The most popular fast food in Germany is not sausage bratwurstneither him CurrywurstNot even the hamburgers. The street menu par excellence is the kebab, or doner, as it is known in German: thin strips of roast meat accompanied by salad and a generous amount of sauce in a pita bread. Meat rolls that spin on themselves while grilling on a vertical grill are an iconic image of German cities. That is why when inflation began to skyrocket, and the traditionally cheap kebab stopped being so cheap, many threw their hands up. But how is that going to cost a kebab?, asked the incredulous customers of a Frankfurt restaurant that was all over the media when the price was raised to 10 euros.
“He doner it is part of the German identity”, says Eberhard Seidel, sociologist and author, among others, of the book Döner: A Turkish-German Cultural History (2022). The favorite food of students —at the Technical University of Berlin a kebab place has just opened on campus— and of the working classes for decades it has gone from costing four or five euros in just a year and a half to skyrocketing to six, seven or, as in Frankfurt, ten. “The reaction to the price increase has been a bit dramatic, but understandable if you think about how cheap it had been to make a meal that with 150 or 200 grams of meat, onion, tomato, lettuce, sauce and bread is quite complete,” says Seidel in his office at the NGO he currently runs, Schools without Racism.
It was the Turkish immigrants who, if they did not invent them, did popularize this dish in the 1970s, of which some 550 tons of meat are sold in around 18,000 stores throughout the country. Neither McDonald’s nor any other food franchise even comes close to billing the kebab industry. The majority are small family businesses and many were founded after the oil crisis of 1973, when the workers of Turkish origin who had arrived from 1961 to the factories and mines of a Germany in full industrial development and thirsty for labor lost their jobs. “Were spendbeiter [literalmente, trabajadores invitados] and they should have left, but in many cases they had brought their families and wanted to stay. Theirs is a success story: out of necessity they ended up creating Germany’s national food,” says the expert.
a key index
If years ago it was quantified how long you had to work to buy a kilo of pork, or a beer, today the index is the kebab, explains Seidel. That is why the blow of inflation has led to talk of a “kebab crisis” or to the fact that in the last municipal elections in Berlin, the Social Democrats hung banners in Kreuzberg -the neighborhood where the Turkish community has traditionally lived- asking for a “brake on the price of doner”. Average inflation in Germany was 8% last year, the highest level in the country’s postwar history. This June it closed at 6.4% (compared to 1.9% in Spain), dragged down above all by the price of food. The shopping basket is 13.7% more expensive than a year ago.
Actually, Seidel says, the kebab was too cheap. Its low cost was based on many poorly paid working hours —the owners are usually the same ones who handle the long knives with which the meat is cut— and on very tight margins. “With the war, the price of all raw materials skyrocketed, and you have to take into account that grills use a lot of gas,” he points out. So even if Germany manages to contain inflation, the kebab is unlikely to ever return to the filling and extremely cheap fast food it once was.
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