“I can still remember when doner kebabs were sold for €3.50,” reminisced one teenager amid calls for a price brake to stop rising kebab costs.
The German capital is the birthplace of that ubiquitous European fast food, the doner kebab, and it shows.
Kebab shops line streets of many German cities, particularly in Berlin, and the scent of roasting, skewered meat is never far off.
Some two-million doner kebabs — meat wrapped in bread, topped with sauces and vegetables — are consumed a day in Germany, according to an industry association, quite a lot for a country of 83 million people. And the doner kebab has even supplanted the old stalwart, the currywurst — fried veal sausage topped with ketchup and curry powder — as the most popular fast-food dish in the country, according to a 2022 survey.
I remember 3,50€ from fucking 2007. They make it seem like the prices have gone up from that within the last two years. Meat is way too cheap anyway.
Meat is way too cheap anyway.
What do you mean “meat is way too cheap”? Are you a kebab joint owner?
From an ecological point, meat is too cheap as long as the general population can afford to eat it more than once or twice per week. Meat is very ineffective to produce, requiring vast amounts of water and cattle feed to be grown. It was never supposed to be a three times a day staple of every meal, and the fact that we have normalized it to that point is really unhealthy both for ourselves and the planet we are ruining to keep production going.
What do you mean “never supposed to”? The world wasn’t designed.
Anyway, meat can still be cheap without the intensive factory farming practices in the US. Chickens are very cheap to raise on pasture and produce much tastier meat as well! They can be watered with well water and supplemented with minimal grain feed.
A pack of dried beef is like 4 euros where i live. The vegan alternative is smoked beets, which basically tastes the same but comes in a smaller packet and is like 8.50. So you’re telling me it’s cheaper to raise a cow, feed it, make sure it doesn’t move too much, drive it somewhere to get killed, get it butchered, and smoked and dried than slice beets and smoke it?
Meat is way too cheap anyway.
This is why I hate that they are focussing on Döner and are even asking for a Dönerpreisbremse. For all I care, discuss falafels, french fries, anything that has no meat in it. I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but it is hilarious to complain that a meat based dish should still be the “easily affordable” fast food for everyone. In 2024. Come on.
Which is a clear sign for Döner being consistent with overall rise of prices due to inflationin the last 20 years. Maybe it has been too cheap for too long. Bad working conditions, a lot or family business where family members “help out” to deal with the heavy competition etc.
On the other hand, feeling angst is part of being German, isn’t it?
You guys came up with the word.
You don’t have a word in your language that has a similar meaning? (like “fear” for example)
It was a Nietzsche joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Angst_and_dread
For Kierkegaard, anxiety/dread/angst is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences an aversion to the possibility of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying impulse to throw himself intentionally off the edge. That experience is anxiety or dread because of our complete freedom to choose to either throw oneself off or to stay put. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Kierkegaard called this our “dizziness of freedom.”
Nietzsche later picked it up, himself using Angst as that’s basically the same word as Danish angst (shocking, I know). Danish also has frygt, German Furcht, English fright, which is immediate and not apprehensive. Reactive, not agentive. Fright is something that happens to you, dread is something you do. At least in theory people don’t always make a clear distinction, they’re blending into each other.
Do note how angst is translated as anxiety or dread, here, which is correct. In psychology English uses anxiety where German uses Angst, both existentialists were talking about psychology, which leaves us with the question on why English philosophers felt the need to import the Danish, or German, or whatever, word, when they had two perfectly fine words of their own.
I have never heard of this fast food, but it looks like if a gyro was made burrito bowl style and stuffed in a Chinese takeout container. Maybe we should get these here in the States.
Gyros Greek though and kebab is Turkish. Even if they are eerily similar both cultures will go to war over them being different.
Gyros is made from spicy, marinated meat. Döner is made from just meat and fat, without any spicing or marinating or whatever. Gyros is made from pork, döner is a mixture of lamb and beef. They’re also served a bit differently.
They’re plenty different originally. In Germany they’ve been bastardized a little bit and brought close to each other. And then Germany went and declared they invented döner kebap, which is of course utter bullshit.
I usually disregard this type of food wars, but the article using clear cut phrasing to attribute döner to Germany in 2 instances has quite triggered me as a Turkish person. I can shrug off the title if it was all there is to it, but what the hell of a British culture-stealing attempt is it to call Berlin the birthplace of döner, and it a European food coupled with that? If one did not know better, one would think that such a food being almost used as point to refuse Turkey’s integration to EU a European cuisine.
What’s next, our Kokoreç is a French food?
Birthplace aside, doner is European because Europe includes both Germany and Turkey.
“European” is not the same as “EU member”.
And this is just when the arbitrary culture lines decide when to include Turkey as a whole in Europe because it is convenient this time.
I wonder what the most governments and people of Europe were thinking during the decision to house 10 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, practically acting as floodplains for the refugees crises they engineered in the Middle East, citing “similar cultures” as the reason? I believe they were thinking " Turkey is a part of the Middle East, not Europe.
Turkey is within Europe. It’s a question of geography, not culture.
What people think about Turkish culture is a completely separate question. Americans have a similar culture to the British, but that does not make Americans part of Europe. Nor can Turkey’s culture move their land outside of Europe.
The modern Döner was indeed invented in Berlin. e.g. check Wikipedia
The modern sandwich variant of döner kebab originated and was popularized in 1970s West Berlin by Turkish immigrants. This was recognized by the Berlin-based Association of Turkish Doner Manufacturers in Europe in 2011.
You should start with the first paragraph of that same wikipedia page to see the Döner Kebab being originated in Turkey, going back to 1800s.
Many food types have regional and personal or family variants, but no one calls taco prepared in Europe with different ingredients oroginated in Europe. Notably, the same wikipedia mentions the Arab variant is called Shawarma, which is a more culture-respecting approach than whatever this article does.
The original Turkish Döner Kebab comes on a plate, not in pide or dürüm, nor would Turks ever really entertain the idea of putting Tsatsiki or any sauce on meat, and you’ll also be hard-pressed to see them eat cabbage.
Meanwhile you’ll be hard-pressed to see Germans eat meat without sauce, and various forms of cabbage-containing salad are very popular.
The Döner in its German form is Turkish-German fusion food. It could not have occurred without two culinary traditions meeting. Heck, the name isn’t even grammatical in Turkish. The meat, both style and preparation and spices, is 100% Turkish, the bread is Turkish-inspired but underwent German bread engineering, the rest is either native German or previous imports: It really is Tsatsiki, not Cacık. No dill, no mint, and no water. If you want diluted yoghurt you can have Ayran.
If you nowadays see German-style Döner in Turkey then that’s because the idea has been re-imported.
Döner “mit alles und ohne scharf” is the best kind of integration, and has been invented in Germany (by a Turkish chef).
Do I bring a pizza home and add meat cooked in Turkish styles and call pizza a Turkish cuisine?
No, but lots of people will argue that modern pizza is a US invention due in large part to the cultural aspects attached to it which differ from the Italian version of the dish. Most places in the world, if you just order pizza blindly, you will get an American slice. You have to specifically look around for Italian style pies, and they are not nearly as ubiquitous.
It’s still too cheap
