Inflation and olives…

In our country, the economic difficulties of recent years have spilled over into 2025. TÜİK (Turkish Statistical Institute) announced the inflation rate for the first month of the year as 5.03. While the annual inflation rate was expected to be around 41%, the announcement of 42.12% surprised the markets and even Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek quite a bit. In a world where inflation rates can be tracked daily or even hourly, such a deviation is thought-provoking. 

Then there is ENAG (Independent Inflation Research Group of Turkey), a community formed by experienced academics and expert professionals from various backgrounds who have come together to calculate and model inflation. They work meticulously and announced the annual inflation rate as 82.02%. It is almost double the figures from TÜİK. As citizens, we are at a point where we cannot make sense of this. Can there be such a deviation in science? Especially in the positive sciences? Moreover, when there is "artificial intelligence" that knows everything. Perhaps we should ask artificial intelligence? To see if it can make sense of it? I still looked at it with good intentions, blended the results of TÜİK and ENAG, added them together, and divided the resulting figure by two; the figure I found emerged as 62.07%. Inflation is definitely not below these figures. The figures are very, very high compared to the salary adjustments announced at the beginning of the year. 

It was very appropriate for the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality to include minimum wage earners, retirees, and the poor in its support group. Today, I want to move on to another topic without dragging you further into troubles like inflation, cost of living, and poverty. By the way, what do you do when you get bored or encounter a problem? I usually try to clear my head by picking up a book from my library. Even if I read persistently, sometimes those troubles do not leave my mind. I even read those pages over and over again until I get lost in the book. In the end, I create a new world for myself and transition into a new state of mind. 

These days, I have been pruning my olives in Göcek. I got a little tired because I did my organic spraying (Bordeaux mixture, etc.) and base fertilization. The prices of labor, pesticides, and fertilizer have increased so much that I took a book from my library to reduce the troubles of inflation—that is, the high cost of living—to relieve fatigue, and in short, to clear my head. The novel "The Olive Tree" by American journalist and author C. Miller Santo caught my interest quite a bit.

 The book tells the fairy-tale story of a family that has been involved in olive growing for five generations, who brought the first olive to California. "Five generations of women in the Keller family live in the same house in an olive grove far from prying eyes. The 112-year-old head of the family, Anna, a vigorous and strong woman, her daughter Bets, her granddaughter Callie, her great-granddaughter Deb, and her great-great-granddaughter Erin... although this family seems ordinary at first glance, the fact that two of them fundamentally shake what is known about longevity makes them extraordinary." "One day, a geneticist comes to town to investigate the Keller family's miracle of longevity, and at this time, Erin announces that she is expecting a baby boy. Thus, the journey into the roots of the Keller women begins. The family's life, intertwined with the soil and olive trees, is stirred by the influence of memories, secrets, disappointments, jealousies, and forgiveness that echo generations later.

 What is experienced will open, one by one, the painful emotions that these five women have kept buried deep inside and the closed boxes that will shake each of them." With its magical olive groves and extraordinary women, The Olive Tree is an extraordinary novel that brings together a family's joys, sorrows, and the emotions that connect one generation to another. And the main idea of the book is: "Only women can carry a heart big enough to strengthen the roots of a tree." Is the secret to a long life in the fall of inflation? Or is it in the olive, the tree of immortality? I leave that to your judgment. The secret to a healthy and long life is in the 46-chromosome olive. May your table never be without olives.

Prof. Dr. Nurettin DEMİR