I have always been a fast learner. I like to think of this as a blessing, but like many things in life, it comes with a curse: I only like to learn things that genuinely interest me. Over the years, this has led me to all sorts of things like Arduino programming, 3D design, skateboarding, playing instruments, photography. Looking back, there is a clear pattern: I invest time in something if I believe it will help me have fun later. Very pragmatic.
In my school years, I was a promising student, but not a particularly disciplined one. I would often finish coursebooks early just to skip classes. There were only two subjects I truly cared about: Turkish Grammar and English. They were rewarding in a very specific way. I was learning how language worked, and I could immediately use that knowledge to meet people and make friends.
I have not had any English (or any foreign language) education until I was at 4th grade, and by the time I was at 7th grade, I could speak decent English already. One of my favorite activities was to just play any random game like Growtopia or Minecraft, not for the sake of the game, but for the chance of meeting somebody cool through Skype (I feel old) or Discord. As some of you may know form my post titled “Mychaela: Somebody that I used to know“, I was also a huge fan of the website penpalworld.com. I would often visit the website and pull off all-nighters to meet people from the US due to the time zone differences.
Regardless of who I was talking to, the conversation would often drift toward cultural quirks. An Italian would tell me about hand gestures, a Farsi speaker about music, and a French person about wine. Being the curious person I am, I loved these conversations.
One of the topics that came up most often when talking about culture was, unsurprisingly, food. I love food, and I loved learning about it. But while I enjoyed hearing about different types of pasta, noodles, biryani, or masala, I was always more curious about what people knew about Turkish food. The answer was almost always the same:
Döner Kebab.
Ironically, Döner is not even in my personal top ten when it comes to Turkish food. Not because it is bad (it isn’t, give it a try at your local Döner shop) but because it is simply not what I think of when I think of Turkish cuisine. Döner is famous largely because it works very well as fast food. It is portable, cheap, filling, and easy to reproduce. Its global success has more to do with practicality than with representing the depth or diversity of Turkish cooking.
(A small sidenote: “Döner Kebab” is something of a misnomer. “Kebap” is an umbrella term in Turkish, used for a wide range of meat-based dishes that often have very little to do with one another. Adana kebap, for instance, is minced meat grilled on a skewer, while something like İslim kebabı is slow-cooked, wrapped, and prepared in an entirely different way. Grouping all of these under the same label says more about how the word travels than about how the food actually works. The word “Döner” literally means “It turns” and no-one in Türkiye call it “Döner Kebab”, it is simply Döner over here.)
One of the questions that I often get from newly met friends was whether if Döner was a German or a Turkish dish. (Maybe it has something to do with the shared Umlaut on the “Ö”)
Turkey is a culinary heaven. It is home to many different people groups, cultures, and their own takes on food. In the Balkans we have sarma and dolma, in the east Arabic-influenced dishes, on the eastern borders spice-rich Kurdish meat cuisine, and on the Black Sea coast various Laz dishes. Multiculturalism has never been so tasty.
However, with all this multicultural cuisine, I think we also have a rather nasty habit: we like to call everything ours. Baklava is often presented as exclusively Turkish, despite its long and clearly shared history across Arabic- and Persian-speaking regions. Dolma and sarma are treated as national symbols, even though the very words travel across languages. Lahmacun comes from lahm and ʿajin, meaning meat and dough in Arabic, yet it somehow becomes a purely Turkish invention in popular discourse. With western neighbours, Greeks, we often get into lenghty arguments over wether the watery yoghurt thing with cucumbers in it is Cacık or Tzatziki. None of this makes the food less delicious, but it does reveal something uncomfortable about how eager we are to draw borders around recipes. Maybe more Middle European readers can think of this as how sausage is claimed by the Germans, the Poles and the Czechs… Multiplied by 100.
One may argue that this is about preserving food culture. Food conservatism, perhaps. But I like to think of food as a continuum, shared by many cultures. If food were ever owned by a single people, empires would not exist. The Ottoman Empire is probably one of the clearest examples of how food spreads not through borders, but through people. Soldiers, traders, bureaucrats, cooks, and families moved constantly across the empire, from the Balkans to the Levant, from Anatolia to North Africa. Along with them traveled spices, techniques, ingredients, and habits. A dish cooked in Damascus would slowly mutate by the time it reached Sarajevo, not because anyone planned it that way, but because food adapts to whoever cooks it. What we now call “national cuisine” is often just a very late snapshot of a much longer process. I much prefer the term “regional cuisine” because of that.
This is where food stops being just culture and starts becoming ideology.
A couple of years ago, Germany wanted to trademark Döner. Which I found hilarious. Not because of some nationalistic value on my part, but because the idea itself is absurd. Trademarking and gatekeeping food is stupid.
Döner, as we know it today, does come from Anatolia, and that distinction matters. Rotating meat on a stick is not a particularly difficult idea to come up with, and variations of it have existed in the Arabic-speaking world for a very long time, most famously in the form of shawarma. The technique itself likely emerged in multiple places independently. What we can trace more clearly, however, is how Turks had been cooking rotating meat long before Döner became vertical. During the Migration Period, when Turkic peoples moved from Central Asia into Anatolia, horizontal rotating meat was already part of their culinary repertoire. We can still see this today in Erzurum’s cağ kebabı.
As this technique moved westward and adapted to urban life, the rotation gradually shifted from horizontal to vertical. What emerged in late Ottoman cities was Döner in the form we recognize today. Not an invention out of nowhere, but a transformation. No flags, no identity; just meat, fire, and some gravity. Like most good food, it existed because it simply just worked.
At the same time, pretending that Döner in Türkiye and Döner in Berlin are the same thing is simply dishonest. Berlin Döner is a product of migration. It is the result of Turkish workers (Gastarbeiter) adapting their food to a new city, new tastes, new bread, new sauces. I want to clarify that it is not a corruption of the original, but a continuation of it. If anything, Berlin Döner proves my point: food does not stay still. It responds to context. Plus, it is very very tasty, especially if you are into more saucey, spicy food.
Trying to trademark it is like trying to trademark an accent, ESPECIALLY when the accent itself was shaped by migration.
Germany (and any state for that matter) wanting to trademark Döner is not really about protecting food. It is about stabilizing meaning. It is about fixing something that is inherently mobile, hybrid, and alive, and turning it into a manageable symbol. A nation wants a dish the same way it wants an official language: clearly defined, legally protected, and preferably uncontested. However, this example does not mean Germany is in the wrong here. Us Turks are just as culpable simply because we are not doing anyhing different. It is not a coincidence that almost every nation does this.
This is where food ideology comes in, borrowing the idea from how we talk about language ideology. Just like languages are standardized, regulated, and tied to nation building, food is increasingly treated the same way. Think Humboldt’s Volksgeist: the idea that a nation must have a coherent spirit, a unified voice, a shared culture. Language policy decides which language counts as “proper.” Food policy decides which dish counts as “authentic.”
Maybe a counter-argument to this could be that if we do not trademark food, we will lose its history. No, we will not. Documentation is more than enough, and food history is a brilliant subfield of history.
I doubt before the “nation building” craze after the French Revolution any Armenian, Greek or Turk living in İstanbul cared all that much about whether a dish belonged to one or the other. Add a bloody war, numerous massacres, and you get to where we are today.
…and the real irony is that Döner became what it is precisely because it was never owned by anyone.
29/12/25
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