“Sucuk” is a meat product produced in Turkey, very much like garlic sausages you might find around the world, but has a special place in Turkish cuisine and culture. The most famous “sucuk” is the one produced in Kayseri, a city in the Central Turkey region. A good sample of sucuk is considered to be a little hot (spicy hot), meaty and with a little garlic. Sucuk can be grilled, fried or boiled in combination with other dishes. Nowadays I do not have much time to discuss Turkish economy thoroughly and separately, in fact, I already did that recently in our magazine (KD Dergi) in Turkish. Maybe I can translate some of that article into English later. For now, I will make use of the consumption behavior around sucuk and try to explain how economic policy affected the lower-economic class in Turkey over the last ten years.
Sucuk has always been a luxury for most people living with minimum wage. Now it is still a luxury, but somehow “not a luxury” at the same time. The reason I am writing about this is that months ago, I watched a TV program on meat production and consumption in Turkey and I found very interesting points, therefore thought it could be a good medium to investigate into economics. By making comparisons, I will use nominal prices, and sometimes made-up prices to give you a general idea. So, when I talk about price, do not consider it with the effects of inflation, the year I am talking about, and the general economic policies at that time in the country. My family has experienced an upper-middle class way of life for some time in my childhood, but later it mostly went downwards. During the middle class life, sucuk was an important thing. It never made it to our fridge as a regular, but when it showed up more often than occasionally, it was a pleasure. You would never call a family that eats sucuk everyday a middle-class family, this is how much of a luxury it was. Sucuk was roughly measured in coils (kangal), and one “kangal” of sucuk was sold for 20x where “x” can be considered the price of a loaf of bread. It was not easy to buy for everyone, and one would refrain from mentioning they consumed sucuk that last evening in public places, because someone could be envious and it would be rude. You would not include sucuk in your children’s lunch bags, because there were many people who could not buy it. It all changed when the healthy propaganda and so-called emerging economy thing came up.
This is when everything including hot-dogs, ham, etc. started to have cheaper and chicken-based alternatives largely available. Chicken has always been cheaper than red meat, it was also considered healthier. So, introducing chicken-based alternatives in a larger scale enabled “poor” people to consume more sucuk, too. It was not only cheaper now, but also considered “healthier”. This genius(!) idea spread to all markets and shops started to sell cheaper alternatives of everything including ketchup, pickles, shoes or lately cell-phone operators. This created a false sense of comfort and high living standards. The government presented it like “you were not able to eat sucuk then, but you can now”, or “you were struggling to buy shoes for your children, but now you can buy them easier.” The public agreed with the idea like “now we can eat sucuk everyday”, or “we are now paying less for a telephone conversation.” This comes from a superficial understanding of comfort in life. In this sense, having a car seems better than having a great car in exchange for a higher price. Again, in the opposite of this sense, eating is essential, but having a car is not. This still does not change the fact the the logic behind two examples is actually the same. It is like the only cars available “then” were Audi A6s and one could not afford them. Now there are more options, this certainly creates utility of some sorts, but it is not absolutely the same. Now one can afford an A3, but let us be honest, we just have “a car”, not “an A6”. This does not necessarily mean that we now have higher standards of living. We just defined a cheaper version of “utility” for ourselves and considering ourselves lucky by lowering our expectations. The most important things here are the following:
- The guy who has an A6 is still much happier.
- Having “any car” now is not as good as having “any car” then.
So, those pickles taste like feet, that ketchup is dyed-red poison, those shoes will not last a month and you will be spending more in the long run, and finally, that cell-phone operator does not have the suitable coverage, therefore you will lose reception when you walk through rooms in your home. Having cheaper versions of little things is mostly unhealthy, uneconomical and creates bigger problems in the economy as a whole in the long run. It is unhealthy because a market is not only about the profit margin or the brand value. Most of the products are expensive, because they have higher quality. When one sells a product for a cheap price, the chances are incredibly good that that product is of a lower quality. This is pretty much similar to the issue with sucuk, but diverging in some way I will explain soon enough. This concept is also uneconomical because cheapening goods and services that are used in everyday life, and considered goods and services with more price elasticity will be damaging in the long run. Lower prices bring higher demand, and especially for “previously luxurious goods like sucuk”, omitting the perception of luxury creates a boom in sales for a short time. So, you will buy ten shoes for your son worth 30 TRL each in two years and will be spending 300 TRL, instead of buying one for 150 TRL and using it for two years or more. This is not only about spending, but also about comfort, too. The pair you bought for 150 TRL will be much more comfortable to wear for a longer time. Considering the spending habits of the lower-economic class people in Turkey, buying 150 TRL shoes might be challenging. This is also why 30 TRL shoes exist. However, instead of having a fixed cost once, having a regular variable cost creates more consumption, and more debt in the long run. The change in the markets and this consumption insanity explains why Turkish people have unbelievably more debt when compared to their status ten years ago.
