Bring Forth What is Within You

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“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” – The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

I ran across this maxim in Robert Aitken’s book The Mind of Clover, and was immediately struck by it. It reminds us that if you do not act according to a conscious dynamic, you will invariably act according to an unconscious dynamic. Repression is truly dangerous because it implies a refusal of knowledge, which leaves us subject to all kinds of negative forces inherited from our personal and collective pasts.

I have a certain interest in dreams, and often in discussing them, I run across the opinion that they’re just meaningless garbage spewed forth by the sleeping brain, a sort of psychological excretion. I can understand this viewpoint, but in the same way that biological feces can reveal a great deal about an individual’s health and diet, so too are our dreams composed of material rich with meaning. After all, nothing in a dream is accidental. Unlike the waking world, every detail of our dreamscapes is generated by our own minds. To dismiss them as meaningless is to ignore the subtle promptings of our unconscious, which desires ultimate union with the universe.

One time years ago, I was arguing just this point with someone, a young man who almost violently rejected the notion that his dreams were meaningful. “I have dreams about sharks a lot,” he said to me in challenge. “I’ll be in the ocean, or in a swimming pool, and I’ll know there’s a shark coming for me, and it scares the hell out of me. I’ve never even seen a shark outside of an aquarium. What does that mean?”

I had to stop myself from chuckling, because his dream was so to the point. In dreams, water invariably signifies the unconscious, and living creatures within the water indicate hidden or emerging impulses. Thus a whale might indicate a significant impending transformation or need for it, or perhaps repressed experiences coming to the surface. A shark, on the other hand, indicates precisely a fear of the unconscious, the belief that if he were to give his unconscious doubts about his life free rein, it would precipitate a painful transformation. So the very example he gave as evidence his dreams were meaningless showed instead his fear that his dreams were meaningful, and the depth of that trepidation was in exact proportion to the need to acknowledge these inner impulses.

This is also the dark side of many religions (and this person was religious). By acceding their beliefs to an external dogma inherited from past generations, and amputating their own natural curiosity, believers fail to recognize the real reasons behind their behaviors, and thus open themselves to all kinds of harmful impulses. Often they lead double lives, one day an upright churchgoer, the next a dissolute drunk.

Even when the offenses appear minor, there remains a cognitive dissonance between their religious and secular lives. Many religious followers find no problem liking, say, both a sermon and a football game; but in fact these two activities are worlds apart, the viewpoints inherent in them separated by enormous chasms of time, geography, economics and history. What relationship, after all, does a Biblical text handed down from a Middle Eastern tribe thousands of years ago have with a twentieth-century sporting event viewed on an LCD television? Virtually none, of course, but even so they coexist in the minds of their followers, the tension between them unacknowledged, its pressure building and building like water behind a poorly built dam. How long before cracks appear? How long before it bursts? Better by far to let the river flow free.

Drugs, Addiction, and Honoring the Great Light

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From a talk I gave at the Zen Center of Denver, Oct. 1, 2006.

Our guide as Buddhists to drug use is the Fifth Precept, the Precept of Not Giving or Taking Drugs. At this temple we add the phrase, “…that dull the mind,” and so we say, “I take up the way of not giving or taking drugs that dull the mind,” and vow also to keep the mind clear at all times. I think these are useful clarifications that pose the question: Is your mind clear, or has the drug interfered with your naturally clear consciousness?

In my own life, I’ve gone through many phases of drug use. I won’t go into the sordid details, because I don’t want to unintentionally glorify drug use, but with that said, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I took most recreational drugs that came my way. Understand, though, that this wasn’t part of an addictive pattern. It seems to me that people most often do drugs for three reasons: first, to gain social acceptance; second, to fulfill emotional needs; and third, to discover meaning as part of a spiritual search. This last was true for me. I took drugs because I was looking for something genuine in the world, and when I finally discovered Zen practice, I stopped doing drugs so intensely.

