KEBABBLE Putrid:
Meat scandal hits Turkish
import By Fazile Zahir
FETHIYE, Turkey - Miscarriages arouse
sympathy and interest in equal measure and are
frequently featured in women's magazines and
supplements as tragic human-interest stories. To
find one as the middle-page spread of German
newspaper Bild is unusual.
On the left
hand side is a mother, head downcast, gazing sadly
at the floral tributes sent for her
seven-month-old but miscarried baby, and on the
right hand side another picture, almost as large
as that of the grieving
woman, of a doner kebab. Katja B blames a doner
kebab - a Turkish dish consisting of spiced lamb
cooked on a spit and served in slices - for the
death of her baby, and the reason for the high
profile given to her story is that Germany is
currently gripped by a rotten-meat crisis.
The Turkish media are highly interested in
the story because of the effect on their
countrymen in Germany. The scandal broke when
health inspectors in Bavaria discovered a meat
wholesaler in Munich selling products that had
reached expiry four years previously. They
estimated that 110 tons of bad meat had been sold,
not only to local restaurants but also to eight
countries in the European Union, including
Denmark, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
They described the meat as putrid,
confiscated tons of it from distributors, and
raided several restaurants in central Munich. When
the German media ran the story they made editorial
decisions that seem highly questionable. As the
story of the bad meat was aired with the headlines
"Playing with our health, feeding us spoiled
meat", the television showed a doner kebab
spinning slowly on its axis.
This and the
Bild miscarriage story followed hot on the heels
of a another expose by health inspectors in
Frankfurt the week before. Decaying meat was found
again, and despite the fact that some of it was
pork, the local papers ran the story next to a
picture of a chef cutting strips off a doner. When
the 74-year-old German manager of the wholesale
butcher in Munich hanged himself, the story
catapulted into the arena of national politics.
Agriculture and Consumer Minister Horst
Seehofer accused regional authorities of
inadequate controls on food quality and challenged
the regions by stating that the central government
should control food monitoring. What the Turkish
papers are focusing on is the effect in Germany of
the negative and undeserved publicity on the
largely Turkish purveyors of doner kebabs.
Doner is now a national dish of Germany,
adopted as quickly and as successfully as chicken
korma in the United Kingdom. Every day 250-300
tons of doner meat is produced, and Germans
consume 800 million doner kebabs a year. Even the
smallest backwoods Dorf will have at least
one Turkish Imbiss (fast-food stand). Doner
sales are equivalent to 2 billion euros (US$2.56
billion) annually, more than McDonald's, Burger
King and Wienerwald combined. But since the news
of the spoiled meat was illustrated with pictures
of doner, sales have fallen by about 30%.
The Berlin Union of Doner Producers has
protested the negative portrayal, but despite the
fact that 11 newspapers sent representatives to
the union's press conference, the demands for
attention and rectification of the errors have
gone entirely unheeded. Instead, the German nation
has fallen over itself with commentators
suggesting that Germans have fallen victim to
their obsession with low-priced food.
Turkish guest workers introduced the doner
to Germany in the 1960s, but one man, Mehmet Aygun
of Hasur restaurant in Berlin, is credited with
turning this exotic specialty into the favored
Teutonic fast food. In Turkey, doner (the word
means "rotating" in Turkish) is served in
restaurants on rice with a sauce of melted butter
and paprika over it or sandwiched between half a
loaf of bread with onions (with no dressing) for
those on the go.
The fast-food format is
more common in Europe, where the meat is served in
a hot pita bread with salad and yogurt or chilli
sauce, all designed to appeal to Western tastes.
Doner has not limited its spread to Germany,
though. In Austria it is fast replacing local
Wurstelstande selling roasted sausages.
In the United Kingdom, it is seen as an
evening meal rather than lunch or breakfast food,
and because of the high South Asian population
often comes wrapped in a naan bread rather
than a pita. Doner is probably France's cheapest
fast food, and the meat used is beef rather than
mutton or lamb. Australians see doner as a healthy
alternative to KFC and McDonald's, but because of
the large numbers of Greek immigrants, the doner
is often called a souvlaki.
Doner kebabs
are just starting in Japan, where the salad is
replaced by shredded cabbage and the sauce is
mayonnaise rather than yogurt-based. The meat
sandwich is called a doneru kebabu.
While German newspapers continue to see
the issue chiefly as one of conflict between the
central government and the individual states, the
European version of Sabah newspaper has vowed to
continue its fight on behalf of the doner men of
Germany, calling its mission a "sacred campaign".
Hundreds of thousands of Turks work in the
catering industry in Germany, with more than
50,000 establishments selling doners. The smaller
vendors of this rotating dish are still reporting
that they have lost more than half their trade.
Let's hope that like the turning spit, fortunes
will revolve and doner will regain its lost
popularity.
Fazile Zahir is of
Turkish descent, born and brought up in London.
She moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been
writing full time since then.
