NEW DELHI: A friend and I met over a meal a few days back. After an enjoyable evening of conversations over good food, we requested the restaurant to pack the leftovers for us. While waiting at a signal near Bhairon Marg in Central Delhi, my friend rolled down the window and offered the bag of leftovers to a middle-aged woman who knocked on our window in hope of some alms. What might seem like a noble deed, got me thinking about a larger narrative at play here. No one asked that woman about her food preference — whether she was a vegetarian or a meat eater. The assumed point here was about sustenance and not preference. Preferences are limited to elites or the upper-class of the society.
Just on cue, I attended the first ever Indian Culinary Agenda conference last weekend on a beautiful spring day, which brought together Indian food researchers, authors, filmmakers and writers under one roof and held meaningful panel discussions over issues that otherwise end up being limited to just closed door talks in one’s homes, usually. One of the discussions that caught my attention was that on visual media’s tryst with Indian food. Film documentarian Shubhra Chatterjee spoke about the way in which Northeast’s food is presented as exotic and most of the times while making shows, they aren’t allowed to cover the region in order to not hurt the populist sentiments. I was reminded of a Doordarshan show Surabhi in the 1980s,where the host Siddarth Kak relished the red ant chutney, which was termed a dish of the ‘outcast.’
Unfortunately, four decades down the line, little has changed, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise (remember the recent vegetarian and non-vegetarian fleet by a food aggregator?)
Food and caste
The fact that we look at food with a privileged gaze is often ignored. Chatterjee’s fellow panelist, Rahee Punyashloka, a Dalit scholar and artist of Delhi rightly pointed out that even our urban landscaping is done in a manner in which the food of the upper castes is celebrated in the central areas of the city, while the ‘khau gullies’ are almost always in a secluded corner of the city, away from the privileged few. Punyashloka’s piece, Strange Fruit: Or to be a Dalit, and Eat is one of the most poignant pieces of food writing dabbling in food and caste in India.
In 2022, Dalit artist Sri Vamsi Matta started performing Come Eat With Me — a play that was also performed in Delhi. It explores the relations between food and caste while sharing a meal and talks about the ‘Dalit food’ and how it isn’t just about a person’s food identity, but also their political identity.
Eating habits
Food has been a tool of segregation and establishing hierarchies, since time immemorial. The debate about vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism is age-old. That one might not want to eat meat is one’s choice, but when you ‘other’ someone who eats it, then knowingly or unknowingly, you establish supremacy. Funnily, the reverse is true too. Taking a leaf from my own life, I — a vegetarian by choice — was (and still am) shamed for my eating preferences when I got married into a family of meat-eaters. A question my husband was posed by every other wedding guest was about how he plans to “sustain” himself with a vegetarian.Funnily, it was never a point of debate between the two of us, as we accepted each other’s food choices.
Food is more than just the act of cooking and eating. It is a cultural marker and is a political subject which deserves more attention and space. It is important to sit back and take stock of why we eat what we eat, the way we have eaten through generations and question our eating habits, while making sure that we respect the choices of others.
Vernika Awal is a food writer who is known for her research-based articles through her blog ‘Delectable Reveries’