"Food is an elemental component of life and today’s empire secured its early growth and honed its ruthlessness by understanding that manipulating and controlling food was a key to power."

Uludag Picnic

June 1967 found us pleasantly crammed with our new Turkish friends into an old Volkswagen beetle wheezing in low gear up the slopes of Mt. Uludag. Also known as Mt. Olympos, Uludag is one of three such peaks so named in the Mediterranean region. Our friends were Bursa natives who spoke only a few words of English, a brother and sister and their female cousin who lived in houses comfortably facing one another across a narrow cobblestone sokak. We ourselves only had a few words of Turkish. Nevertheless, we spent a happy four days as their guests, first with the siblings and then on the other side of the lane with their cousin who claimed her share of the hospitality.

Together the five of us had hurled ourselves hilariously into the sea off a high wooden pier on the Bursan shore and dined afterwards in a nearby restaurant on shrimp mounded on a bed of greens, a dish much like a New Orleans remoulade but with more satisfactory tartness deriving from Mediterranean amounts of lemon. Together we had lounged on an old blanket at an outdoor evening concert, enjoying a much-loved pop singer who brought down the house by a rendition of what must have been the latest Turkish hit, the melody of which echoes in my ears to this day. On the last day of our stay our friends made us understand that we were going to make a “picnic” and so we all piled into the car and followed their direction through town and up the slopes of Uludag. As we drove along I wondered idly what we would eat as we took no provisions with us.

The June day was rare as the poet says, with clear sky and a brilliant sun warming the sharp mountain air and the gods - who were said to have monitored the Trojan War from their Uludag fastness - were surely perched high above us gazing westward towards the placid, battle-free sea. As we rounded a steep curve, the cousins signaled us to pull into a graveled road on our left, up which we drove a short distance finally coming to a halt as the road ended in a grassy, upsloping mountain meadow. We clambered out to find an Alpine prospect opening around us, lush with green spring grass and wildflowers, a few rough wooden tables and benches scattered about.

Above us Uludag continued skyward, snow still visible in some places. A narrow icy rivulet coursed singing downhill nearby, fed by the rapidly melting snows above. At the locus of this idyllic setting stood a small wooden structure scarcely bigger than a telephone booth; with its high front window opening over a wide ledge it was reminiscent of the concession stands on an Atlantic City boardwalk. The strains of the very same pop song that had been received with such éclat the night before came from a radio within and we could make out a dressed lamb carcass hanging from a hook in the dim interior. Nailed over the window was a hand-lettered sign which announced that we had reached:

A man’s head popped up over the ledge at the noisy approach of what must have been his first customers of the day. He was smoking a cigarette and greeted us cheerfully. Was this Ahmet himself? The cousins spoke animatedly with him and in short order, rather like a magician pulling objects out of a silk hat, Ahmet began hauling out of the dark interior of his improbably small cafeteria a veritable armload of provisions: A stack of cracked and chipped dinner plates, a handful of battered silverware, glasses, liter bottles of the excellent local beer, a large platter of tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet onions and bread and finally a brass mangal filled with charcoal and ready for grilling.

We staggered over to one of the tables with our load and went to work, plunging the beer to cool in the nearby snow-fed stream, lighting the charcoal and coaxing the embers to a glowing heat, slicing the vegetables, arranging the table. We then sat down and smoked Turkish cigarettes together in companionable silence savoring a moment punctuated only by a pleasant rhythmic pounding coming from inside the cafeteria mingling with the radio melodies. After a while Ahmet emerged carrying yet another platter piled high with paper thin lamb cutlets, rubbed all over with a spice and herb mixture, ready for the grill.

We left Bursa the day after our memorable Uludag repast continuing our journey home to Lebanon. But in the years that followed as we traveled throughout the Middle East and Africa we repeatedly encountered such kindness again and again: Invitations freely given - nay, insisted upon - without being asked for and with no expectation of any return save the pleasure of company and conversation. Crossing into Syria from Turkey after our Bursan holiday, we were puzzled to find the border post on the Syrian side abandoned at midday. We then heard a distant beckoning hallooing and saw that the missing guard was lunching with his wife and kids nearby under the shade of a nearby tree. We joined the family for lunch and afterwards the guard walked us back to the post and processed us across the border. We were tickled by the combination of hospitality with the casual approach toward the duties of a state apparatus that seem quite unimaginable today.

Stranded in Oran and finding all the cheap pensions full, we resigned ourselves to sitting up at an all-night café drinking coffee. We struck up a conversation with a young man at the next table and when he had acquainted himself with our plight he immediately invited us to pass the night at his house. His mother and sisters received us graciously at nearly midnight and not only did we all dine together at that late hour on an unforgettable artichoke stew but we were provided with a comfortable mattress in the salon of their freshly-painted apartment. In yet another year, a chance meeting in a jitney cab in Marrakesh resulted in a dinner invitation from a young man and his wife to their home in the center of the qasbeh, where they honored us with an enormous feast of harira, couscous, pickles, fruits and sweets. We all arranged ourselves on the cushions about the sinniyeh in their tiny one-room home, scarcely larger than the cubicle at my place of work and ate for what seemed like hours discussing all the while politics, literature and American popular culture.