I’ve often heard zazen compared to drug experiences, and in some ways this is understandable, but in others it’s completely mistaken. People compare the two, I think, because of the separation between their everyday lives and their zazen. They regard zazen as something out of the ordinary, and their experiences of samadhi or kensho as “altered” states of consciousness. Yet zazen is not an altered state of consciousness. It is pure, unaltered consciousness itself. 

There is a relationship here, though, in that we must be careful not to cling to any experience at all. In this respect, any experience or state that we cling to may be regarded as a drug. Television can be a powerful drug, as can video games, Internet pornography, trashy novels, or whatever we do to escape reality. Even peak experiences during zazen can be a terrible obstacle to practice, because we often look to re-create those experiences.

One may see meditation vs. drug use as being analogous to the Zen concepts of joriki and tariki. Joriki is self-power or self-reliance, and this is the type of energy cultivated by Zen practice and meditation. There are no crutches in zazen. Nobody can do this practice for us. We sit upright, under our own power.

Tariki is other-power, reliance on external spiritual power. Most often this term is used in reference to religious sects that pray to external powers—deities and such—in the hope that those powers will favor the petitioner. However, tariki is perfectly reflective of drug usage. Rather than cultivating wisdom through long and difficult spiritual practice, one instead seeks an emotional state or insight through the drug.

I would like to be clear that these insights and states are not necessarily false or delusive. I say this to avoid the dichotomy often seen in public discourse and government policy. There’s no doubt that drugs can be extremely harmful, even deadly, but it’s also true that drugs sometimes help people to overcome psychological blockages and become more insightful and open.

Still, these experiences come at a price. There’s a catch to using drugs, and it’s that whatever other effects they cause, drugs most often encourage continued reliance on the drug, and that reliance is often in proportion to the degree of positive emotions or insights that the drug provides.

So you get caught in this cycle. You want happiness and turn to the drug to provide it, but once that state fades, you turn again and again to the drug to recreate it.

This is clinging to a state of mind. You feel dukkha, lack, that life is out of joint, and you take a drug and experience of sense of well-being. Then the feeling fades, and you find that your sense of lack has actually become more acute.

And the more you cling to this state, the worse your suffering becomes, because clinging causes suffering. And the more you suffer, the more you want to escape. This is the downward spiral of addiction.

I have a friend who calls using drugs getting twisted. This is an interesting expression and very descriptive of drug effects. You take the drug and it twists your mind, and because you’re in a different state, sometimes you can see things about your life that you didn’t see before, or you can temporarily escape whatever state you were in. But when the drug wears off, you don’t return to the same place; you’re somewhere different than where you started, and with continued drug use it becomes difficult to see how off-center you’ve become.

Bodhidharma said, “Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the intrinsically pure Dharma, not giving rise to delusions is called the Precept of Not Giving or Taking Drugs.”

In any case, after discovering Zen, I cooled off and stopped taking psychedelic drugs. I actually cooled off all the way a couple years later when Lindsey (my ex-wife) and I went to Hawaii to train with Robert Aitken there. The entire time we lived with Aitken Roshi, I took no drugs whatsoever, including alcohol and coffee. I took nothing stronger than black tea for about a year and a half. This was also instructive. There’s no doubt that it helped to drive me into my practice, and I’d come there to practice, and that’s what I did.

However, I also learned that complete abstinence didn’t altogether suit me. It made me rigid, uptight, and inflexible, and kept me separate from people, kept me from connecting with them.

Zen also has the archetype depicted in the tenth ox-herding picture: entering the marketplace with helping hands. The picture shows the spiritual traveler with a wine gourd over one shoulder, ready to share it with whoever comes along, completely open.

So when I came back to Denver, I gave up abstinence too. Since then, I drink alcohol socially, though even that tends to slowly escalate. I’ve also smoked marijuana a few times—maybe a couple of times a year—which is something I continue to examine. It seems that I do it to feel close to old friends, but every time I do I conclude that I really shouldn’t again. Until the next time.

Dogen said: “Drugs are not brought in yet. Don’t let them invade. That is the great light.” Our minds are naturally bright. We are naturally full and complete and aware. How do you honor that great light while remaining open to the people around you?  

