Mystery Solved: Germans are not eating as much "sausage" as I thought

Whenever I tell people that I am living in Germany they inevitably ask me how much beer and sausage I am eating. Presumably, that is all they are eating over here, while wearing lederhosen. While that is somewhat true- in Bavaria, I think the association of Germany with all things sausage is a little bit false.

Last week during a meeting with a German colleague we were discussing how great life/ food is in germany and she actually said this: (in the most stereotypical german accent you can imagine)
Most ov oll, I luf see zsausagez.

And then it dawned on me. She was talking about 'würst' which is the german word for sausage, but roughly covers about 29848329900 varieties of meats, sausages, spreads, cold-cuts, salamis, bolognas and on and on. Würst for them is all the stuff that you buy at a butcher that is not raw meat. You know at the grocery store in the US how there is a sweating deli case filled with mass-produced hams and deflated bologna? That's the US's poor excuse for what the germans call würst. We call it Boar's head.



All these years when people say that germans eat a lot of sausage I always pictured, you know, sausage. Lips, assholes and fat globules packed into edible casing. Casing. Turns out that is not exactly the case. I guess it's a little like how the eskamos have 100 different words for snow. It's all white stuff to us. There is, of-course, the small chance that everyone else already realizes this distinction. However, there is also the chance that I have just broke down a wall between American and German understanding.