Perhaps the simplest yet most elegant kindness we ever received was on a dusty Algerian road along which we trudged while attempting to hitch a ride with non-existent passing cars. Hailed by a family working in the olive groves on the slopes above the road, we joined them for an unforgettable lunch of bread dipped in deep green, fruity olive oil of exceptional quality. These and many other spontaneous incandescent incidents came unsolicited over our years of travel in the third world. The picnic we had that June day on Uludag along with all the other hospitality we were offered over the years stand out as burnished jewels of memory. They seem all the more astonishing and impossibly luminous in these dark times in which we live in the shadow of an ever more vicious empire.

The Kindness of Strangers

Food is an elemental component of life and today’s empire secured its early growth and honed its ruthlessness by understanding that manipulating and controlling food was a key to power. From the cruel enclosures of agricultural, pastoral and hunting commons to the subsidizing of what Peter Linebaugh calls the “bitter substances of the industrial diet” - sugar and tea - in order to keep the workers impoverished by enclosure awake and energized on the cheap, a long procession of empire ideologues have constantly sought to refine control of the production, distribution, processing and ingestion of food. Here in the Empire’s core today food has become particularly degraded, its preparation turbo-charged as “fast”, its content widely processed utilizing dubious fats, sugars and lab-concocted chemical flavorings to disguise inferior ingredients and create quick, addictive highs. One might hope that in this respect the Empire may find itself anon hoisted on its own petard, albeit slowly and creakingly due to the endemic obesity in the Empire’s heartland.

The architects of empire also understood that altering social relations and the culture surrounding the communality of both food and resources was critical to success. An iron social discipline had to be instituted, epitomized by the repellant Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, where prisoners would be atomized and unseen jailers would see all: A model of minimized, controlled social contact to enhance the goal of increased production and profits and applicable in prison, factory and neighborhood alike. No matter was too small for Bentham’s merciless eye; the dour Utilitarian even authored a cookbook inveighing against the “errors” of modern cookery, recommending that to save time and expense, treacle should be substituted for butter, whereby it would not only provide the desirable industrial sugar high but make palatable the poor quality flour available to the lower classes.

Laurence Oliphant, that active promoter of empire and well-known early Christian Zionist bemoaned unseemly displays of kindness and generosity with food that he observed amongst the very peoples the Empire sought to subdue, understanding instinctively that such behavior must be radically altered in order for empire to prosper. Oliphant eerily presages present neoconservative ideology when he decried in 1881 the “eastern” habit of hosting and feeding travelers without requiring any recompense:

… [as] a more enlightened financial selfishness is a higher state of civilization, I suppose it should be encouraged. Unless we can stimulate the Moslem to devote his whole energies to preying upon his neighbor and can increase his greed for money…the cause of reform in Turkey is hopeless.

That old slogan “reform in Turkey” has now been updated to “spreading democracy in the Middle East”. The spirit of Bentham, Oliphant and the legion of their ideological progeny is a chief ingredient in the mortar in the Empire’s rapidly rising external and internal walls. It can be found in the apartheid wall Israel is constructing around its perimeter; it hangs over the gated communities springing up mushroom-like here in America wherein the wealthy cower in air-conditioned isolation in their personal panopticons; it powers the phenomenal expansion of the American prison industry which is itself a mirror image of those wealthy gated communities only meant instead to isolate and render politically impotent poor people of color. The racist American south won the Civil War after all; slavery is still with us, morphed today into the vast prison-industrial complex in which the majority of inmates are African-American and Hispanic men between the ages of 20-39 years and within the unforgiving walls of which fully one third of African-American men will pass at least some portion of their lives in Benthamite social isolation. The amply funded laboratory for the Empire’s violent disciplining of social relations has long been open for research, perfecting its experiments right here in the American heart of darkness.

American playwright Tennessee Williams sensed the alienation inherent in American social relations when he created the character of Blanche DuBois in his “Streetcar Named Desire”. Her sweet vagueness as she declares that she has “always depended on the kindness of strangers” could only be presented in an American context as irrational, even pathologic. Williams’ genius is such that even in 1947 he understood that someone who depended on such kindness could not be portrayed as sane; in those post-war years the Empire was already furiously incubating in American society in order to take up and expand the task inherited from Britain. The uniquely American-cum-biblical punitive ideology of rugged individualism, a sort of hopped-up Randianism in which every man’s hand is against every other man, in which each individual looks out for that uniquely American idiom of “number one” was rapidly becoming the cultural norm. Refusing to submit to this soul-withering reality, Blanche gently retreats to an imaginary refuge of kind strangers, something all of us resident in America know is scarcely to be found. The audience can then leave the theater gratified with a Blanche utterly disconnected from reality, a poor soul who might even require therapy and medication in order to adjust.

Although Williams portrays Blanche as slightly mad, at the same time he foils the cultural censors and endows her with a sort of heroism in the face of the sure and certain alienation that is a founding cultural pillar of American society and that in these violent days is being imposed, missionary-like, by the powerful armament of empire. Blanche would have been entirely at home on the slopes of Uludag or in the Algerian olive groves, soothed by the incomparable human balm that she knew can only be generated by the kindness of strangers.

J A Miller is an American activist grandmother who lived and studied in the Middle East for many years. She maintains a blog at www.secularavatar.blogspot.com and may be contacted at jsec_miller@hotmail.com.