Turkey wants to regulate Germany's beloved döner kebab street food

BERLIN (AP) — Beef and chicken glisten as they rotate slowly on vertical spits before they are carved off in razor-thin strips. Two cooks slide from a sizzling griddle to a warm toaster in a practiced dance. Mounds of fresh tomatoes, cabbage and red onions shine in a colorful tableau.

The scene at Kebap With Attitude in Berlin’s trendy Mitte neighborhood is typical of any street-side stand or restaurant where cooks pile the ingredients into pita bread to create the city’s beloved döner kebab.

But the snack's status could be in jeopardy if the European Commission approves a bid by Turkey to regulate what can legally take the döner kebab name.

In the balance is an industry that generates annual sales of roughly 2.3 billion euros (nearly $2.6 billion) in Germany alone, and 3.5 billion euros (nearly $3.9 billion) across Europe, according to the Berlin-based Association of Turkish Döner Producers in Europe.

“From the government to the streets, everyone is eating döner kebab,” Deniz Buchholz, the owner of Kebap With Attitude, said as waiters ferried steaming orders from the kitchen to hungry lunchtime customers on a rainy Monday afternoon.

The word “döner” is derived from the Turkish verb “dönmek,” which means “to turn.” The meat is grilled for hours on a spit and sliced off when the meat becomes crisp and brown. In Turkey, the dish originally was made of lamb and sold only on a plate. But in the 1970s, Turkish immigrants in Berlin opted to serve it in a pita and tweak the recipe to make it special for Berliners.

“They realized that the Germans like everything in the bread,” said Buchholz, who was raised in Berlin and has Turkish roots. “And then they said, ‘OK, let’s put this dish into a bread’ and this is how it came to döner kebab Berlin-style.”

In April, Turkey applied to have döner kebab protected under a status called “traditional specialty guaranteed.” It’s below the vaunted “protected designation of origin” that applies to geographic region-specific products, like Champagne from its eponymous region in France, but could still impact kebab-shop owners, their individual recipes and their customers throughout Germany.

Under Turkey’s proposal, beef would be required to come from cattle that is at least 16 months old. It would be marinated with specific amounts of animal fat, yogurt or milk, onion, salt, and thyme, as well as black, red and white peppers. The final product be sliced off the vertical spit into pieces that are 3 to 5 millimeters (0.1 to 0.2 inches) thick. Chicken would be similarly regulated.

The European Commission must decide by Sept. 24 whether 11 objections to the application, including from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, have merit. If they do, Germany and Turkey will have up to six months to hammer out a compromise. The European Commission has the final say.

“We have taken note of the application from Turkey with some astonishment,” Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“The kebab is part of Germany, and the diversity of its preparation methods reflects the diversity of our country — this must be preserved. In the interests of the many fans in Germany, we are committed to ensuring that the doner kebab can remain as it is prepared and eaten here," the ministry said.

It appears that vegetables, turkey and some veal kebabs — all of which are popular in Germany — would no longer be allowed under Turkey's application because it does not specifically mention them, causing confusion in the German food industry.

“The kebab belongs to Germany. Everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves how it is prepared and eaten here. There’s no need for guidelines from Ankara,” Cem Özdemir, Germany’s federal food and agriculture minister who also has Turkish roots, wrote on social platform X.

Buchholz of Kebap With Attitude said he isn’t worried about possible regulations.

Although he said it might be a way to keep the quality high for the traditional döner kebab — he believes it has lapsed in some places — he added that shop owners might have to harness Berlin’s legacy of creative solutions to keep their expanded menus.

“We will go the Berlin way and we’ll find a solution to name it different,” he said, like calling it a “veggie sandwich.”

Döner kebab impacts the political sphere, too. Anger over kebab costs that have risen into the double-digits led the Die Linke, the Left party, to ask German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for a “price break” that would have subsidized the street food and set a maximum price for customers. Scholz declined, but took to social media to explain that increasing food costs come in part from soaring energy costs — which are fueled by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

And German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier engaged in “döner diplomacy” when he brought a third-generation kebab-shop owner, as well as a full skewer of meat, to Turkey in April. The trip was the first official visit there by a German president in a decade, even as Turkey’s populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is seen as having increasingly authoritarian instincts. Erdogan's reputation has made some Turkish citizens who own kebab shops in Germany fearful of speaking out against the proposed regulations for fear of facing reprisals when they go home.

In its objection, the German Hotel and Restaurant Association wrote that Turkey’s proposals differ from typical German preparations for döner, and that the regulations could lead to economic problems for kebab shops — as well as potential legal challenges.

The German döner kebab economy should not be held to Turkish rules, the association said in a statement.

“The diversity of the kebab must be preserved,” the association said.

People eat doner in the outdoor area of a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

People are seen through the window of a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

People eat doner in the outdoor area of a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Turkish doner cooks prepare doner kebabs for customers in a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Turkish doner cooks prepare doner kebabs for customers in a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

A doner chef prepares doner kebabs for customers in a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Doner chef Hvesley Silva cuts doner kebab in a doner kebab restaurant in Berlin, Germany, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

People stand in the line to buy doner kebab in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

People stand in the line to buy doner kebab while the Turkish cook prepares the doner kebabs, in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

The small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline to Laurie Dove in 1993. Pregnant with her first baby in a house beyond any town in rural Kansas, Dove used the little black device to keep in touch with her husband as he delivered medical supplies. He carried one, too. They had a code.

“If I really needed something I would text ‘9-1-1.’ That meant anything from, ‘I’m going to labor right now’ to ‘I really need to get ahold of you,’” she recalls. “It was our version of texting. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers. It was important.”

