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Food, which has been handled from many aspects such as production, consumption, transportation, presentation and sanctity since the beginning of humanity, is one of the cultural elements imposed on a person by the society he/she was born into. The vital importance of food as a cultural element has determined the various turning points in human history. Accordingly, all the things that consist of the transformation of humans from consuming seafood as their primary food to hunter-gatherer and the transition from huntergatherer to herding/stockbreeding and agriculture point to the human effort to survive in the provision of food. The planned hunting has compelled people to move as a community. Respectively the use of fire, the domestication of animals and the emergence of agriculture have led to the development of various religious beliefs and practices, lighting, eating meat by cooking, shepherd/feeder revolution, the emergence of the order of society, writing, urbanization and social classes. When we consider these developments as a break, each of these breaks directly affected both the physical evolution of human beings and their social organizations. It is possible to say that the eating habits for survival lose their vitality after a point. It is also possible to collect various information about the place of food in cultural history from historical documents (cookbooks, registries etc.), archeological excavations and the studies prepared by the anthropologists which have examined indigenous communities. In addition to these, the texts that have survived from the past to the present and are regarded in the history of literature today also contain information about food cultures. Since such works are a mirror of the society in which they emerged, they give information about the structure of society, whether they are fed from oral sources or written ones. In this study, the literary works of Dede Korkut (DK) and Kutadgu Bilig (KB) will be evaluated through food culture. The reason for choosing these two literary works is that they represent two different social organization models of Turkish culture. When DK and KB are handled literarily, they differ in terms of their types, contents, styles, the formation of works and most importantly transmission medias. These differences in works are a result of their different models of social organization. DK is a nomadic society and KB is a mirror of a state-based society. What is remarkable here is that these two different forms of social organization continued to exist among the Turks for a long time. In addition to the state structures such as the Karakhanid State in Central Asia, where settled order, urbanization and social stratification were observed due to agricultural production, it is seen that there were nomadic communities such as the Oghuzes at about the same time. It is understood, not only by the texts associated with the discipline of history, but also through the written sources evaluated in terms of both language and literary characteristics within the history of literature today, that Turkish history cannot be positioned on the same developmental and homogeneous evolution model. In this sense, it is possible to say that the foods in the texts, the tables set and the meals that are eaten or excluded can be evaluated together with their repetitive and changing meanings within their historical social organization contexts. Through the texts mentioned in the study, it will be focused on what shapes the food culture, how eating organizes the network of social relations and how it determines the authoritarian structure and social status both in the nomadic lifestyle and in the settled social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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