Currywurst Has a PR Problem

German food is almost entirely meat. Pork in every configuration, beef prepared with quiet seriousness, chicken doing its best. Vegetarians manage. Vegans suffer visibly. The dishes are heavy, filling, and completely indifferent to your approval—Schweinebraten, Currywurst, Käsespätzle, Weißwurst that by local tradition cannot be eaten after noon. There’s a confidence to it that borders on self-satisfaction.

And yet none of it traveled. Pizza is everywhere—you can get a decent slice in a provincial airport in a country that has no cultural relationship with Italy whatsoever. Sushi crossed every ocean. Chinese noodles reached places that had no reason to know what China was. But German cuisine stayed home, apparently comfortable with its own company. The Oktoberfest franchise exported beer and lederhosen to the world and forgot to bring the food along.

The YouTube channel HiHo, which has built a small industry out of filming children encountering unfamiliar foods, put a group of American kids in front of some of the classics. Schnitzel, sausage, cheese Spätzle—the reactions are what you’d expect and somehow still charming. There’s something in watching a person encounter a flavor they have no framework for, no memory attached to it yet. Whether any of them converted is another question entirely.