TOKYO -- As a nine-year-old boy in the 1960s in the Kurdish quarter of Nizip, an Anatolian town 157 kilometers from the Turkish-Syrian border, Musa Dagdeviren was mesmerized by the eccentric food traditions of the Turkoman, Arab, Kurdish, Armenian and Turkish communities living, feasting, laughing, and crying side by side in his hometown.
One custom even involved some kind of black magic. "In large gatherings of women cooking, the wife would spit in the cig kofte (raw meatballs) that she had prepared for her husband so that he wouldn't turn his eyes to other women," chuckles Musa.
