What's Cooking in Kurdish Cuisine?

Dear Readers,

Before I started sticking up recipes, I decided to go out into the street and see if people knew anything about Kurdish cuisine. I had quite an interesting experience. For example, a good number of people mentioned kebab, which is funny, because usually when Turkish people are explaining their own cuisine to foreigners, the first thing they say is kebab. Now here they were telling me kebabs were Kurdish. A lot of people answered ‘Beans and rice.’ These people, even though I asked in a very loud voice, always thought I said ‘Turkish food’. Basically, their brains were closed to the very idea of a ‘Kurdish’ food. The only people who could list any of the true Kurdish dishes (like meftune, keledosh, avsir, or braised lamb) were Kurds themselves. 

Let me emphasize, except for one man who said ‘The Kurds have their own food? Please!’ (and you can probably guess who this is in the video), I did not have any negative reactions to my question.  Quite the reverse, from the moment they heard my question, they started to ponder hard over a question that they probably had never thought about before.

The thing that impressed me most was the answer of the young man who appears at the very end and the very beginning of the video: ‘If we just talk, just like this, everything would be wonderful.’