The most popular fast food in Germany is not bratwurst, currywurst or burgers. The street food par excellence is the kebab, or döner, as it is known in German: thin strips of roasted meat accompanied by salad and a generous amount of sauce in a pita bread. The meat rolls that rotate on themselves while being roasted on a vertical grill are an iconic image of German cities. So when inflation began to soar, and the traditionally cheap kebab became less cheap, many people threw their hands up in horror. But how can a döner cost that much? asked incredulously the customers of a Frankfurt restaurant that went viral when it raised the price to 10 euros. “The döner 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 favourite food of students – the Technical University of Berlin has just opened a kebab shop on campus – and of the working classes for decades, in just a year and a half it has gone from costing four or five euros 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, who speaks to EL PAÍS in his office at the NGO he currently runs, Schools without Racism. It was Turkish immigrants who, if not invented, then popularised this dish in the 1970s, of which some 550 tonnes of meat are sold in around 18,000 shops across the country. Neither McDonald's nor any other food franchise even comes close to matching the turnover of the kebab industry. Most of them are small family businesses and many were founded after the oil crisis of 1973, when workers of Turkish origin who had arrived from 1961 onwards to the factories and mines of a rapidly developing and labour-hungry Germany lost their jobs. “They were gastobeiter [literalmente, trabajadores invitados] «They were supposed to leave, 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
Whereas years ago the number of hours worked to buy a kilo of pork or a beer was measured, today the index is the kebab, explains Seidel. That is why the inflationary shock 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 neighbourhood where the Turkish community has traditionally lived – calling for a “stop to the price of doner”. Average inflation in Germany was 8% last year, the highest level in the post-war history of the country. 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. In reality, says Seidel, the kebab was too cheap. Its low cost was based on long, poorly paid hours of work – the owners are often the same people who handle the long knives that cut the meat – and on very tight margins. “With the war, the price of all raw materials shot up, and you have to take into account that grills use a lot of gas,” he says. So even if Germany manages to contain inflation, the kebab is unlikely to return to the satiating and extremely cheap fast food it once was. Here you can check the latest Letters from the correspondentFollow all the information from Economy and Business on Facebook and Twitter. Twitteror in our weekly newsletter