NOVEMBER 2017

Ruhun Doysun: feed your soul. Our newly launched project in Turkey aims to do just that, and more. It aims to feed a lifestyle that’s mindful, in touch with nature and sources of food, and conscious of food wastage. Because we believe that ‘wasting food is wasting life’.

Our main collaborator is chef Mehmet Gürs, with whom we have developed tasty recipes with easy steps, and food saving tips. The videos and articles can be found on our Ruhun Doysun website.

It branches from our global campaign of Respect Food. We want to save the planet and save you money, by encouraging a lifestyle where we all waste the least food possible. We’re also supporting chef Massimo Bottura’s ‘Food for Soul’ initiative, thanks to which we have saved 25 tonnes of food in just one year.

Our projects meant that we were the biggest sponsor of Istanbul’s YEDİ conference, where a Ruhun Doysun lunch was organised. 7 women from different parts of Anatolia gathered and cooked traditional delicious with a cause; to show how easy it is to reduce food wastage.

They cooked delicious food using food that would otherwise be wasted. They showed that some of the tastiest traditional dishes can be made from undesirables such as stale bread, unliked parts of meat, and peels and scraps of fruit and vegetables.The women, who are not professional chefs, but rather researchers and producers of food, cooked everything from ‘pısık köftesi’ (meat-free meatballs with tomatoes, herbs and spices), to ‘hades çorbası’ (a soup made of bone broth, lentils and wheat), and even ‘asma yapraklı pilav’ (made of rice, grape leaves and bulgur). The different Turkish regions were represented by:

• Güler Zerger-Eastern Antolia
• Ahsen Toktay-Central Antolia
• Ayşe Tükrükçü-Marmara region
• Asuman Albayrak – Black Sea
• Münevver Aslanhan – South Eastern Antolia
• Ümit Hamlacıbaşı – Aegean Region
• Nadya Turunç – Mediterranean Region

They were helped by Şemsa Denizsel, Maksut Aşkar, Yılmaz Öztürk, Seray Öztürk, Mustafa Otar, Zeynep Moroğlu and Fatma Yıldırım.

And what better place to make these dishes but YEDİ? The name YEDİ refers to the seven regions of Turkey, which these women represented. It is also the past tense of ‘eat’ in Turkish. With Ruhun Doysun taking placed in the third YEDİ so far, the project and the conference go hand-in-hand. The aim of YEDİ is to address globally pressing matters in relation to gastronomy and food. Chefs, researchers, opinion leaders and food experts are invited to speak at the conference, all with a different theme each year. The theme of October 2017’s YEDİ was Extinction, which addressed global issues related to maintaining the environment. It was held at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum.

We believe that ‘wasting food is wasting life’, and that’s not just limited to our Ruhun Doysun project. We believe that if this thought is kept in mind throughout the world, and whenever we’re about to throw some food away, we can save the planet. So keep Ruhun Doysun in mind to feed your soul, and save lives at the same time too.