[ Music ] >> Mehmet Oztan: Part of sharing food with people who are not from my culture, sometimes it's about loneliness, right? -- because if you are an immigrant and then there are not many like you around you. You have this urge. You look for other people to share your cultural experience. Food is one of the most important aspects of life in Turkey. Turks take their food very seriously and take pride in it. The ingredients in the food create a commonality, so I always search for that commonality. People, you know, respect that aspect of my culture and share it with me. In terms of seed maturity, peppers and eggplant, I need to plant -- finishing planting them next week. >> Mike Costello: When you talk about Appalachian food, what it is, and how it's evolved over time, you have to include immigrant cuisines, and if that conversation happens, it's so often about white, European settlers who came here at least a century ago, but people are always coming here from all over the world, and when they do, they bring their food traditions with them. [ Music ] Moving to a new place as part of a family or a community is a lot different than going somewhere by yourself. That makes everything Mehmet does so impressive because to carry on these pieces of Turkish culture in rural West Virginia, he's had to figure out so much of it on his own. [ Music ] He's always making Turkish food, even when he's not in the kitchen. Maybe he'll plan to cook a stew and he'll serve that with some bread and a few pickles, but long before that, he creates the building blocks for this entire meal. He'll grow and harvest the beans, and he'll make sure that those beans are the right kind of beans for this particular recipe. He'll gather ripe tomatoes from the field and he'll puree those and make a traditional tomato paste that will be the base of that stew. [ Music ] In Turkish cuisine, the ingredients are so important and Mehmet's reverence for those ingredients starts with the seeds. >> Mehmet Oztan: So this one is a boncuk ayse. Boncuk means bead. The beans in this category come with beautiful patterns and colors on the seeds. >> Mike Costello: Mehmet's a farmer and a seed keeper. He and his partner Amy run their farm together on about six acres, and they have a small heirloom seed company called Two Seeds in a Pod. They grow hundreds of crops, and their goal is not so much to harvest the produce itself but to preserve the seeds of all these unique plants that have been handed down through the generations, for decades, centuries, sometimes even thousands of years, and they focus on crops that are culturally significant to the people of Turkey. When you walk through their field, you will see dozens of types of beans, lots of melons, okra, squash. I mean you name it, and it's probably there. >> Mehmet Oztan: Look at that. This is a sunflower from northeast Turkey, specifically from Kars. Its name is semichka and stewarded by the Molokans. It's a Christian community in that part of the country. When the seeds are fully mature, they're going to turn pitch black. [ Music ] >> Mike Costello: Everything they grow is meaningful in its own way, but maybe Mehmet is more attached to some crops than he is to others. >> Mehmet Oztan: This is Turkey hard red. This is what I made flour from last year. I love the act of coming back to it. It's like, I don't know, representing a beloved family member, so you know, every now and then I come here and cut the ears and drop them in this bucket. And then I just step on them and separate the seed from the ears. There's something so comforting about it. We grow I think 50 to 60 different food crops on the farm here, and while all of them are culturally very important, wheat is on top of that list of crops that I feel culturally very attached to and because of bread being a staple item in Turkey. Bread is very important to my people. It is still the staple of all meals in Turkey. That was one of the first things that I looked for when I came to United States, you know, the bread that I am used to. >> Mike Costello: The community oven is very much a social anchor in Turkey. It's where everyone comes to get their bread, and when Mehmet and Amy fire up this gorgeous oven that they built by hand, you can sense that oven's importance and you can appreciate how in one simple loaf of bread, there's actually so much working together, the tradition, the baking techniques, and of course, there's the wheat itself. [ Music ] >> Mehmet Oztan: Man, it's so beautiful, these ears, almost blue color. I mean, wheat is beautiful, yeah. >> Mike Costello: Wheat has been grown in Turkey and that whole region of the world for an incredibly long time. Different kinds of wheat have long been revered in specific communities in Turkey, and there are still hundreds of varieties of wheat grown across some of those communities today. >> Mehmet Oztan: You know, they all are different, but then this one is -- this specifically is from western Turkey. That's a very unique seed variety. >> Mike Costello: These precious seeds were sought out and collected by researchers and industrial interests from here in the U.S. and other places in the world, and some of those seeds were used to develop the wheat that is commonly grown today on a much larger industrial scale. When we look at these seeds based on how they can serve us commercially, we lose sight of everything that made