A Brief History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, via the Best Sci-fi and Fantasy Novels Ever Written

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Recently I was talking to a friend about some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels. “Make a list,” he said, and so I began. But the more books I added to the list, the more I ran into the question of how to organize them. I could have used a rating system – start with Lord of the Rings and work my way down – but people’s tastes vary widely, and who’s going to choose a book rated at #59?

Instead I settled on the date of publication. And as I rearranged my list, I started to see historical patterns emerging, trends I suppose I’ve always known were there, but hadn’t considered through the lens of specific works. The list became a jumping-off point to consider the history of science fiction and fantasy as a whole, with its various subgenres and development more clearly delineated, and authors placed in relationship to each other.

Understand, however, that these books haven’t been chosen to fill out a history lesson (with a few exceptions, mentioned near the end of this post). The list came first. These are actually my favorite books in the genre, and picking any one at random will yield something amazing. I guarantee it.

The Progenitors: So Old School They’re Wearing Top Hats

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1897)

Today we call Jules Verne and H.G. Wells science fiction, although of course in their time there was no such genre. In fact, Verne was largely ignored by the French literary establishment of the time, who dismissed his popular books as boy’s adventure stories (thus establishing the pattern for the next century and a half). As with Carroll and Wells, we’re all familiar with the stories from television and movie adaptations, but the originals are well worth reading at least once. Edgar Allan Poe probably also deserves a place here, although only a few of his works engage with fantasy per se.

The Founding Fathers: Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy from the Mid-Twentieth Century

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950)
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1954)>John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955)
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

There isn’t a single thread connecting these mid-century writers, unless it’s in the energy with which they pursued and developed their ideas, their works shaping whole subsequent genres. H.P. Lovecraft wrote dozens of memorable short stories whose imagery and structure have shaped fantastic horror ever since. Tolkien, of course, almost single-handedly invented what most people still consider fantasy, with countless imitators down to the present day. Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s revolutionary political ideas are found to some extent in nearly all modern dystopian novels.

0936e-i_robotIsaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein (mentioned below), among many others, wrote countless short stories and pulp novels published in the venerable sci-fi magazines of the ’50s, mostly to do with space travel, time travel, alien races and the like, all the science fiction tropes that were, for the most part, old hat even then. Most of these works have aged poorly, cursed with flat characters and dull prose, tossed into the boys-adventure bin alongside Doc Savage and the Hardy Boys; but their best works, informed by compelling ideas, remain relevant and entertaining. Most sci-fi lists include Asimov’s Foundation series, and while I agree that its millennia-spanning vision of galactic civilization has been influential, it also reads like a historical artifact, whereas I, Robot remains interesting to modern readers. Ray Bradbury worked alongside the pulp authors, but his work has fared far better over the years, since it always relied more on his lambent prose than the novelty of a new premise.

Worth mentioning together are Wyndham’s and Miller’s books, both set post-nuclear apocalypse. While Wyndham used nuclear armageddon primarily as an excuse for a fantastical future dystopia (the most common application of apocalypse in fiction), Miller’s is concerned with the human drive to self-destruction itself, a theme addressed also in Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and, much later, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (below).

Expanding Consciousness: Trippy Shit From the ’60s

Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969)
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 (1968), Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Ursula K. Le Guin, the Earthsea trilogy (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5 (1969)

ae45b-frankherbert_dune_1stThe ’60s were a decade marked by experimentation, and nowhere is that clearer than in science fiction. These authors pushed against boundaries in every direction, demanding readers fundamentally re-examine their views on religion, sex, marriage, history, politics, gender, and consciousness itself, from the alien views and mystical powers of Heinlein’s Michael Valentine Smith, to Philip K. Dick’s over-the-limit reality-bending, to Herbert’s mind-expanding spice. Herbert’s Dune demands special mention as perhaps the single greatest science fiction book ever written, at once lyrical, daring, philosophically fascinating and tightly plotted. Ursula Le Guin has consistently crossed boundaries in her writing, her stories invariably moving in unexpected directions to challenge our own genre expectations.

