Döner Degree

When it comes to the Culinary Oscars, the award for the most futile act within the service industry will be one of the most hard-fought categories on that most glittering of prize nights.

Challenging for the Golden Spatula will be the Dog and Duck's "All-You-Can-Drink and French Existentialist Poetry Reading" evening, the Starlight Restaurant's five course supermodel buffet and PETA's George Foreman Grill and Bush Meat Extravaganza.

However, the prize for the food-related initiative most likely to be ignored despite its best efforts is likely to go to the certificate in "Meat Processing with Döner Kebab Production Specialization" at Hamburg's Vocational School for Gastronomy and Nutrition.

While encouraging young people to get a start in life with a vocational qualification is a worthy cause, one will have to search high and low to find a pursuit that is less appreciated and undervalued by the customer in the fast food sector than the high-quality preparation and presentation of a kebab.

Planning for the future

The reasons for starting this course are, of course, honorable -- and not just in terms of raising the standard of the döner-labeled concoction called a kebab by some snack stands.

The training scheme is part of an initiative in Germany to encourage young people with immigrant backgrounds to get professional training and help improve their chances of employment in a country where unemployment stands at under over 4 million.

"Mainly people with migrant backgrounds and Turkish people work in (the kebab) business but few have qualifications," Kazim Abaci, head of Companies Without Borders, a German association designed to promote integration in the workplace, told Reuters. "We want to give those people a better chance and make them re-employable."

A standing ovation for that philosophy would naturally be forthcoming if it was not for the fact that those trainees are going to be asking themselves every day of their working lives why they even bothered in the first place for all the thanks they get.

Serving an ungrateful clientele

Imagine the scene: After successfully completing the course and proudly hanging his certificate on the wall, Murat is qualified to lovingly prepare the cleanest, tastiest and most aesthetically pleasing kebab on the planet.

His lamb is of the finest cut, his salad the freshest, his pita bread the most aromatic -- a fast food masterpiece free of germs and scandal. It is a labor of love, a meaty paradise in an edible pocket of goodness. It is both the culmination of and the reward for all those hours slaving over health and safety regulations and raw animal flesh.

Enter Udo and friends at 3 o'clock in the morning to make the scene rather less appealing. Belching stale beer fumes and soccer chants over the counter, Udo and his mates snatch Murat's exquisite Döners from the hands that created them; spilling half on the pavement outside, wolfing most of it without the contents even touching the sides and then puking the rest into the shopping basket of a nearby bicycle.

For students enrolled in the program the immeasurable joy of achieving vocational qualification and running a worthwhile and beneficial business await.