Hasta La Gadget!

While food is one of the two fundamental pillars of human survival — water being the other — how often do we stop to think about food in a socio-cultural sense? For Zeynep Kilic, sociology professor, Fulbright Scholar, and Turkish transplant in Alaska, Turkish food has been the link between her new world in the US and her upbringing in Turkey: “My dinner table has always functioned like a bridge between my social network in my new country and myself, shortening the distance between us,” Kilic narrates in her documentary Tables of Istanbul, currently making the festival circuit around the world. “Whenever I want to make friends I seduce them with Turkish food,” she says with a welcoming smile.

But it is not only the warm familiar tastes of home she craves in Alaska’s icy climes, she is also curious about how the immigrant experience shapes the foods we eat and how we prepare them.

“Like every immigrant, I have thought a lot about identity and belonging. But to be honest, it is only recently that I started thinking about how food fits into these concepts. Since I left Turkey years ago in search of different places and another future, the only constant in my life has been Turkish food. In America, I brought with me the need to come together around the table, always choosing dinner conversation over other activities and trying to recreate familiar tastes from around Turkey. Reminiscing about my homeland over food has become a constant in my life, so much so that foods I never ate while in Turkey, such as kebap or baklava, have become dishes that I make at home or order at restaurants…

As a sociologist, seeing how my Turkish identity became sharper in the kitchen made me curious. But I only became aware of this phenomenon after I moved to Alaska. Living in a state with long and dark winters that limit agriculture made me realize what a privilege it was to come from a land where you can bite into sun-ripened grapes, fresh-picked cherries and tomatoes, right off the stalk. On the other hand, Alaska taught me the pleasures of eating fresh salmon you catch yourself or biting into a moose burger that may possibly be road kill, as well as the joys of picking blueberries or raspberries by the handful while hiking. I started to think that perhaps eating like a Turk while living in Alaska was absurd. Should I be combining Turkish tastes with Alaskan bounty in my kitchen? Or, perhaps as many of my American guests would secretly wish, should I stay as authentically Turkish as possible?

But what is on the ‘authentic’ Turkish table? Kebap? Is the Turkish kitchen in our minds simply a jumble of clichés? As I keep urging my students to stay away from generalizations, am I following my own advice?”

This desire to unpack the meanings behind Turkey’s foods and flavors led Kilic far from her new home in Anchorage to Istanbul, a city that itself has been a bridge between cultures for thousands of years, in search of a more comprehensive understanding of what Turkish cuisine actually means and how it is shaped by this enormous history of migration, colonization, and transformation. What she found from interviewing restaurateurs, chefs, activists, food writers, and families is that the core of what makes Turkish food Turkish is far more complicated than she’d expected, and the flavors of all these different and sometimes contradictory perspectives makes for a hearty visual and ideological meal in and of itself.

In Tables of Istanbul, Kilic breaks down Turkish cuisine into four categories: food as idea, food as business, food as cause, and food in daily life, all of which form a complex network of idea and practice in which to frame uniquely Turkish flavors and culinary behaviors as well as the local sustainability and conservation efforts taking place within the country to preserve its ancient dishes and guarantee a future for these long-standing traditions.

In one of dozens of fascinating interviews, R. İhsan Eliaçık, author of Earth Tables says:

“Food culture is very old, perhaps the first culture humans developed. Sitting together comes before the marital institution. Humanity has progressed as we sat around the table together, as we shared what is on the table. Wherever people could share more food and give more to others, the more humanity flourished.”

And on the flip side Eliaçık further notes:

“All inequalities start with food, at the table, then moves onto clothing, to where you live etc. but it starts with the food culture. You can wear the same outfit for a month but you have to eat every single day. Therefore food is where we first notice the inequalities.”

Hilal Nuhoğlu, general director of the Turkish Cuisine Foundation points out:

“Right now we are in an area where the poorest of the city, especially the Syrian refugees live. You are at a restaurant such as this, you have the luxury to order whatever you want and two streets down there are people who don’t have bread. How could you swallow that food?”

