Jennifer Hattam

With my latest article, about the Turkish dessert aşure , I joined the contributors' team at Zester Daily , an award-winning online destination for food, wine, and travel journalism. I'll be writing for them at least once a month about culinary culture in Istanbul, Turkey, and wherever else I roam. Founded three years ago by former L.A. Times writer Corie Brown , Zester seeks to "promote spirited, intelligent dialogue about what we eat and drink." Corie's commitment to an international focus, to professional writing, and to creating new models for funding journalism at a time when all three often seem to be in short supply have me excited to be on board.

For the past four years, I've been writing for TreeHugger.com as the popular green website's Istanbul correspondent, blogging about environmental issues primarily in Turkey and the region, but also elsewhere in the world, following my interests in art, food, travel, urban planning, and other topics. Blogging for TreeHugger provided an excuse to contact and meet all sorts of fascinating people; the opportunity to cover events such as the 5th World Water Forum and the London School of Economics' Urban Age conference; and the chance to raise the profile of places I care about -- Istanbul, of course, but also Beirut , which I fell in love with on a 2010 visit, and Lake Urmia in Iran, where my grandfather originated and where I hope to travel someday. (It also let me occasionally indulge my nostalgia for San Francisco and baseball .) One of my posts got picked up by the popular tech site Boing Boing , while another led to an assignment for BBC Wildlife magazine. Now...

From warm, gooey künefe to chocolate-slathered profiteroles to candied walnuts topped with cream, Istanbul's eateries offer plenty of ways to satisfy the biggest sweet tooth. For the latest issue of SHOP Istanbul 's Style Edition, I profiled a top-notch selection of the city's sweet shops, both storied patisseries and gourmet up-and-comers introducing new flavors to the Turkish palate. Read " Sweet Thing " online or download a pdf version of the article as it appeared in  SHOP Istanbul 's Autumn/Winter 2012 issue .

No white walls surround the art at Istanbul's newest sculpture gallery. Instead, skyscrapers and tower blocks rise dramatically above its works of stone and steel, set atop the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art in the city's Maslak business district. Meanwhile, at Borusan Contemporary , weekend visitors stroll through the empty offices of one of Turkey’s biggest holding companies -- tidied up every Friday night so no paperclip is out of place -- to view selections from the firm's 600-piece art collection. This is the latest trend to hit Istanbul: the office block as art gallery. Large private companies, especially banks, have been patrons of the arts in Turkey for decades, but as the country's economy booms, the line between the art and business worlds is becoming ever harder to distinguish... Read the rest of my article "From the water cooler to the water colour" in the October 2012 issue of Gulf Life , the in-flight magazine of Gulf Air: jpg | pdf ...

Beating drums and blowing whistles, hundreds of women marched last month on Istanbul's central Taksim Square, in one of dozens of rallies that have been held around the country to protest a new threat to reproductive rights.   Abortion until the 10th week of pregnancy has been legal in Turkey since 1983, and little contested until Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan railed against the practice in May, calling it akin to "murder" ... Unlike in the United States, abortion hasn't generally been much of a political issue in Turkey, so the prime minister's recent statements came as a shock, bringing women and their supporters out into the streets to protest and generating news coverage around the world. Reporting my latest piece for Women's eNews, I spoke with experts about how this renewed debate affects the general climate for women in Turkey, and how further restrictions on abortion could impact efforts to some of the country's most pressing domestic ...

In the shadow of the Acropolis, they set off before dawn. Men and boys driving rusty trucks, pushing heavy hand-carts, towing wagons behind battered motorcycles. As the city slowly comes to life, they are already well into their day's work, scouring alleys and Dumpsters for old box-spring mattresses, appliances, car parts, anything they can salvage and sell at a scrap yard for a few dollars a day.  Many Athens residents have been struggling to get by since economic and political crisis erupted in Greece, threatening to engulf much of Europe. But the estimated 80,000 Athenians who collect and process scrap in the city's informal economy were eking out their meager livings back when the rest of the city was still living large. .. Back in April, I had the opportunity to watch the new documentary "Raw Material" and interview its director, Christos Karakepelis, as part of the 31st Istanbul Film Festival , which hosted a special series of screenings and talks related...

A post I wrote for TreeHugger this spring about a Kenyan boy's creative method of keeping lions away from his family's farm attracted the attention of an editor from BBC Wildlife magazine, who commissioned me to look into the topic further. I consulted with experts on the viability of the young inventor's idea and learned many more interesting things about human-wildlife conflict in Africa than I could fit into the final piece, a short article for the "Agenda" section of the magazine's July 2012 issue . Read my article for BBC Wildlife, "Lions in the light": jpg | pdf