Beepers and all they symbolized — connection to each other or, in the 1980s, to drugs — went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones wiped them from popular culture. They resurfaced in tragic form Tuesday when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multiday attack as Israel declared a new phase of its war on Hezbollah.

In many photos, blood marks the spot where pagers tend to be clipped — to a belt, in a pocket, near a hand — in graphic reminders of just how intimately people still hold those devices and the links — or vulnerability — they enable.

Then as now — albeit in far smaller numbers — pagers are used precisely because they are old school. They run on batteries and radio waves, making them impervious to dead zones without WiFi, basements without cell service, hackings and catastrophic network collapses such as those during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Some medical professionals and emergency workers prefer pagers to cell phones or use the devices in combination. They're handy for workers in remote locations, such as oil rigs and mines. Crowded restaurants use them, too, handing patrons blinking, hockey puck-like contraptions that vibrate when your table is ready.

To those who distrust data collection, pagers are appealing because they have no way to track users.

“A mobile phone at the end of the day is like a computer that you’re carrying around, and a pager has got a fraction of that complexity,” said Bharat Mistry, the UK’s technical director for Trend Micro, a cybersecurity software company. “Nowadays it’s used by people who want to maintain their privacy ... You don’t want to be tracked but you do want to be contactable.”

From the start, people have been ambivalent about pagers and the irksome feeling of being summoned when it's convenient for someone else.

Inventor Al Gross, regarded by some as the “founding father” of wireless communication, patented the pager in 1949 intending to make it available to doctors. But they balked, he said, at the prospect of being on-call 24/7.

“The doctors wanted to have nothing to do with it because it would disturb their golf game or it would disturb the patient,” Gross said in a video made when he received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. “So it wasn't a success, as I thought it would be when it was first introduced. But that changed later.”

By the 1980s, millions of Americans used pagers, according to reports at the time. The devices were status symbols — belt-clipped signals that a wearer was important enough to be, in effect, on call at a moment's notice. Doctors, lawyers, movie stars and journalists wore them through the 1990s. In 1989, Sir Mix-a-Lot wrote a song about them, rapping: “Beep diddy beep, will I call you maybe.”

By then, pagers also had become associated with drug dealers and schools were cracking down. More than 50 school districts, from San Diego to Syracuse, New York, banned their use in schools, saying they hampered the fight to control drug abuse among teenagers, The New York Times reported in 1988. Michigan prohibited the devices' use in schools statewide.

"How can we expect students to ‘just say no to drugs’ when we allow them to wear the most dominant symbol of the drug trade on their belts,″ James Fleming, associate superintendent for the Dade County Public Schools in Florida, was quoted as saying.

By the mid-90s, there were more than 60 million beepers in use, according to Spok, a communications company.

Dove, who went on to serve as the mayor of Valley Center, Kansas, and become an author, says she and her family use cell phones now. But that means accepting the risk of identity theft. In some ways, she fondly recalls the simplicity of pagers.

“I do worry about that," she says. “But that risk just feels like a part of life now.”

The number of pagers globally is hard to come by. But more than 80% of Spok’s paging business deals with healthcare, with about 750,000 subscribers across large hospital systems, according to Vincent Kelly, CEO of the company.

“When there’s an emergency, their phones don’t always work,” Kelly said, adding that pager signals are often stronger than cell phone signals in hospitals with thick walls or concrete basements. Cell networks are “not engineered to handle every single subscriber trying to call at the same time or send a message at the same time.”

Members of Iran-backed Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border have used pagers to communicate for years. In February, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, directed Hezbollah members to ditch their cell phones in an effort to dodge what’s believed to be Israel’s sophisticated surveillance on Lebanon’s mobile phone networks.

Tuesday’s attack appeared to be a complex Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah. But the widespread use of pagers in Lebanon meant the detonations cost an enormous number of civilian casualties. They exploded in a moment across the landscape of everyday life — including homes, cars, grocery stores and cafes.

Kelly says first responders and large manufacturers also use pagers. The manufacturers have employees use the devices on factory floors to prevent them from taking photos.

Most medical personnel use combinations of pagers, chat rooms, messaging and other services to communicate with patients without revealing home numbers — an effort to be truly off-duty when they’re not working.

Dr. Christopher Peabody, an emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital, uses pagers every day — albeit grudgingly. “We’re on a crusade to get rid of pagers, but we’re failing miserably,” said Peabody, who is also director of the UCSF Acute Care Innovation Center.

Peabody said he and others at the hospital tested a new system and “the pager won": The doctors stopped answering the two-way text messages and would only respond to pagers.

In some ways, Peabody understands the resistance. Pagers provide a certain autonomy. In contrast, two-way communication carries the expectation to immediately answer and could provide an avenue for follow-up questions.

The problem, Peabody said, is that paging is one-way communication and providers can’t communicate back and forth through the paging system. The technology, he said, is inefficient. And paging systems are not necessarily secure, a critical issue in an industry that must keep patient information private.

“This has been a culture of medicine for many, many years,” he said, “and the pager is here to stay, most likely.”

Parvini reported from Los Angeles.

An ambulance carrying wounded people whose handheld pager exploded, arrive at the American University hospital in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

FILE - Three women hold the pager 'Quix' as they present it at CeBIT '97 in Hannover, Germany, Tuesday March 18, 1997. The beep-beep-beep of a small black box on your belt or in your pocket was something of a status symbol decades before the smartphone wiped it from popular culture. (AP Photo/Fabian Bimmer, File)