Food forecast 2016

If you're familiar with Turkish coffee cup fortune telling, you must already be familiar with that widely heard phrase: "You'll receive good news within three units of time!" Those three units of time are hard to interpret; it can be as soon as three hours, but more likely three days or three weeks. If your fate is a slowly-moving process, it might take three years for the miracle to happen. Fortune telling is usually about love, heartbreaks and money matters, but this forecast is about food. I admit that some predictions are based on true inside information. Seven is considered a lucky number, so here are the seven top food trends for 2016: 

1.The culinary pulse of the world will be beating in the new year, as UNESCO has declared 2016 the International Year of Pulses. This means we'll re-discover the virtues of lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, dried peas and beans of all sorts? My own prediction is there will be a rising interest in cuisines like Indian that make effective, efficient and tasty use of pulses, especially for those who are vegetarian or vegan. Turkey cuisine also has a rising sign of potential success, as it makes use of pulses in diverse ways, from soup to dessert, and from the ever-present lentil soup to the weirdly lovable festive sweet pudding "a?ure" loaded with beans and chickpeas. The southern city of Gaziantep, now on the UNESCO list of Creative Cities for its merits in gastronomy, has its lucky sign here, with countless pulse dishes and its own local pulse varieties like mung beans, black lentils, black-eyed peas and local chickpeas. There is a lot about pulses in fortune telling, as lentils stand for prosperity and abundant amounts of money, while fava beans are dreaded for the fear of death. There is even a "bakla fal?" in our...