Gastronomik Irkçılık(Gastronomic Racism)

Abstract

Racism, which can be summarized as the idea that one race has superior characteristics
compared to another, has started to target cultural and physical characteristics of “other”
societies as well as changing over the years. Racist-minded people or societies, can display
hostile attitudes and claim superiority against all cultural elements of other individuals or
societies such as language, religion, tradition, customs, belief, and clothing etc. One of the
most important cultural features of a society is that society's “food culture” or more broadly
that society’s gastronomy. Therefore, the idea of racism can also develop against the
gastronomic identity of a race or culture. In this study, firstly, the concept of gastronomic
racism was tried to be defined. And also Examples of gastronomic racism in many countries
of the world, especially in European countries, have been examined. Between 1 July 2017
- 10 July 2017, semi-structured interviews were held with twelve restaurant operators
offering Turkish cultural dishes in the Kreuzberg district of German capital, Berlin. In
addition to the restaurant operators, an interview was held to support the research with,
spokesperson of TBB (Berlin Brandenburg Turkish Society) which represent 37 Turkish
non-governmental organizations and 86 individual members. As a result of study, it is
determined that, there is a continuous racism on food against to immigrants in Germany.