There are a couple of odd ducks here as well. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is more in keeping with the dystopias of the ’50s, milk with knives in it notwithstanding, although the Cockney-Slavic dialect he wrote it in is as experimental as it gets. Arthur C. Clarke stands with Heinlein and Asimov in his hard-sci-fi style, although his is yet more opaque in character, enhancing the sense of mystery in his uncommunicative alien artifacts. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 is, to my mind, only nominally science fiction, the fantastic elements mostly a narrative method to convey Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II, but it’s also one of my favorite books, so I’m including it anyway.

Escape from Reality: ’70s and ’80s

Roger Zelazny, The Chronicles of Amber (1970)
Phillip Jose Farmer, the Riverworld series (1971)
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (1974),Footfall (1985)
Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon (1976)
Frederick Pohl, Gateway (1977)
Anne McCaffrey, The White Dragon (1978), Crystal Singer (1982)
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (1979)
Stephen King, Skeleton Crew (1979), The Running Man (1982), It (1986), The Drawing of the Three (1987)
Julian May, Saga of the Pliocene Exile (1981)
Alan Dean Foster, Nor Crystal Tears (1982)
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (1983), Last Call (1992)

By and large, these are light books, paperbacks to read on the bus, or for a twelve-year-old to stick in his backpack (as was invariably the case with me). Their prose is not necessarily the finest, their ideas not necessarily the freshest; they rely primarily on world-building for their fascination. And yet, I have a tremendous fondness for them, as I do for beautiful places I travelled to once and enjoyed a great deal. And in each there is something remarkable: Zelazny’s shadow-riding princes of Amber, Farmer’s colorful cast of historical misfits, Niven’s and Pournelle’s inventive aliens, Anthony’s light-as-air humor, May’s embellishments and refinements of psychic powers.

2b669-tumblr_lid950guze1qc1enbo1_500There are also, however, a few more substantial works in with the escapists. Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of the funniest books every written, with profundity constantly peeking from beneath the absurdity. Ende’s Neverending Story is about fantasy itself, the liberating power of the imagination, and how that power gets lost in adulthood. (Also, while everyone’s seen the movie, the movie actually only covers the first half of the book – and that’s not even necessarily the better half.) Stephen King, of course, is always put on the horror shelf – I think they put that shelf there just for him – but in fact, he’s a superb fantasist and an unmatched master of suspense. I’ve listed four of his best, but if you’re going to just read one, make it It.

The Digital Age and Dawning Disillusionment

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), Idoru (1996), The Peripheral (2014)
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985)
Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985), Hull Zero Three (2010)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986)
David Brin, The Uplift War (1987)
Dan Simmons, Hyperion Cantos (1989)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age (1995)
Jeff Noon, Vurt (1993)
Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995)
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire (1996)
George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996)
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2004)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels (2003)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004)
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (2006)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009)
Lev Grossman, The Magicians trilogy (2009)
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (2012)
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014)
Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit (2016)

2dedc-neuromancer_bookFew books stand so clearly as boundary markers in literature as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. At its pulsing heart was a burning vision of the digital future, in which all information could be represented in virtual reality, and hackers rode programs like cracked-out sharks diving into deadly AI ice. Its ideas, and the dawning computer age that informed them, invigorated the genre like nothing had since space flight and LSD. Most futurist novels that followed dealt with the implications of the digital revolution, along with the continuous miniaturization of computer systems that accompanied it: Blood Music, Hyperion Cantos, Snow Crash, Vurt, Holy Fire, American Gods, Altered Carbon, Rainbows End, 2312.

There is a second trend here, namely a broader cultural mood of disillusionment and pessimism about the future. McCarthy’s The Road may be the darkest book every written, and its ashen landscapes are a precise description of nuclear winter. George Martin brought new life to sword-and-sorcery by casting his characters as cynical, power-hungry scrabblers in a dirty, violent world, and Phillip Pullman stoked some minor controversy by penning a popular young-adult trilogy with an atheist slant. Alan Moore’s Watchmen (yes, it’s a graphic novel, but it’s too good not to include) offered a vital critique of superheroes, depicting them variously as violent vigilantes, sociopaths, sexual fetishists, or disinterested gods.