Many of the restaurateurs interviewed by Kilic in the film mention that the cultural stratification of Turkish food goes back hundreds of years into its Ottoman history, where the royal kitchen produced certain types of foods and with a variety of exotic ingredients passing through the silk road, all the while peasant dishes remained a staple as well as being geographically specific to various areas of Turkey. A king’s table and a worker’s table were two very different things, but so were an Istanbul table and an Anatolian table. Today, with such huge migration patterns and constant influxes of people from around Turkey and even its neighboring countries into Istanbul, the city is seeing what can be called the democratization of food. Batur Durmay, the general coordinator for Asitane Restaurant comments on the oxymoron of people ordering a $15 salad in a fancy restaurant for lunch and then going home to eat street food from a corner shop. While this might be usual behavior in the West, this is a new food experience for Istanbulites.

To this incongruity Vedat Başaran, chef of Nars Restaurant and Ottoman cuisine researcher, explains:

“There has to be a certain level of hybridization. As a result, some interesting things materialize. Take Beyoglu for example. Beyoglu is…shaped by Art Deco, has a very interesting, amazing structure. In that framework you see a woman from Van making gozleme. This is actually a paradox, but over time you internalize this. That I can go to Beyoglu, to eat gozleme, or to have wine, or to go to disco, or shop at an exclusive shop. Hence many different stratas start coming together. They used to be separate. Now they all work together.”

But not all interviewees were as excited by the possibilities of democratization and hybridization of food in Istanbul. Musa Dağdeviren, chef and owner of Çiya laments:

“He eats mıhlama and hamsili ekmek (Black Sea regional foods), çiğ köfte and baklava (Southeast specialties); consumes all. This is not us. This is urban macho aristocrats creating a city food culture. When we fuse them all together, we experience a loss of identity.”

Zeynep Kakınç, president Turkish Friends of the Kitchen Association, puts it this way:

“Perhaps we can call it cuisine of Turkey rather than Turkish cuisine. Turkey’s cuisine is an anonymous one. This is a topic of debate. In other words, some people consider it a fusion cuisine. I don’t think it’s out of place to say so because everyone influenced everyone else. Using the term, ‘anonymous’ is also accurate because there is a coherence to it. Just like ebru (marbling art), we are intertwined, while ethnic groups retaining their distinct character. Turkish cuisine is multicultural and this is where its abundance comes from.”

Hilal Nuhoğlu also brings national identity into the picture:

“I told them, please, do not be a chef, be a cook. Don’t be ashamed of kurufasulye (broad bean stew). It is our symbol. No matter where you are, if you see a person eating onion with kurufasulye, you know that’s a Turk. This is a symbol. Don’t be ashamed of menemen, or onion stew. These are all our values.”

Levon Bağış, wine expert and food writer for Kav/Agos cautions:

“Before we talk about who these dishes belong to, let’s consider if we are able to protect & preserve them. One of the most well known dishes from the olden times is uskumru dolmasi (stuffed mackerel). Highly unlikely anyone makes it these days because there is no mackerel left. It is so meaningless to discuss the ownership of dishes after they disappear. Hence one of the most important things we must do is conservation of local products.”

And these snapshots from the film are only a small meze platter of what Kilic and her interviewees have on the menu in Tables of Istanbul. For an informal anthropologist/sociologist like myself, it was rather delicious watching such multiplicities of perspectives emerge through a one-hour film, and how deep into these socio-cultural issues their combined efforts were able to produce.

Tables of Istanbul is not only a visual feast, but a sociological banquet as well. If you’re familiar with Turkish food your mouth will water for those familiar flavors and you can almost smell the dishes through the screen. If this is a cuisine with which you aren’t yet familiar, you’ll be looking to Istanbul for your next culinary adventure. And for the discerning cultural critic, there are so many fascinating concepts and questions posed in the film to leave you mentally chowing down for days. As for me, a biracial Third Culture Kid without a fixed culinary tradition in my life, Kilic’s musings in Tables of Istanbul has me approaching the food I cook and eat with an entirely fresh perspective that now takes into account the cultural history of products I regularly cook and consume, which actually has me tasting and appreciating food on my Florida table in a whole new way.

