In May 1891, the London Vegetarian Society held a meeting in Portsmouth. Present were not just English, but also two Indian members, T.T. Majumdar and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, both students of law in London. For Gandhi, later one of the leading figures in the Indian independence movement, membership in the London Vegetarian Society was a formative experience. It allowed him to discover vegetarianism as an ethically motivated choice and integrate it into a philosophy of non-violence. The encounter was not a singular instance. It was part of a larger entanglement between European vegetarianism and India.   In order to buttress what was then a fringe lifestyle, vegetarians in Europe made frequent reference to meat abstention in other parts of the…

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The burek – a pastry made of phyllo dough with various fillings, well-known in the Balkans, in Turkey (bürek) and also in the Near East by other names – probably arrived in Slovenia in the 1960s. Industrially, the most ambitious of the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia needed a workforce. And with that workforce – immigrants from the former Yugoslav republics – came the burek. To paraphrase Max Frisch: We called for a workforce and we got bureks! But the burek might have remained unknown to the majority of Slovenes if not, in the 1960s, “foreign” burek stands (run by Albanians from the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia) appeared in various Slovene towns with high concentrations of immigrants or soldiers. Until the…

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