Several of these works also display an increasing literary sophistication, from the hard, unsparing sentences of The Road (the only sci-fi book to ever win the Pulitzer), to David Mitchell’s cunningly interlocked plots, Susanna Clarke’s endless spinning of fairy tales, and Mark Danielewski’s labyrinthine textual constructions. Along with the wonderfully inventive genre-bending of his New Crobuzon books, China Mieville is known for literary experiments like The City & the City and Embassytown. Worth mentioning also is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, set in an alternate-universe Alaska.

While it’s true I’ve included a few of these selections for “educational” purposes (Verne and Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Miller, Burgess), I also want to say that as a rule, these aren’t hard books to read. To the contrary: they’re nearly all fast-paced, grip-you-by-the-throat stories that I’ve read and reread until the pages fell free from their bindings, out of pure fascination and delight. Just last Sunday I finished Gibson’s The Peripheral, and it was good, so freaking good, I felt like I was thirteen again, reading Neuromancer for the first time, with the very same sense of wonder at how strange the world is and how strange it may yet become.

It’s all about expectations

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If you think that humans are essentially celestial creatures created of God, beautiful beings of radiant light akin to the angels, then you will invariably be disappointed in their behavior and angry at the world. On the other hand, if you realize that we’re really just a bunch of dumb apes, then anytime we’re not literally throwing feces at each other we’re doing all right.

Vegetarian Food in Turkey: What to Expect

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Being a vegetarian, I tried to do some research before traveling to Turkey regarding food. After all, food can be the deciding factor in choosing a destination and enjoying a trip. Most websites I found said that’s it’s easy to find vegetarian food in Turkey, and this is more or less true, but after reading such assurances we were surprised, on actually going there, by how limited our options were.

The first thing to understand is that Turkey has very few foreign restaurants. Nineteen out of twenty restaurants are Turkish, and even in sizable cities it can be hard to find non-Turkish food. There are a few Indian restaurants and a few Chinese restaurants, and you may want to seek them out if and when you want an alternative to the local cuisine. The rest of the time, you’ll be eating Turkish food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The second thing is that while there are lots and lots of Turkish restaurants, by and large they serve the same things. Walking around Sultanahmet, you’ll be approached by host after host asking you to look at their menu, but the fact is every menu is nearly the same. Turkish restaurants don’t go for culinary innovation. There’s no experimentation, no nouveau cuisine. Instead there’s the same vegetables in saffron sauce, the same pilav, prepared with small variations. Once you’ve eaten a dish at one restaurant, you have a good idea what to expect at the others.

Within these bounds, the food is generally well-prepared and flavorful. Turkish food heavily favors certain vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and onions. Generally they do not use legumes in main dishes, so you’ll have to rely on eggs, cheese, mezes and soups if you want more protein.

While this is fine for ovo-lacto vegetarians, vegans face considerably greater challenges. Many dishes are cooked in butter and cream. The cold meze platter is safe enough for dinner, but breakfast especially offers few options beyond fruit and bread (if the bread is vegan). If you plan to make your own meals, choose your hostels carefully: most Turkish hostels don’t have kitchens, and ask that you not bring in outside food. If you have a private room, the last is easy to ignore, but Turkish markets also offer little in the way of healthy ready-to-eat items.

Anyway, here’s a detailed breakdown of vegetarian options:

Turkish breakfast

Breakfast: A buffet breakfast is included at virtually all Turkish hostels and hotels, so it’s a good opportunity to fill up early. The buffet will invariably include hard-boiled eggs, white bread, cucumbers, fresh tomatoes, olives, white cheese, fresh fruit (most often watermelon), butter, honey, çay (tea), and instant coffee. Usually there’s also yogurt. Additional items may include muesli, cereal, milk, croissants, various other cheeses, dried fruit, and sigara borek (rolled phyllo dough stuffed with feta and/or spinach).

