Einkorn ( Triticum monococcum ), locally known as siyez in northwest Turkey, is a hulled wheat variety. It is a semi-wild relative of wheat and is considered one of the Neolithic founder crops of agriculture, along with emmer and barley. Grown in the ancient Near East for at least eight thousand years, its production today is limited to marginal mountainous and isolated communities in different countries of the Mediterranean region. This article examines the expansion of einkorn markets in Turkey, an important wheat exporting and processing country, which has created increased income opportunities for small farmers in Ihsangazi, Kastamonu. Although einkorn already fits into the broad dietary habits of Turkish consumers, gradual market expansion has occurred as urban middle-class consumers acquire a taste for it. While the emergence of health niche markets has been one factor, the interventions of multiple actors have also helped to create and sustain these markets that connect local producers to both local and global consumers.

Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female, expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.

The simit, a sesame-covered bread resembling an oversized bagel, is Turkey's unofficial national food. Traditionally sold and eaten on the street, it has been around since at least the Ottoman times. It has been documented in writings and illustrations for centuries; more recently, politicians have used simits as a measure of basic subsistence. Turkey has been cracking down on street food vendors though. And the simit has been facing competition from international snacks like pizza. And companies including Starbucks and the home-grown bakery chain Simit Sarayi have also been making it harder for more traditional simit-bakers and simit-sellers to survive.