The kebab that makes (and unmakes) Europe

At first glance, it seems like a paradox. On the Guardian, Deborah Cole recounts that the Germany rivals, against the Turkey, the döner kebab as Germany's national heritage. 

This stance follows Ankara's request last April for this dish to be recognized as a traditional specialty -- "guaranteed traditional speciality"-- of the country, on the same footing as jamónserrano for the Spain or pizza for the Italy. 

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If the Turkish request is accepted, the price of döner would rise further due to the specifications introduced (from the thickness of the meat cut, to the type of spices, to the cut). 

In Germany, where kebab sales account for 7 billion euros a year and where an estimate 1.3 billion kebabs are consumed annually, the price of this dish is a hallmark of the caravan (which has risen from about 4 euros to about 10 in some cities). So much so that the Die Linke (left) party had proposed to lower the price of kebab to 4.90 euros. 

And it's not just about Germany, because the kebab is a "popular" dish, with all the contradictions and prejudices that this adjective drags with it. Popular because it is cheap, but also popular because it is found in neighborhoods where low-income people live. Popular also because it is associated, in some cases, with so-called "junk food." Food that is "cheap," and unpretentious, but fills the belly. 

In 2012, the Los Angeles Times defined the kebab "Turkish migrants' gift to Germany," and while the first reflex is to say "so it's a Turkish dish," the reality is a more complex recipe. 

On the Tageszeitung (a newspaper, I remind you, progressive and left-wing) the journalist Eberhard Seidel reads the Turkish request as an "attempt to reorganize the kebab world, which for decades has been developed by Turkish-German producers." It is, in his view, an "authoritarian project, setting standards from above, in Turkey, with nationalistic ideas of purity and ownership claims." 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, stealing and learning from each other. The result is the trinity: kebabs, gyros and shawarma."

The Turkish demand starts from the initiative of the International Doner Federation (UDOFED), founded in 2019 by Mehmet Mercan (died 2023) who was also provincial chairman of the far-right Büyük Birlik Partisi (Party of Great Unity, BBP), report Christophe Bourdoiseau on Libération. 

"When Turkish workers brought döner kebab to Germany, they took a further step in cross-cultural tolerance. They took something they knew from Turkey and created something completely new: the German döner," Seidel continues, and because of this, "the German döner is a democratic product. Millions of people contributed to its current form in a participatory process. The German döner is exactly what people want it to be. That's why it is pop, that's why it is a global success, that's why it is an export success from Germany and not from Turkey," continues  Seidel.

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In Germany, a 1989 law, the "Berliner Verkehrsauffassung für das Fleischerzeugnis Döner Kebap", regulates products that can, or cannot, be called kebabs. 

During Frank Walter Steinmeier's recent visit to Turkey (April 2024), the German president  brought along restaurateur Arif Keles and a 60-kilogram kebab, precisely to celebrate "100 years of diplomatic relations" and dilute the discrepancies between the two countries. 

In Europe, kebabs are part of the common food landscape. According to EuroNews, which quotes data from the European Association of Turkish Döner Producers (ATDID), which has represented the industry since 1996, the "döner" economy in Europe is worth 3.5  billion euros. And every day in Europe, according to the association, about 400 tons of döner kebabs are produced. 

And yet (or in spite of) the kebab (as a dish, restaurant, fast-food, and as a concept) arouses discord, even deep-seated discord, bringing together racism, traditions, and norms, and producing a low-intensity war over "traditional food" and "our traditions" that has swept across Europe over the past decade. 

Kebab vs. "Judeo-Christian" tradition

In July 2024 several European media outlets -- France24, SkyNews, RFI, The Times -- covered the case of the Austrican village of Pfösing, Lower Austria, where restaurants serving "traditional" food have been able to benefit from what has been called the "schnitzel bonus".  In enforcement from 2023, this is a kind of economic aid aimed at "traditional" businesses, which are to be protected as "meeting places" to safeguard local heritage. 

Behind the romanticism of this vision of the table and the local community, there is a right-wing junta (coalition of popular conservatives from the Övp, with the far-right Fpö party) looking ahead to the Sept. 29 general election and cherishing the defense of the "Leitkultur," a concept from Germany, taken up especially on the right, that pits a sanctified form of the dominant culture (understood as the "local" and "legitimate" one) against a global and multifaceted culture that would threaten it. 

Let's go back a decade or so. 

Béziers, in southern France, the extreme right-wing mayor Robert Ménard wanted to ban kebab restaurants from the historic center as early as 2015, and this was to defend traditional "Judeo-Christian cuisine." All this 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 favorite dish of the French was cous-cous. 

The following year, in Padova (northeastern Italy) the then-Leghist (far right) mayor Massimo Bitonci proposed that restaurants in the historic center should be required to offer "at least 60 percent of the products" of local origin. 

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Since the 1990s, when these restaurants began to open outside the city as well, the kebab "is seen as an index of the visibility and presence of immigrant populations," explains a study by the Jean Jaurès Foundation. This association between a sandwich and a type of population "was promptly politicized and denounced 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 civilization and herald a form of 'great gastronomic replacement,'" referring to the racist and conspiracy theory that there is an Islamic plot to take over from the "original" European populations.

The list of examples would be long, it continues to this day and - I fear -  will continue tomorrow: in Forlì (northern Italy), in the historic center, at the end of August 2024 racist posters appeared on stores, especially kebabs. 

And we could trace it back to the war in the former Yugoslavia -- journalist Leonardo Bianchi explains it in this newsletter -- where "Remove Kebab" is a slogan, a song and all possible derivatives, used in a racist and anti-Islamic key. 

And the kebab becomes (also) "cool"

If the working classes eat the regular (or should we say "traditional"?) kebab, the urban middle classes eat a "healthy" kebab, made with "selected" (by whom?) and "locally sourced" products. A "gourmand" kebab, in short, as has already happened with pizza, cheap street food par excellence. 

The speaks about it Abraham Rivera in the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial reporting on the opening of a new eatery in the Spanish capital. The slogan? "Kebabs, pero bien" (Kebabs, but done right). In the article, journalist Sergio C. Fanjul, explains that kebabs are "traditionally" the food for "people [who] don't have time to eat well, who often don't even have the culture to know how to eat well [...] this kind of food abounds in the poorest neighborhoods."

And he reflects, "Taking kebabs and bringing them to wealthy neighborhoods is a bit like taking a 'ghetto' food and gentrifying it. [...] It also implies not going to those neighborhoods to have to eat it."

We talk about Madrid, but it is a phenomenon that affects many European cities. 

Because of the kebab, after all, it seems you can do anything with it. Reappropriation? Or just appropriation?  

In Lyon, southern France, the case of a kebab that becomes so "local" that the sandwich is made with pork-- instead of beef or mutton--  opportunity that a former candidate of the sovereignist and far-right Reconquête party, did not let slip to make controversy. 

In collaborazione con Display Europe, cofinanziato dall'Unione europea. I punti di vista e le opinioni espressi sono esclusivamente quelli dell'autore o degli autori e non riflettono necessariamente quelli dell'Ue o della Direzione Generale per le Reti di Comunicazione, i Contenuti e la Tecnologia. Né l'Unione europea né l'autorità che ha concesso il finanziamento possono essere ritenute responsabili.