those seeds special to people and to their communities. >> Mehmet Oztan: I take it as my responsibility to make sure that all these wheat varieties that were collected, you know, decades ago grow them and then try to connect with the seed and try to collect cultural narratives, stories when possible, try to find out how they are used traditionally in their region, and that's I think also what makes seed keeper different than a seed saver, so you don't only save the seed from the plant to basically physically make it -- make the seed to keep going, but also you keep the story and the cultural connection and the significant recipes. And the next one is also very unique which became extremely rare, almost went extinct from northeast part of the country and its name is kavilca which is an emmer, emmer variety what has been cultivated for more than 10,000 years. There are just so many different varieties. I don't think my lifetime will be enough to just explore all of them. I mean it's a -- it's basically it's a never-ending journey to explore these. >> Mike Costello: Preston County is a pretty good place to grow wheat, and in terms of climate and topography, it's actually like a lot of places in Turkey, so it sort of makes sense for him to be farming there, but when he first came to the U.S. to get a PhD as an engineer, he had some very different ideas about where he'd end up and ultimately what he'd be doing. >> Mehmet Oztan: I grew up in Ankara, which is a big city, the capital of Turkey. I never had access to like a backyard garden or planting seeds or the soil. It just never happened. I would have never imagined to end up living in this place. It's kind of wild actually, thinking about it. I didn't have the intention to stay in the United States, but then I met my partner. I made some life decisions, decided to stay here, and I think when you do that, one anxiety as an immigrant you have is that to not be forgotten by your people, because I had that anxiety of, you know, is my family going to forget about me? Are my friends going to forget about me? Are my memories going to fade away? Connecting with food is I think a very important part of connecting with your culture and your people that you left behind. I never cooked actually up until I came to the United States in my life before, because my mother was kind of the boss of the kitchen, so I had the chance to spend a lot of time with my mom watching her cooking and preparing food. She would specifically pick certain kind of vegetables that would meet her needs for those specific recipes. The day after I arrived, I went to the grocery store to see what's available. Beginning that day, especially as a person who had not cooked at all before, that journey of looking for the fresh vegetables that I was familiar with because of the way my mom used the produce in the kitchen for specific recipes. Took a lot of time and actually that journey never ended. Eggplant is interesting. It was one of my main reasons actually, one of the main reasons that I started saving seeds and growing seeds, because the grocery store eggplant, it wasn't good enough for the meals that I wanted to make with it. For different recipes, you need a different kind of eggplant, you know, and Turkish moms are very specific about it. This one roasted the best, I think. >> Mike Costello: Turkish eggplants for roasting are different than eggplants for stuffing, and they're different than eggplants you'd use to make a stew, and you can buy every one of those eggplants in the markets back in Ankara, but in the grocery stores here, Mehmet never saw that variety. There was just one kind of eggplants in every single store, everywhere he went. >> Mehmet Oztan: That's very creamy, that texture. >> Mike Costello: As his time here went on, his desire for those familiar eggplants got stronger and stronger, and eventually he and Amy moved to a new place, and he got an idea. >> Mehmet Oztan: I discovered that there was actually a small backyard that I thought would be great for me to experiment with growing different vegetables, and then so I thought oh, you know, this is so powerful, so you know, can I find the seed for the eggplant that I grew up eating? >> Mike Costello: That's when he calls his cousin back in Turkey, and he says can you help me find these seeds? Well, she did and she sent him some mail and those tiny seeds essentially changed the whole course of his life. >> Mehmet Oztan: I never forget that moment in my life. Seeing these fruits that were the fruits that were in my memory made me realize that the seeds had the potential and the power to connect me to my home. >> Mike Costello: That experience sparked this incredible curiosity and he started looking at other vegetables and collecting more seeds, and now he cares for what has to be one of the most impressive seed collections that I've ever seen. We moved to West Virginia and then I was unpacking our boxes. I came to the awareness of how actually these many seeds, a huge collection and emotionally and culturally, an important seed collection for me can be fit into these few boxes. It came at a huge relief and I said to myself oh, you know, this is my home and then it can fit into a few boxes and then, you know, even if we move again, I can, you know, take my home with me and move away easily. That's why I consider the field here that we grow all these varieties, my