But many companies can give no such assurances. Since Germany's health minister declared a few days ago that she would no longer be eating sausage, the public has learned that all kinds of wurst thought to be made of pork actually contain small quantities of recovered meat from other animals. The result is severe wurst angst. Ahmet should be doing a roaring trade. He runs another snack bar, on the other side of the street, which serves doner kebabs.
Berlin has Germany's biggest Turkish community.
There is scarcely a thoroughfare of any consequence without a snack bar with a fat column of slowly broiling meat near the entrance. The doner kebab has become almost as typical of Berlin as curry wurst, and many of the city's Turkish immigrants depend for their livelihood on preparing, delivering, cooking and selling doner. Which is how, in Berlin, the BSE crisis has acquired an important ethnic dimension, for doners are traditionally made of veal. It was mid-afternoon, yet the doner had scarcely been touched. Ahmet came to Germany in 1979.