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The purpose of this paper is to describe methodology and practices undertaken during a pilot study on food composition of Turkish traditional foods (TTF).

The pilot study was conducted under the European Food Information Resource Network (EuroFIR) Project for the systemic investigation of traditional foods. As a partner country of the EuroFIR, Turkey has selected five traditional foods, tarhana soup, yoğurtlu kebap (kebab with yoghurt), hamsi buğulama (anchovy stew), pastırma, and baklava. The traditional recipes of the selected foods were recorded by field studies. Nutritional composition of foods was determined by chemical analyses.

Information on the identification, sampling, sample handling, and analysis was collected for each of the selected foods. The food composition data were evaluated by using EuroFIR standards, and the recommended dietary allowances (RDA) for nutritents. Five TTF were meeting with various nutrient recommendations.

This pilot study on the systemic investigation of traditional foods would be an example for further traditional food studies in Turkey and would enable the generation of reliable, representative and sufficient quality data on TTF.

To date, limited studies have examined the country-specific social institutions to explain the informal entrepreneurial activities of women, particularly, within the context of the Middle East. This research paper attempts to close this gap through identifying the contextual and personal factors of domestic informal female entrepreneurs (DIFE) within the context of Turkey as a representative case of the Middle East region. The chapter takes national culture as the external context to identify the informal institutions that shape women's informal entrepreneurial activities and uses the Globe Project cultural dimensions to describe the sociocultural context. The qualitative research presented here was conducted with 38 DIFEs who participated in an EU-funded project in Turkey.

The profile of the informal domestic female entrepreneur reflects a middle-aged woman, married with children, literate with a low-level education and a necessity-type entrepreneur at the beginning who gradually evolves into a pull-type sociocultural entrepreneur in time. The findings show that, the perceived sociocultural environment can be categorized as a socially supportive culture – SSC (Hayton and Cacciotti, 2013, p. 713) which is one of the facilitators of informal entrepreneurial activities and creates a fertile and socially legitimized ground for the informal commercial activities of women in Turkey.