At first glance, it seems like a paradox. In The Guardian, Deborah Cole reports that Germany is claiming, against Turkey, that the döner kebab is part of Germany’s national heritage.
This follows Ankara’s request last April for the dish to be recognised as a national “guaranteed traditional speciality”, like jamón serrano in Spain or pizza in Italy.
If the Turkish request were to be accepted, the price of the döner would rise due to the new specifications (from the thickness of the cut of meat to the type of spices).
In Germany, where kebab sales account for 7 billion euro a year, and where an estimated 1.3 billion kebabs are consumed annually, the price of this dish is a benchmark of the cost of living (rising from around 4 euro to around 10 in some cities). The left-wing party Die Linke even proposed to fix the price of kebabs at 4.90 euro.
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And it’s not just Germany. The kebab is a “popular” dish, with all the contradictions and prejudices that this adjective entails. Popular because it is cheap, but also popular because it is found in low-income neighbourhoods, and popular because it is often classified as “junk food”: food that is “cheap” and unpretentious, but fills the belly.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Times called the kebab “the Turkish immigrant’s gift to Germany”, and while the first reflex is to say “it’s a Turkish dish”, the reality is a more complicated recipe.
In the Tageszeitung (a progressive, left-wing newspaper), journalist Eberhard Seidel reads the Turkish request as an “attempt to reorganise the kebab world, which for decades has been driven by Turkish-German producers”. It is, in his opinion, an “authoritarian project, setting standards from above, in Turkey, with nationalistic ideas of purity and ownership”. According to Seidel, Ankara’s demand “ignores the fact that the kebab is not a Turkish invention, but a product of the Ottoman empire, in which Turks, Greeks, Albanians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds and Arabs looked into each other’s pots, and stole and learned from each other. The result is the trinity of kebabs, gyros and shawarma”.
The Turkish request began as an initiative of the International Doner Federation (UDOFED), founded in 2019 by Mehmet Mercan (died 2023), who was also provincial president of the far-right party Büyük Birlik Partisi (Great Unity Party, BBP), as Christophe Bourdoiseau reports in Libération.
‘When Turkish workers brought the döner kebab to Germany, they took a further step towards cross-cultural tolerance. They took something they knew from Turkey, and created something completely new: the German döner,” Seidel continues. In a participatory process, Millions of people contributed to the dish’s current form. The German döner is exactly what people want it to be. That is why it is pop, that is why it is a global success, and that is why it is a smash hit export from Germany and not from Turkey,” Seidel continues.
In Germany, a law from 1989, the “Berliner Verkehrsauffassung für das Fleischerzeugnis Döner Kebap”, regulates which products can and cannot be called kebabs.
During Frank Walter Steinmeier’s recent visit to Turkey in April 2024, the German president brought along restaurateur Arif Keles and a 60kg kebab, to celebrate “100 years of diplomatic relations”, and to ease tensions between the two countries.
In Europe, the kebab is part of the shared food landscape. According to EuroNews, citing data from the European Association of Turkish Döner Producers (ATDID), which has represented the sector since 1996, the döner economy in Europe is worth 3.5 billion euro. According to the association, around 400 tonnes of döner kebab are produced in Europe every day.
Whether despite or because of this popularity, the kebab (as a dish, restaurant, fast food, and as a concept) is the subject of discord, even deep discord, which brings together racism, traditions and social norms, and fuels a low-intensity war for “traditional food” and “our traditions” that has swept across Europe over the past decade.
Kebab vs. “Judeo-Christian” tradition
In July 2024, several European news outlets – France24, SkyNews, RFI, The Times – reported on the case of the Austrian village of Pfösing in Lower Austria, where restaurants serving “traditional” food were able to benefit from what was called the “schnitzel bonus”. In force since 2023, this is a form of economic aid for “traditional” businesses, which are protected as “meeting places” to safeguard local heritage.
Behind the romanticism of this vision of the table and the local community is a coalition of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Övp) and the far-right Freedom Party (Fpö), which are looking ahead to the general elections on 29 September. This coalition seeks to defend the so-called “Leitkultur”, a concept that originated in Germany and has mostly been taken up by the right, which sets a sanctified form of the dominant culture (understood as “local” and “legitimate”) against a global and multiple culture that would threaten it.
Let’s take a trip back to about a decade ago.
In Béziers, in the south of France, the far-right mayor Robert Ménard wanted to ban kebab restaurants from the historic centre as early as 2015. This was an effort to defend traditional “Judeo-Christian” cuisine, in a country where, in 2012, the kebab was the third most consumed dish for lunch (after the sandwich and the hamburger), and where, until 2022, the favourite dish of the French was cous-cous.
Since the 1990s, when these restaurants began to open outside the city, the kebab has been “considered as an index of the visibility and presence of immigrant populations”, explains a study by the Jean Jaurès Foundation. This association of a dish with a specific population “was promptly politicised and attacked by the Front National (now Rassemblement National, far-right), whose candidates have been opposing these restaurants for years, claiming that they signal the decline of Judeo-Christian civilisation and herald a form of ‘great gastronomic replacement’, referring to the nativist theory that there is an Islamic plot to replace the original European populations”.
The list of examples is long, is still growing to this day, and – I fear – will continue growing tomorrow: in the historic centre of Forlì (northern Italy), racist posters appeared on shops, kebab restaurants in particular, at the end of August 2024.
Or we could go back to the war in former Yugoslavia. Journalist Leonardo Bianchi explains in his newsletter how “Remove Kebab” became a racist, anti-Islamic slogan, song and meme.
“Cool” kebabs
If the working classes eat the normal (or should we say “traditional”?) kebab, the urban middle classes eat a “healthy” kebab, made with “select” products (selected by whom?) and of “local origin”. A “gourmet” kebab, in short, just like the gourmet pizza: pricier versions of cheap street food par excellence.
Abraham Rivera discusses this phenomenon in the Spanish daily El Confidencial, where he reports on the opening of a new restaurant in the Spanish capital. The slogan? “Kebabs, pero bien” (“Kebabs, but good”). In the article, journalist Sergio C. Fanjul explains that kebabs are “traditionally” the food for “people [who] do not have time to eat well, who often do not even have the culture to know how to eat well […]. This type of food abounds in the poorest neighbourhoods”.
Fanjul continues: “Taking the kebab and bringing it to rich neighbourhoods is a bit like taking a ‘ghetto’ food and gentrifying it. […] It also implies not having to visit those neighbourhoods in order to eat it”.
This phenomenon can be seen in many other European cities besides Madrid.
After all, you can do just about anything with a kebab. Is it reappropriation, or plain and simple appropriation?
In Lyon, in the south of France, where there’s a kebab so “local” that it is made with pork – instead of beef or mutton – a former candidate of the sovereignist and far-right Reconquête Party did not miss the opportunity to stir controversy.
