Month 14.2. Through Thick and Through Thin: An Ode to Yogurt.

This blog entry is written for you. Yes, you. It dawned on me that people really like to read about food. (I know I'm basically the last person on earth to realize this. Personally, when I read about food it makes me want to eat, so I stop reading to go eat. Therefore I concluded that writing about food is self-defeating if you want people to actually read what you're writing.) To keep my readers interested, I'll write about food today. I guess that makes this blog entry ultimately for me, since it's in my interest to keep you interested. Oh well, Kant sue me.

But this entry is not just about any old kind of food! Heavens no! It's about practically the best food ever invented. I say "invented" because there are arguably better non-man-made foods, like mangoes. I say "practically" because there are close runners-up, like muffins. When I was in high school I joked that if I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it "Mangoes and Muffins." Now that I'm older, I'm wiser by exactly one word: yogurt.

During my travels, I've come across all kinds of yogurt. But to this day, the most exquisite yogurt I've tasted was right at home in Montreal. I worked in a little café run by a Romanian couple. They bought this enormous tub of 10% yogurt to make parfaits with. I made the parfaits and decided to try one for myself. I nearly fainted. My boss was looking at me, and he asked, "…Are you ok?" And now I have secret altars throughout the house where I can worship yogurt whenever a burst of faith graces me.

Yogurt has been around for about 2000 years. One of the earliest documentations is from the middle ages. The author reports it as a popular food amongst Turkish nomads. Yogurt gradually made its way from the Middle East into Europe. In the 1800's, it was used as a cleaning agent (and is still used today as a hair conditioner in India). But it was only well into the 20^th-century that yogurt entered the diets of westerners. The typical yogurt cups now found in North American grocery stores go back 60 years to a Czech guy who combined yogurt with jam.

True to the history, I ate lots of yogurt in Turkey. In Istanbul, they like their yogurt really thick. I spread it like butter over my toast. With Nutella or hazelnut butter, yogurt toast is heaven. But the Turks do all kinds of things with yogurt. They blob it over their salads or eat it as a side-order with a sprinkle of dried parsley and chili. The most popular yogurt concoction is ayran. Fill a cup half-way with yogurt, top it off with water, add a generous sprinkle of salt, shake or stir, and enjoy. Best to drink it with kebab; goes well with burgers too.

The Balkans are also yogurt-friendly, owing to centuries of Ottoman rule. The first researcher of the chemistry of yogurt was indeed Bulgarian. But thick yogurt isn't easy to find in Eastern Europe. To Croatians, yogurt is something like milk. They share the same thinness and are served in the same plastic bottles. You can pour it over your cereal. In Serbia yogurt is a drink too – usually paired with burek, a stuffed pastry also originating in Turkey.

The default yogurt in Turkey and the Balkans is plain. In Turkey, the selection of sweetened yogurts is very limited. The whole notion of sugary, dessert-like yogurt seems to be North American. I got some strange looks in Macedonia when I combined yogurt and jam (I mean, right? If a Czech guy can do it, so can I. That's all fruit-on-the-bottom is, anyway). I remember seeing coffee and chocolate yogurt in Montreal, with about 6% fat, under the label "Mediterranean tradition." Well I may not have seen the whole Mediterranean, but I have yet to see 6% yogurt, and yet to see yogurt combined with anything more exotic than peaches. It turns out that high-fat yogurt was developed in North America. (It also turns out that the jelliness of North American yogurt comes from the addition of pectin, which explains why Balkan yogurt is so much thinner.)

The whole idea that yogurt is a "perfect" food also seems restricted to North America. Nobody tries to sell you on probiotics or bacteria over here. It's true that yogurt was supposedly used to cure the French King Francis I of diarrhea, way back in the day. The Bulgarian researcher mentioned above speculated that yogurt was responsible for the longevity of Bulgarians. Europeans accept the healthiness of yogurt, but without dwelling on it or advertising it. So it's ironic that the regions that most promote yogurt as a health food are the ones that add the most sugar and fat to it.

I miss being able to spread yogurt over toast, but it's also nice to pour yogurt over my cereal like milk. Yogurt is versatile, delicious, healthy, cheap, cultural, and attractive. Whatever its form and wherever its origins, yogurt is yo-great.