Even if I wasn't vegetarian, I'd be vegetarian in Turkey.

In Turkey, meat comes in two forms. There's big stacks of sliced meat called döner, and there's little blobs of ground meat called kefte.

Döner is Reason #276 why I hate entrepreneurs. At some point, one of them decided they could make a fortune if they could somehow convert a happily-grazing cow into a tubular shape. Because honestly, the way God made them isn't exactly conducive to fast food. Take an electric knife to one and you'll end up with gristle and bone and cowhide, not to mention hoof marks in your hair.

So, this entrepreneur tosses a cow into a wood chipper and stacks up what comes out. He sells it to restaurant owners, who mount it on a vertical rotisserie in front of a heating element, and the outside cooks as it spins. Somebody walks up, says "Hey, gimme a döner!" and the cook slices off the outer layer and tosses it onto a piece of bread. If the outer layer isn't done, he'll say, "Sorry, it's not completely cooked. You'll have to come back later, okay?"

Ha. Well, I'll bet some of you fell for it.

Döner raises a few red flags with me. First, how do you stack up raw meat so it stays in a cohesive shape? When I play Jenga, the game never lasts more than five minutes, and we're not playing with uncooked cow. Plus, there's all kinds of sanitation issues. Where does this döner go at night? (I mean, is it stored in a refrigerator, rather than does it like to drink and dance.) How many days does the center spin around before it ends up in somebody's sandwich?

Kefte are sometimes called meatballs, except usually they're not in a ball shape. Years ago some chef decided that fashioning tiny balls took too long, so he just squished meat in his fist and cooked it the way it came out.

You know, I've always been extra-suspicious about ground meat. I'll eat stuff that's been sprayed with chemicals, or came from more than eight miles away, but I need a little more than the chef's reassurance that what I'm eating isn't something inedible chopped really small.

Besides, this is probably the worst kind of food shape you can imagine, short of tiny meat vulvas. You can make out all sorts of details, like knuckles and wrinkles and such. I don't know why the Turkish people happily devour these things. Broad smiles splashed across their faces, they dig into plates of food shaped like the inside of a dude's fist. I couldn't do it. I don't like knowing forensic scientists could reconstruct parts of a human being using what's going in my mouth.

Needless to say, I stayed firm. I ate beans and rice, rice and beans. I got curious stares from everybody, but I'd avoid their eyes and steadfastly watch the chefs squish the tiny blobs. And eventually I realized that, in this venue at least, some old maxims were definitely true.

Big hands meant big meat. Small hands meant small meat.

And unless you're looking for trouble, avoid dudes wearing wedding rings.