Recently I hung out with my Turkish friends at their house (in America) and they offered me a white and a bit thick drink. They said it was salep. I couldn´t understand their explanation due to their poor English. Can someone tell me what is it made of? When is it usually drunk?

mmm..Salep

It´s main ingredient is the floor of the roots(tubers) of a plant. You add it to hot milk(or water but milk tastes better and thicker) and some sugar too. There isn´t really a special occasion for drinking it, though it´s generally considered a winter drink.

Salep plant is some type of wild orchid, and has really beautiful purple flowers as far as I can remember. Back when I was a kid, we would go to the hills to dig salep with my grandma. Wow this made me feel nostalgic all of a sudden

Thank you. It was a very clear explanation

Most of the endemic (only grow in one region and small areas) and rare orchids are endangered even though they were protected under laws. People are picking up orchid bulbs for sahlep production and selling them, they dont know they are consuming these beutiful species from nature.

I advice you to think again when drinking sahlep and see what sahlep is made of.

 Agree. But the stuff you buy in powder and add to milk is artificial, isn´t it?

We also call it cardomum in English

 right but most of people nowadays are not enviromentally aware and don´t care about nature.Just out of curiosity some questions come to my mind-how is nature protected in Turkey?What are the penalties for nature violation?And to what degree people are respectful for nature?

 Every year approximately 45 ton sahlep is produed in Turkey, and 1000-4000 Orchid bulbs are used for 1 kg sahlep! and that means every year 45-180 million orchid bulbs, which provide new generations, are being removed from soil. Orchid bulbs are not only used in sahlep but also in ice-cream.

I find that wrong on many levels.

-We human beings operate by breaking up organic compounds for energy. Whatever you choose to eat will have to come from some other living being. Salep being a beautiful flower doesn´t put it above, say, potatoes or sheep.

-Discouraing salep consumption or trying to ban people from digging it is a non-solution. It is a very unrealistic but rather romantic idea, you may think people will care about it going extinct, and they should, but they won´t. There are many failed attempts at saving species with such methods, the problem is it is very hard to enforce these bans, we can´t.

-On the contrary; what will save salep is for it to be become a profitable agricultural product, thus consumption must increase. I remember hearing news about this, it´s on an experimental phase, being caried out by some universities at the moment. Once cheaper domestic salep enters the market wild salep digging won´t be profitable anymore. Not only that; but the species will be under human protection, even if wild salep dies of some other cause such as climactic changes, the species will live on.

There are many good examples, maybe the best one is safran(saffron?). Which was an endangered wild species but is being cultivated heavily now, and is thriving. One other species that needs to be produced domestically is Tunceli garlic, it´s endangered too.

Realistic > Romantic, Politically correct, do gooder

We are here saying Orchids are only picked up from nature, they are not cultivated and they have small and unique habitats. now there is an over-exploitation of these plants. of course there are some attempts to grow them out of their natural habitats but most of them failed.

the most important subject is, we losted many species. I dont think caring about living things is a romantism.

Actually, I agree with Janissary here.  We have farmed salmon here, but it tastes horrible. We have almost made wild salmon extinct in CA with various wreckless policies, such as damning the rivers they need to spawn. For the last two years the commercial fishermen have not been allowed to fish salmon.  I really miss wild CA salmon.

We thought farming them would be good, but it is actually more harmful to the habitat.  We have to catch tons of other fish to feed them, then there is the problem of getting rid of their feces....all in all, it doesn´t work very well.  The same thing happened with abalone, They are almost extinct as well.  They are just hanging on.  We had amazing forrests of redwoods, but some people cut them all down in some places to sell the wood. Trees that took hundreds of years to grow....gone forever. What was planted in their place contaminated the ground making other species growth all but impossible....but those trees are fire hazards and not able to tolerate the weather changes here.

I hope the Environmental movement in Turkey grows before too much damage is done.