Now let us look at the photos here and compare Sucuk 1 and Sucuk 2. Sucuk 1 still exists by the way, and its price is around 40-50x, again, x is the price of a loaf of bread. Sucuk 2 might cost between 3x and 15x. This gets stuck at the profit margin, because the real price of Sucuk 1 should be around 30x. Let us assume a new firm entry, supplying Sucuk 1 for 30x and let us call this sucuk Sucuk 3. The people who can already afford Sucuk 1 will assume Sucuk 3 has lower quality and taste, because there is a significant difference of price. The people who already cannot afford Sucuk 1 will also assume the same thing and will not buy Sucuk 3 when there is already a cheaper lower quality version. If they actually knew that Sucuk 1 and Sucuk 3 has the same taste and quality, the chances of them buying Sucuk 3 would be much higher. The new firm has two options now:
- They will increase the price to 40x-50x level and sell to the rich.
- They will decrease the quality, sell it for 15x, and refer to the poor.
This creates the following problems:
- Non-wealthy people cannot eat good quality sucuk (almost at all), because it is already overpriced.
- Wealthy people have to pay more for good quality sucuk because of the high margin and market perception problems.
- This pricing problem is getting more and more normalized in the eye of the public and it prevents quality competition in the market.
- We are already seeing less and less of good quality sucuk in the market everyday, because people present average quality sucuk as good quality sucuk by simply increasing its price.
- In the long run, no one will be able to eat Sucuk 1, but the wealthy will at least have access to healthier low quality options. And yes, let us talk about health and taste here.
There is a reason I provided you with the pictures. The first thing you will notice should be the packaging. The first one is made of perfectly natural intestines. As you might know from your biology classes, intestines are semi-permeable. The second one is made of plastic. Of course, being “plastic” is already unhealthy in many ways, but it also is not the way sucuk is prepared. The second thing you should notice is the color and texture. The second one probably contains red food coloring and many additives. In the first one, you can see and feel that you will be eating real, old fashioned, tasty, tasty meat. The first one will take longer to fry and even the oil coming out of it will smell and taste incredible. The second one will let itself go much sooner and it will get dry and inedible if you keep it on the pan a little longer. It will also lose most of its taste when it lets out all the fat it contains, which again proves there is no tasty meat in it, but mostly additives.
Cheap sucuk is prepared with offal, chicken products, food coloring, additives, and loads and loads of unhealthy fat to fill up its packaging. Considering the price, who knows whether the facilities they are prepared in are in sanitary conditions or not. While red meat is considered unhealthy when compared in larger proportions, by eating cheap chicken and fat based products everyday instead of consuming real high quality red meat products occasionally, one is inviting cholesterol, various heart conditions, diabetes, obesity, sexual health problems, etc. So, even if we leave our humanity behind and support an economic model based on consumption insanity, we will be facing healthcare costs and related economic issues in the long run. Life expectancy also is a problem considering the satiation of production across this kind of consumption levels.
Making things relatively cheaper and making their cheaper alternatives are totally different two things. A “cheap is expensive” mentality is most of the time applicable to many things in an evolving economy. Considering that Turkey is now experiencing one of the worst economic processes in its history, the continuation of such market policies should be prevented in some way before it cripples the economy to an irrevocable degree. However, to be honest, such products are still “alternatives” in a way. The poor guy’s little son might not be able to understand that the thing he is eating is not actually sucuk, but he will not be considering it a problem. If this issue makes it easier for you to accept the corruption, go ahead, I will pass.
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