Breakfast is often called the most important meal of the day. But for journalist and food writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee, it is much more than that. It is a way of understanding cities, their people, histories, inequalities and everyday lives.
In her new book, First Bite (Speaking Tiger) Chatterjee writes about the 10 Indian cities she visited — Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Amritsar, Varanasi, Shillong, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad — to explore how the first meal of the day tells stories of migration, labour, caste, class, gender and changing food cultures.
The book shows how a city wakes up and goes about its day. "I was beginning to understand breakfast not as a lifestyle choice, but as a meal that sustained labouring bodies," Chatterjee tells TMS. "It was not about avocado toast or Instagrammable plates.” Instead, it was about the morning fuel that workers needed to get through the day.
She said the idea for the book took shape while she was researching Kolkata's Mughlai breakfast culture for a now-defunct food magazine. Chatterjee realised that while the city's famous biryani is often linked to Nawab Wajid Ali Shah—after losing his throne in Oudh the British exiled him to a Calcutta suburb—and Awadhi cuisine, its modest breakfast eateries were telling a different story — of migrants, especially from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who worked in them. "These eateries represented their often ignored stories. That got me interested in breakfast because it revealed stories of migration, labour, and survival," she remarks.
Some breakfast histories
While breakfast is often said to be a concept borrowed from the West, according to Chatterjee, this overlooks the undocumented lives of working classes, who could not "afford" to wake up late and had their own morning meal traditions.
Through research and fieldwork, she found out about traditions of morning meals across India. Agricultural workers often ate leftover rice or rotis before heading to the fields, while fishermen and labourers relied on simple meals that gave them enough energy for physically demanding work.
"Rice and curry from the previous night, or stale rotis, have been breakfast for generations. It was simply food that helped people work," she says.
The book also traces how breakfast has evolved over centuries. In medieval Europe, breakfast was looked down upon by the elite and associated with poverty and gluttony. Only labourers, farmers, children and the elderly commonly ate in the morning. It was only by the seventeenth century that breakfast gradually became acceptable again.
Whereas, in India, colonialism transformed morning food habits. Bread, biscuits and tea, which are now seen as breakfast staples, were once considered foreign foods and were rejected by many Orthodox Hindus — especially upper-castes — because of caste restrictions around who prepared food. “Items like bread and biscuits — morning essentials in today’s India — were manually made in bakeries by Europeans or Muslims, in some cases lower-caste Hindus, and hence considered polluted,” the book reads.
Food holds memories
The project took nearly two years of dedicated research. The author visited most cities multiple times, waking before sunrise to observe how neighbourhoods came alive. Chatterjee notes that Bengaluru in Karnataka "serves the best dosa" and that the city's cooler temperatures give the dish a "mellow, noticeable sweetness". This sets it apart from the tangier dosai found in Tamil Nadu.
In Kochi, however, she looks beyond popular cafés such as Lila Art Cafe, Pandhal Cafe, and Kashi Art Cafe to highlight the city's local chaayakadas (tea shops). She writes that these tea shops evolved into important social and cultural spaces where people, irrespective of caste or social status, gathered over tea and coffee to read newspapers, exchange news, and discuss politics, films and sports.
Speaking about the fieldwork behind the book, she said, "It wasn't just about eating breakfast."
"It was about understanding the morning culture of a city” — who wakes up early, why they do, and how breakfast becomes part of the routine. The research included conversations with street vendors, restaurant owners, historians and local residents of a particular place, along with extensive archival work.
One of the major themes in First Bite is that food holds memories beyond the family table. "For a long time, we've spoken about food as something that carries memories of home and grandmothers cooking," Chatterjee said. "But food also carries memories of displacement, oppression, and important historic junctures like the Partition. Those stories deserve to be told too."
Chatterjee documents many such lesser-known stories of people displaced by the 1947 Partition. They include Pehalwan, the iconic kulcha shop in Amritsar that began as a small dhaba after the family migrated from Sialkot in present-day Pakistan; kachori and chhole-chawal shops established by West Punjabi refugees, especially from Multan, in Delhi's Paharganj; and the famous dal pav stalls of Mumbai's Chembur, a neighbourhood with a large Sindhi and Punjabi refugee population.
A window into society
Chatterjee also observes how breakfast reflects gender inequalities. Even though women often prepare food at home, public breakfast spaces across most cities remain dominated by men. Shillong, however, is an exception, with its matrilineal Khasi society making it one of the few places where women are commonly seen cooking, selling and eating breakfast in public.
Across its pages, the book shows that breakfast reveals much more than food preferences. Chatterjee notes that while breakfast is optional for some people, “for others, it's the only meal they know they'll have for hours”.