Gastronomic Fascism.

This week, Alternative for Germany won its first regional government since the postwar era. In the same news cycle, a documentary carried the complaints of Germans who felt their street no longer smelled of Sauerbraten but of döner: too many kebab stands, they said, and too little of their own cooking. The complaint sounds culinary. It is not. It is a complaint about power, dressed up as gastric nostalgia, and it deserves to be taken apart with the same seriousness one would apply to any other argument for purity. Start with an uncomfortable fact for anyone longing for a monochrome Germany: the döner kebab, as eaten in Berlin, Cologne, or Frankfurt, is not an import lifted intact from Anatolia. It is a Berlin invention, credited to Turkish immigrants in the 1970s who adapted the plated kebab to the German baguette so it could be sold quickly to workers with little time for lunch. The döner, in other words, did not invade German cuisine. It was born from it, or at least from its encounter with another. Mistaking that story of hybridity for a story of replacement is the first error, and it is not an innocent one.

The second error runs deeper, and it is the one this piece should really concern itself with. When someone says "there's no German food left, it's all kebab now," they are not describing the market. They are inventing it. In any German city, Eisbein is still on the menu, Schweinshaxe still comes out crackling, Kasseler is still smoked to order. No one has banned them. What has happened is that, given a free choice, a considerable share of the population, German or not, prefers the döner. It does not do so because anyone forces it to, nor does it give up the Eisbein because anyone forbids it: it does so because it is a consumer, not the hostage of an inherited menu. That is not the disappearance of a culture. It is a culture responding to the decisions of its own consumers, German and non-German alike, with its stomach and its wallet, not by decree.

And here lies the line separating a legitimate complaint from a political imposture: one may reasonably mourn that a family recipe is cooked less and less often at home. What one cannot do, without committing a small moral atrocity, is translate that private nostalgia into a public demand that others eat what one wishes to see them eat. That is where the gastronomic argument stops being gastronomic and becomes what it actually is: a way of telling one's neighbor what he has the right to put on his plate, and by extension, who has the right to open a business on the corner. Let us call it by its name: accepting that someone else gets to decide which options we may put on the table is not preserving a culture. It is gastronomic fascism.

It is worth being precise about what is actually at stake. No state has forced anyone to stop cooking Rouladen on Sundays. What has changed is supply, and supply changes because demand changes, and demand changes because people, free of coercion, prefer things different from what their grandparents preferred. That is not decline. It is simply what happens when people are allowed to choose. The alternative, the one hinted at by those complaining about the smell of spices on their street, is a centrally managed gastronomic economy: quotas on restaurants by origin, licenses conditioned on the nationality of the recipe, a national menu imposed from above in the name of authenticity. There is no version of that idea that does not eventually end up deciding not only what can be sold on that street, but who is allowed to live there.

Of all a culture's expressions, cuisine tolerates border patrol the least, because it has always been the most migratory of all. Pasta reached Italy through trade, the potato reached Germany from the Americas, pepper reached all of Europe along routes no European controlled. Asking a national cuisine to stand still in time, to stop absorbing what arrives, is asking it to stop being what it has always been: a living organism, not a museum. Whoever genuinely wants to defend the Eisbein does not need to shut down the kebab stand on the corner. He simply needs his Eisbein to keep being better. That, too, is decided by the consumers, not by fear.