In Turkish culture, mercimek turns up everywhere: in the copper pot of the humblest esnaf lokantası cafe and the gleaming bowl of a New-Nordic fusion spot; in the taxi driver’s midnight soup as a welcome alternative to pungent tripe soup, and the dietician’s protein plan. If quinoa is aspirational and bulgur nostalgic, mercimek is foundational: a pulse that has nourished this land since it was the Fertile Crescent.
Naturally, it has also seeped into the language. A total idiot is mercimek kafa, or lentil-headed, our answer to “pea-brained.” Mercimeği fırına vermek, “to put the lentils in the oven,” is a cheeky hint that a relationship has ... er … just been consummated.
Last week, the lentil also became the centerpiece of a national alarm. At TÜRKONFED’s 26th Business World Summit in Antalya, Migros CEO Ömer Özgür Tort warned that Turkey is approaching a critical rupture in food supply. “If we continue at this pace, we may not find products to sell in Turkey,” he said, a sentence that landed with the force of an economic diagnosis. Producers, he added, are “not earning enough to keep producing,” and the country risks drifting toward deeper import dependency.
Tort also broke down the price gap with a blunt example: “A product is 5 lira in Antalya and 35 lira in Istanbul. There is a simple math behind this — without efficient production, bringing a product with zero cost to Istanbul costs 21 lira, and no producer will produce for 5 lira.” Particularly not the sons of farmers. He added that collective production can cut input costs by one-third, rail transport can reduce logistics expenses by a similar margin, and that technology in agriculture is no longer optional.
Migros, owned by Anadolu Holding, operates around 3,500 supermarkets across all 81 provinces, so the warning was striking.
SAVING GRACE
But Tort also highlighted an exception. Amid this bleak picture, one product offered a path forward: mercimek. Migros could “very easily” import cheaper lentils from countries like Canada, he said, where logistics are simple and yields high.
“We could import very easily, but we said we won’t,” Tort noted.
Instead, the company partnered with Kayseri Şeker and local farmers to revive yerli mercimek on sugar-beet fields that lie fallow every other year. The results, he argued, showed how small decisions can spark broader recovery. “Our country is the ancestral homeland of lentils. We planted local lentils on idle beet fields; the crop left beneficial minerals in the soil and increased fertility.”
JUST PAY UP
His warning — and his lentil plans — did not earn the applause he may have expected. As his remarks spread on social media, one producer wrote on X: “If you and the other retailers simply paid producers without dragging payments over 60–90 days, that alone would help.”
The Agriculture Minister drew fire as well. İbrahim Yumaklı had attributed the record contraction in the agricultural sector in the third quarter of 2025 to frost damage (zirai don) and extreme weather. “It is your bad agricultural policies that created this,” wrote one user on X. Another quipped: “Well, we’ll just have to eat cement” — a jab at the construction sector that has flourished under Erdoğan.
MICRO-RESILIENCE
Together with Tort’s remarks, these reactions sketch a picture of a food system strained by climate, cost, and structural pressures, one where a humble pulse becomes a test case for resilience.
The glorification of lentils in the oven is hardly new. Nutrition scientist Ayşe Baysal spent decades insisting that mercimek was never “poor man’s protein.” Lentils, she argued, are efficient, affordable, and nutritionally complete — a case that sounds almost prophetic today, as both wallets and diets shift toward plant-based staples.
So when Tort frames the lentil as a blueprint for recovery, he taps into a deeper cultural truth. In a year of agricultural uncertainty, mercimek may offer the kind of quiet comfort and hope that lentil-headed policies fail to provide.
