Kent Lokantası with a longing for Italian meatballs

I spent 5 years of my life in the New York and New Jersey region of America, both as a student and as a civil engineer.

I experienced my period of poverty while I was a student, and my period of prosperity while I was an engineer.

Neither as a student nor while working did I encounter the cafeteria system much.

Well, was it non-existent?

Of course, it existed in some schools and industrial workplaces, albeit rarely.

As far as I remember, if the student dormitory and school were in an area far from the city, a cafeteria system could exist. In Turkey, however, there is a cafeteria system in all institutions, large and small.

Even if the food is not of the desired quality.

Anyway, that is not our topic.

While working as a civil engineer in America, I would go to an Italian deli right near the construction site for lunch. Chinese food was not really for us. America didn't have much of a cuisine of its own either. It still doesn't. Except for burgers and junk nuggets. There were no Turkish restaurants in the nineties anyway.

Thanks to the meatball sandwiches with plenty of tomato-pepper sauce, pasta with cheese, sourdough bread, meat and onion pastries, and all kinds of cookies prepared by our Mediterranean Italian fellow countrymen, I almost never had any nutritional problems. These legendary sandwiches and all kinds of saucy grain products didn't cost more than 10-12 dollars.

I would eat the food I got from the Italian place at the construction site. The neighbor's portions were generous, or maybe he put extra food in as a favor to his young Turkish fellow countryman. I would put the leftovers from the generous portions somewhere to the side. For some reason, it was rarely possible to find these leftovers where I had left them.

I would think the cleaner had thrown them in the trash and wouldn't dwell on it.

It turned out that the Filipino and Spanish kids working at the firm would eagerly devour the leftover food. Since they were tired of eating 20-30 count frozen pizzas they bought from big supermarkets for 99 cents each every day, they would watch me on the sly and go after my leftover food.

As our friendship grew over time, I told them, "Don't follow me like that, just come and ask," and they were very happy. Their stomachs were having a feast with the Italian food. Otherwise, they were at the point of exhaustion from eating plastic-like pizzas heated in the microwave for a dollar every day.

If there is such a thing as déjà vu, what we are experiencing now reminds me of the state of those Filipino and Spanish kids.

For those close to a Kent Lokantası, there is no problem; they are the lucky ones.