Lunch: Lunch was a persistent challenge for us, partly because we didn’t know all our options. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money at restaurants, especially since we’d likely be eating at those same restaurants for dinner, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of other choices. For meat eaters, döner (shaved roasted meat in a pita) is ubiquitous and cheap, but there seemed to be no equivalent for vegetarians. At first, we mostly we either ate pide (melted cheese on a flat pita, essentially a Turkish pizza; actual pizza is also common), or found a local market and bought crackers and cheese.

Later, someone introduced us to cig köfte. Now, köfte is meatballs, so this was a little confusing for us: obviously we didn’t want meatballs. And reading online, it seemed cig köfte was a traditional dish of raw meatballs, so clearly we wanted that even less. However, in the last decades the raw-meat version of the dish has been outlawed for public health reasons, and it’s been replaced with a vegan substitute made of chickpeas or walnuts. There’s no meat involved whatsoever, and there are small fast-food joints that specialize in the dish. It’s also cheap, fast, and flavorful: the perfect thing for lunch when you’re out shopping or seeing the sights. Ask for a cig köfte durum, and you’ll get a tortilla wrap with walnut/chickpea paste, plentiful iceberg lettuce and/or arugula, spicy barbecue sauce and sweet pomegranate syrup (the sauces are optional but recommended).

Cig köfte durum

There are also two kinds of soup that became a staple for us, at lunch and dinner both. The first is mercimek çorbası, or lentil soup, a light soup of strained lentils served with lemon wedges and pita. It’s absolutely delicious, very reasonably priced, and provides the protein you’ll probably be craving. Be warned, however, that it is often made with chicken stock, so you may wish to ask before ordering.

In a similar vein is ezogelin, a red lentil and tomato soup seasoned with mint, again served with lemon and pita. This was one of our favorite dishes in Turkey, and perhaps the best lentil soup I’ve had anywhere.

Often we would order a soup with a green salad (yeşil salata), which varied far more than the soup. Always the salad would have cucumber and tomato (one time, only those), generally lettuce or arugula, sometimes green peppers and white onion.

Many cafes also advertise gözleme, which they describe as a “pancake.” Well, it’s not a pancake: it’s more like a crepe, with cheese and other fillings pressed between two thin layers of pastry. Turks often accompany it with ayran, a yogurt drink similar to kefir.

Supper:

Supper offers considerably more choices, with prices varying widely; restaurants outside tourist areas can be half the price of those inside. We’ll start with the cold meze (appetizer) platter, which is delicious and found at most every dinner restaurant. In general the meze platter is all vegetarian, but there may be a non-vegetarian platter available as well, so ask to be sure. The platter may include:

• humus – simpler and less potent than its Middle Eastern versions
• patlican salatası (eggplant salad) – mashed eggplant, similar to baba ganoush
• saksuka – cubed eggplant with tomato sauce
• cacık – yogurt with cucumber and fresh herbs
• ezme – spicy tomato salad
• roasted red pepper and walnut tapenade
• yogurt with roasted red pepper
• dolmas – grape leaves stuffed with rice
• olives
• pita or flatbread

Several hot vegetarian entrees are also common:

• vegetable pilaf – rice and orzo with sauteed vegetables, typically some combination of bell peppers, carrots, eggplants, zucchini, green beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes
• vegetables in saffron sauce – essentially the same vegetables as above, sauteed in a buttery saffron cream sauce and served with rice
• vegetable casserole – ditto, but with tomato sauce instead
• vegetarian pastry – same vegetables, this time layered with cheese and thin hand-rolled dough (similar to crepes)
• vegetable kebab (kebap) – just what it sounds like. Be warned, also, that an “eggplant kebab” may include pieces of sausage; ask when ordering.

Street food:
Most street food in Turkey is vegetarian. Common items include:

• simit – a bagel-like twisted bread covered in sesame seeds
• mısır – corn on the cob
• roasted chestnuts

All considered, it’s true, it’s not difficult to be vegetarian in Turkey, although you might start craving broccoli or tofu after a while. As a side benefit, I found the Turkish diet remarkably easy on the digestion – nary a stomach ache in sight.