Tables of Istabul is a delightful treat that stands out in a documentary genre thriving on exposing so much darkness. Kilic says:

“To tell you the truth, during my Istanbul adventure, I enjoyed conversations around the dinner table the most. And maybe I need not worry too much about my food preferences, about the ‘why’s and ‘how’s. Perhaps it is enough to see another bridge built through my cooking. And maybe, just maybe, all that matters is to cook with love, eat with pleasure, and break bread surrounded by friends and family.”

Afiyet olsun!

To see if the film is screening near you check out the Tables of Istanbul website, and stay tuned for its release to the general public in 2017.

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“Students using laptops and tablets in class perform worse in exams”

So wrote The Telegraph in a feature article in May of this year.

Last week I wrote about the issues related to productivity in our digital world and promised to tackle education this week. Here goes…from The Telegraph:

University students that are allowed to use laptops and tablets in the classroom for note taking fare significantly worse in exams than those who are prohibited from using devices, a study claims.

[MIT] researchers found that use of devices had a “substantial negative effect” on students’ performance, and that removing technology from the classroom was “equivalent to improving the quality of the teacher”.

Students that were permitted to use laptops and tablets scored 18 per cent worse in exams on average, according to the study.

Lest you think that somehow MIT hasn’t a clue or perhaps is somehow misrepresenting the data for their own nefarious reasons, a recent article from the BBC stating, “Computers ‘do not improve’ pupil results, says OECD,” covered a few key learnings from the OECD study:

Students who use computers moderately at school, such as once or twice a week, have “somewhat better learning outcomes” than students who use computers rarely

The results show “no appreciable improvements” in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in information technology

High achieving school systems such as South Korea and Shanghai in China have lower levels of computer use in school

Singapore, with only a moderate use of technology in school, is top for digital skills

The study shows “there is no single country in which the internet is used frequently at school by a majority of students and where students’ performance improved”

Among the seven countries with the highest level of internet use in school, it found three experienced “significant declines” in reading performance – Australia, New Zealand and Sweden – and three more had results that had “stagnated” – Spain, Norway and Denmark

The countries and cities with the lowest use of the internet in school – South Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Japan – are among the top performers in international tests

To my way of thinking, Andreas Schleicher, the Education Director of OECD, makes the key point–the same point I made in addressing the lack of general productivity as an outcome of digital technology. Schleicher is quoted as saying, “the findings of the report should not be used as an excuse not to use technology, but as a spur to finding a more effective approach.”

Or as The Next Web puts it:

According to University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway, who studies the impact of technology on education, the problem isn’t with the technology, but in how it’s used by schools.

Or as I put it…as my readers know…it’s time to cut the Digibabble around education and technology and begin to focus on the issues.

In an interview with The Economist, Shiza Shahid, cofounder of the Malala Fund–which promotes girls learning in underdeveloped countries–answers the question, “Do we really understand how to leverage technology?”:

I think technology offers incredible efficiency gains and ways to scale. On the other hand, I think we’ve put technology at the center rather than putting the issue at the center, which is an inability to educate children well, at scale and low cost. Rather than seeing technology as a tool, one of many tools, that can perhaps improve how we create solutions, we’ve put it at the center and we’ve built a tablet that in itself, we believe, will educate children, but we haven’t thought about delivery or how it’s maintained or how it’s used.

Technology and its applications are mere tools. In and of themselves they hold no value unless utilized, deployed and applied in ways that actually add value to people’s lives and, in this case, to their education.

Here is the unadulterated truth from The New York Times, from just over a month ago, about a school in Columbus Ohio: “Online School Enriches Affiliated Companies if Not Its Students”:

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an online charter school based here, graduated 2,371 students last spring. At the commencement ceremony, a student speaker triumphantly told her classmates that the group was ‘the single-largest graduating high school class in the nation.

What she did not say was this: Despite the huge number of graduates — this year, the school is on track to graduate 2,300 — more students drop out of the Electronic Classroom or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country, according to federal data. For every 100 students who graduate on time, 80 do not.

