Hungry in Berlin

I’ve had it with Berlin’s long-running food frenzy, Green Week. This makes something like the eleventh one I’ve attended, and it’s the last. Year after year, the quality has declined, year after year countries have stopped attending, and finally the place is reduced to three things:

• Bratwurst/Salame
• Alcohol
• Pfanne

When it comes to hot food, nearly every European country there offers a sausage, a hunk of bread, and some mustard. Maybe they figure that’s all Germans understand, maybe it’s just a cheap alternative to offering something truly representative which the masses would just reject for its unfamiliarity, but it’s boring.

Of course, it’s not always bad: there’s nothing like a Danish hotdog, covered with thin slices of pickle, some ketchup, and those addictive crisp-fried onions. But down deep, it’s still a bratwurst, a fried sausage. The alternative, if you’re not cooking, is salame. You slice off a paper-thin piece, hold it on the edge of your knife, and wait til someone bites.

Alcohol was in full effect. If you can’t feed ‘em, offer ‘em a thimbleful of firewater (the Canadians even called it Feuerwasser — heaven knows what it actually was) for a couple of Euros. By the time Hungry In Berlin got there yesterday, Green Week had already had its first alcohol-related death, a young guy in his 20s with an astonishing 3.1 reading. Alcohol dulls the crowds and makes them aggressive. A huge trade fair filled with a crowd like that is no fun whatever.

I’ve commented on Pfanne before: a wok-like pan is put over heat, various glop is poured in, and the whole thing left to sit there for hours. They invariably taste of nothing but salt, have negligible nutritional value, and do nothing valuable except soak up some of the abovementioned alcohol.

It was astonishing to see how much had vanished, even since last year. Countries not represented at all: Japan, the U.S., Israel, New Zealand, Iran, and the entire continents of Central and South America. Then, there were the countries who’d cut back their presence to alcohol only: France, Ireland (a real tragedy: you used to be able to buy inexpensive sharp cheddar and top-notch steaks from the Irish), Spain.

Tunisia was there, but not selling olive oil. The woman shaking the Pfanne was working with the house brand from Plus. “You make the best olive oil in the world and you’re using German supermarket oil?” I asked her. She shrugged.

I scored my usual: some Barolo salame from a friendly Italian guy, some “Russian” mustard — incredibly hot — from the Latvians (although I discovered shortly thereafter that I’d bought my last batch from the Estonians), and a year’s supply of Cajun sausage from the Wattwurm Marktschreier, who doesn’t even know that his Knoblauchknacker are this close to what they use in Louisiana. But he also hits the big malls outside of Berlin on his rounds, and paying money to go see him is fading in its appeal when it means being exposed to huge crowds of drunken Germans and the demeaning stereotypes imposed on the foreigners who continue to attend this event.

I’ve been in a bad mood ever since I got back. It’s not worth it. Never again.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.