Food as inheritance
Menus, Maps, and Mothers
A journey across kitchens and oceans in search of meaning.
Most of my friends’ mothers used to give their children advice like this:
“I wish you’d become a doctor.”
“Law is a fine profession.”
“Ah, wouldn’t architecture be lovely?”
“Teaching is sacred.”
My mom started with my sister first, offering up those strange 90s career suggestions...
“I wish you’d become a painter,” she said.
My sister never let go of her pencil, even as a tiny child. My mom would come home with every kind of art supply, oil paints, gouache, you name it.
And in the end, a wildly talented artist was born.
As for me, it wasn’t a pencil I held. It was a rolling pin.
Food was the most important act of my life.
She began with, “Maybe you should be a chef?”
But I insisted: “No, I’m going to be a journalist.”
Eventually, I found myself in the pages of a food magazine.
My sister, always ahead, said: “There’s a gastronomy university at the fine arts faculty. They teach the history, science, and art of food. You have to draw to get in. I can teach you how to draw. You’ll get a scholarship!”
My mom never said, “You have to be this.”
She just gently nudged us toward whatever sparked our interest.
And so, I drew pictures with food, and my sister painted with her brushes…
Everything seemed normal up to that point.
Then one day, while I was working in the R&D department of Mikla restaurant, my mom came to visit my apartment.
For my birthday, she gave me a Casio watch and said,
“What if you cooked on boats?”
Wait. What?
She was referring to the meager salaries in the restaurant world and the shoebox-sized apartment I lived in at the heart of Taksim.
“If you can live here, you could definitely live in a small cabin,” she said.
And I loved that idea.
The thought of drifting into the sea.
Of cooking to the rhythm of waves.
We were designing incredible menus with priceless ingredients from all corners of Anatolia.
It was every chef’s dream, really.
To create new menus every day, using your imagination.
But thanks to my mom...
The next day, I quit my job and applied for the ship’s crew certificate exam.
In a class of 50, except for two people preparing to work on cruise ships, everyone else was heading for cargo vessels.
As the only woman in the school, I graduated learning how to tie sailor’s knots and how to escape pirates, you know, the really important stuff.
Before my passport even arrived, I applied for a job. Pure luck.
I was accepted.
The boat’s owners got my visa in one day (!)
I packed up my home and flew to the island of Mykonos, Greece.
My only experience with the sea had been the ferry ride from Asia to Europe.
I only understood what a 48-meter yacht meant when a small dinghy picked me up and took me out to the open water.
I was the sole chef.
13 crew members.
A family of 5.
A three-deck yacht.
“Mom… really, why?” I kept asking myself.
But then today, I came across something I had written. Some scribbles from 2021, tossed from one bay to another, one island to the next:
When you look out from the tiny airplane window, everything seems to make sense.<br>There’s a logic to how the universe works, but only when you’re looking from above.<br>As the little cup of water trembles on your tray, your emotions shift.On the boat, rocking gently, you glance at the land…<br>Those pieces of earth you never tire of looking at begin to take on a kind of meaning, a sense of order., just from watching them from afar.As I sipped my coffee, trembling slightly in the boat’s winter chill, I remembered. Does the world only start to make sense when seen from a distance?<br>Is that why we always want to go higher?<br>Away from those who walk, into space…Like a bee trapped behind glass, we keep trying to escape.Instead of sitting at the window and saying, “How strange and beautiful everything is,”<br>we keep trying to fly higher.We’re the bees that bump our heads against the glass and faint.
Now I see…
To my mother, the one who always looked at my world from afar,
who helped me see things more clearly, who taught me that cooking is not just about food, but about offering a piece of your story.
I learned it the hard way, by bumping my head, again and again.
I just wanted to say:
I’m so glad you exist.
May we always take one step back and see the whole picture.
Sincerely
Nesrin Eren