Even as the national on-time graduation rate has hit a record high of 82 percent, publicly funded online schools like the Electronic Classroom have become the new dropout factories.

Yet not all succumb to this lemming-like Digibabble narrative:

The Guardian asks, “Could Steiner schools have a point on children, tablets and tech?”

It’s late morning and the children in Maria Woolley’s class at the Iona school in Nottingham are busy kneading dough. The dough is made from flour they saw ground at the local windmill using grains harvested from a nearby farm they had visited. During the morning lesson the children have sung songs, recited poetry and done rhythmic clapping and stomping.

There is no uniform here, and no head teacher – the school is run by staff and friends – and, unlike the vast majority of primary schools these days, here the students don’t work on tablets or computers. At the front of the class is an old-fashioned blackboard.

…Critics suggest that in not allowing children to use screens as part of its ideology Steiner schools are putting them at a disadvantage. “The needs of our young people are that when they leave school, they become part of a world that is highly likely to include technology,” says Mark Chambers, the chief executive of NAACE, a professional association for those concerned with advancing education using technology. “We should be doing all we can to help them be prepared for that world, just as we would for the physical world that is around them.”

…Research into the effects of technology on learning has yet to demonstrate much in the way of positive results, though. A recent study published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that students barred from using laptops or digital devices in lectures and seminars did better in exams than those allowed to use computers and access the internet. And research last year from the London School of Economics found schools that banned pupils from carrying mobile phones showed a sustained improvement in exam results, with the biggest advances coming from struggling students.

A Cambridge University study found that spending an extra hour a day of TV, internet or gaming time in year 10 saw a fall in GCSE results equivalent to two grades overall. Its co-author, Esther van Sluijs, says reducing screen time could have important benefits and adds that “limiting the amount of time spent in front of screens and introducing children to a variety of activities is likely to have the most beneficial long-term impacts on a child’s health”.

…Despite the evidence from such studies there is still, according to Moore [founder of Iona school], “an anxiety that children aren’t going to be ready to fit into the economy because they don’t do computers at the age of four – whereas if you give them a healthy education and childhood, they can catch up very easily”.

Proof of point as quoted by The New York Times:

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

And when you have a chance, check out the view of the late Steve Jobs.

If you have tracked with me, you may agree, then, that the issue is not technology–whether more technology or better technology–instead it’s about understanding what we’re actually solving in the case of education: literacy; critical thinking; independent idea/opinion forming; intellectual sophistication.

Yes, technology can play a role…but, no, it does not solve the problem.

So I ask you to read about Microsoft’s latest acquisition–LinkedIn…a smart acquisition in my book…but, then again, maybe not for this reason [as quoted in the deal announcement presentation]:

Today, despite the fact that the useful life of skills and knowledge has shrunk to less than five years, only 38% of employees believe they have the opportunities for learning and growth at their workplace. In the future, LinkedIn Learning will tightly integrate into office, enabling users to have a more seamless experience and access to on-demand courses. Recommending the right course at the right time will enable individuals and companies to be more productive and successful — this will transform learning.

Linking productivity and learning–neither a stellar performer based on pure digital sourcing–makes one wonder. no?

According to Quartz, “Microsoft buying LinkedIn could transform the way we are taught, trained, and hired for jobs.”

And here are two points of view from educators on what is in fact called EdTech. I find these statements relevant to the above-mentioned acquisition:

It is not about the technology; it’s about sharing knowledge and information, communicating efficiently, building learning communities and creating a culture of professionalism in schools. These are the key responsibilities of all educational leaders. – Marion Ginopolis

It is important to remember that educational software, like textbooks, is only one tool in the learning process. Neither can be a substitute for well-trained teachers, leadership, and parental involvement. – Keith Krueger

Finally, let me end with this defining thought from Lord Jonathan Sacks:

Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.

And there you have it…

Software is just a holder…it needs to be filled. We need to make sure that the next generation knows what to say…and by definition how to get to the core of that “what.”

So in a world where productivity is slipping and education is suffering, Microsoft and LinkedIn might be able to make an important contribution and help change the paradigm of decline…but not with Digibabble….

What do you think?

Read more at The Weekly Ramble

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