Unlike Seoul, where exotic street food was varied, abundant, and cheep, Istanbul has been a bit more conservative on the food side of things. Yes, there’s great Turkish food all around us, but for whatever reason (usually price or convenience) we’ve been eating a lot less of it than I’d like. When we’re not cooking pasta or beans at home to save money, our diet consists largely of kebaps, soft serve ice cream, and ‘fiesta’ pizzas from Pizza Pizza. Yesterday I was introduced to a strangely familiar Turkish street food: Kumpir.

Turkish Kumpir, heaped with toppings

Yes, it’s a baked potato Turkish style! In addition to the standard butter and cheese, they top them with a variety of things including: black and green olives, pickles, sausage bits, Russian salad, corn, chili paste, mayonnaise, and/or ketchup. Despite the fact that there’s not a bacon bit to be had, they’re still pretty delicious and filling. We got these in Ortaköy, near the Bosphorus Bridge, which seems to be home to at least 20 different yet entirely identical Kumpir stands, so you should have no trouble tracking one down.

I have tried to maintain a strictly healthy diet during this adventure, avoiding fast food and concentrated sugar – foods that make me tired and easily frustrated. The only way I’ve survived off the number of hours I’m sleeping is because of my diet, which is admittedly not appetizing but nonetheless, highly functional. Here’s my favorite…

One of my 3 basic food groups...

Mochi balls (rice beaten, mashed, made into a sticky dough, and steamed) dipped in a mix of kinako (a common powder high in protein) and fiber. Mochi gives calories, kinako gives protein, and fiber gives, well, fiber. It’s only about 120 Yen and it only involves me carrying around the powder mix. Simple, easy, effective.

Our Health CONdition levels are measurements of our overall bodily health security, a function of what we eat, drink, and do during our time in Tokyo.  HCON is an assessment of our health risk.  Simply put, we’re already at war.  Weeks of rice, eggs, rice, instant coffee, eggs, bread, instant coffee, etc. have sunk our nutrition levels so low.  Both Rob and I have googled “scurvy”…

I’ll have some posts coming up which explain in more detail what our diet situation is and what we’ve been eating, but here I’d like to show you what we haven’t been eating – and why.

Seriously, why is it so hard to buy healthy things?

100 Y is about $1.10, so 1 normal pear costs about $2.20.  To get vitamin C from fresh fruit, we would pay almost  75 cents per Mandarin orange.  At these prices, I would eat the pear stem and savor the orange rind, perhaps even chewing on the seeds until they either went safely into my stomach or became a choking hazard.  All fruit is similarly priced, so needless to say, fruit is not a part of our diet.

Vegetables are definitely cheaper, but only ones that are a staple part of the Japanese diet, usually meaning they are not part of the American vegetable diet.  We’re not really sure what to do with most of these cheap vegetables other than rip them to shreds and eat them (and actually I’m the only one that will do that).  Online recipes work well in some situations, but they’re not very helpful for cooking with ingredients you didn’t even know existed.

So the occasional leaves of Chinese cabbage are one of our main sources of nutrition in Tokyo, and most of the time we get by wistfully wandering around the produce section and wishing that a banana bunch didn’t cost over twice what a corndog does…