home. My field is my home because there's this tomato in the field from my hometown and then there's this cucumber variety from Istanbul. There's this watermelon from eastern Turkey, all grown in a season, and then I can touch all of them and then kind of, you know, I basically went into that space, that special space for me that I can connect again with my people and stay connected and then don't forget, and I feel that I'm not forgotten. These seeds are my -- now my family, and I feel responsible for them because seeds cannot stay viable without their keepers. It's barbunya type. It corresponds to pinto in the kitchen of Turkey, and there are quite a few different barbunya varieties. >> Mike Costello: The culture of seed preservation is so rich in West Virginia and Appalachia, so I think finding other seed keepers here is probably a lot easier than it is in other places. That helped Mehmet settle in and it helped him find a community here, and our common interest in seeds is actually what connected us. Now on our farm here at Lost Creek, we are growing Turkish peppers and watermelons and Mehmet's growing corn and a couple bean varieties we shared with him. >> Mehmet Oztan: Coming to West Virginia, I realized how beans are a staple and a cuisine of this region, and then that made me happy because this crop that was from the native people here in this place, who cultivated this crop for thousands of years, is so important in the kitchen of my culture. Specifically, dry beans, I think is really significant in Turkish cooking. Okay. Now I'm going to take it out to pour the beans. kuru fasulye, that's a staple dish, so when you say kuru fasulye meal, which is dry bean meal, everyone knows what you're talking about, and it's common language. These dry bean stews are usually cooked with tomato paste, diced [inaudible] onions and also meat, usually cubed lamb and beef. That is a stew that cooks longer, so it's like a slow cooking process that combines all the flavors, you know, all together and then the dry bean eventually gets a consistency of like melting in your mouth by the time the cooking is done. The wholesomeness of the beans is important that they stay intact so that the flavor is, you know, can taste it, so I think it looks good. The stew is the combination of the bean variety of Ispir of Erzurum, eastern Turkey, and stew meat, tomato paste, pepper paste. If you like, you can add some hot peppers in it, which we did. You know, it keeps coming back. It used to keep coming back, our house. My mom would, you know, like I have very vivid memories of her, not only for this meal, but you know, for specifically saying that oh, I haven't made that in a long time, so and then she would just make it, but there are different dry bean varieties that are locally grown in different parts of the country that, you know, the same meal basically can be cooked with different kind of beans. >> Mike Costello: What is special about these meals is that the components of Mehmet's journey are all there on the table, but more so, it's about how he uses the seeds, stories, and the oven to bring people in. >> Mehmet Oztan: I'm thinking about how the ovens in Turkey functioned, how it was important for the society, how the oven was actually taking care of people. The concept, the whole concept, is not only about food, but it's all about community and oven taking care of people and people taking care of each other. That community feeling is true in Turkey, and actually, here too, because with our neighbors, we take care of each other and we help each other, so I thought it would be very important not only for, you know, looking into how different wheat varieties would turn into our meals, but also, you know, completing on that, you know, idea of community was important for me. [ Music ] >> Mike Costello: And when you think about all he's created to make up for his experience back in Turkey, there's only one piece missing, and in a way, in a really beautiful way, the oven makes up for that too. >> Amy: [foreign language] Nasilsin. >> Mehmet Oztan: My mom hasn't seen this oven yet. We talk on the phone and then she's very curious about it, and then she probably would have a lot of ideas, you know, if she was here to what to do, what not to do. When I talk about recipes on the phone with my mom, you know, that's oh, you know, she always says why'd you do that? Why'd you do this? And then it should have been this way, not that way. Me interacting with the oven and trying to cook reminds me of my conversations with my mom. I mean, I feel like, you know, oven is judging me from time to time, so I mean, I feel like we are punished sometimes because we just don't know what we are doing and then, you know, oven responds by you know, teaching a lesson saying that no, I mean, that's not right, you know? That's not how it works. The oven is teaching us, you know, like how to behave and how to adjust the fire and then what kind of foods to cook in that specific temperature range and such. There's a lot of teachings in it and I'm learning a lot, you know, on a daily basis. It's comforting. It's a comforting feeling. It says everything will be okay, you know, as long as you know, you respect the seed, you respect wheat, and then you don't stop understanding the significance behind that seed and you always try to continue that journey of exploration. I'll give you what you want.