HYDERABAD: Acclaimed Australian food writer and historian Charmaine O’Brien, whose books have the status of culinary bibles are all set to come up with her next book Eating the Present, Tasting the Future. Charmaine has travelled the country for the last 25 years, has studied Indian culinary habits from the inside out, and delves much deeper with the latest release by Penguin India.
Through her journey, she discovered India’s contemporary foodscape and the forces transforming it, as how and where Indians are producing, trading, and eating their food. At a time when food and our relationship with it are topics of increasing global interest, the book offers a unique insight into a complex society — India. Charmaine has been researching and writing on the history and culture of food and eating for more than two decades, specifically Indian and Australian food, and is internationally recognised for her work on both.
Her publications include The Penguin Food Guide to India, the first comprehensive guide to Indian regional food. Her work won the Best National Food Writing, Gourmand International Cookbook Awards 2016. She also holds a PhD in creative writing, with a focus on the psychology of creativity and creative development. CE got in touch with the author to know more about the book and her love for Indian food. Excerpts:
The title of the book is very interesting. How did you zero it on?
Titles, along with opening lines and cover images, are important because these are what capture a reader’s attention in the first instance. I think it captures the premise of the book well though, that is what is happening with food in India now (present). I think it is also important to note that the book is predominantly, but not exclusively, focused on the changing eating habits of urban and urbanising India, and of urbanites who have the resources and interest to purchase and try new foods.
What inspired you to pen this book?
My previous work has been focused on food history and food tradition in India and on Australian food history, the latter being inextricably linked with 19th-century British history. Additionally, I have a passion for reading 19th-century British novels. Then there are the links between Australia and India as British colonies. Essentially, I know a bit about the impact of the Industrial Revolution, including the emergence of a strong middle class and consumer culture and changing social standards amongst other things and how all of this changed British, and by association Australian, food culture and food habits. Having spent a couple of decades observing and learning about India’s food traditions I was also alive to what was changing, and this looked to me a lot like an ‘industrial revolution’, albeit one driven by technology rather than steam engines. But rather than reading about it, it seemed like history was happening before my eyes and I wanted to capture this. It was quite astounding to see India changing with such momentum (not in all respects though!) — this was too interesting a story to not try and tell it in my way, which is through food.
Writing a book of this stature takes a lot of research. Tell us about it.
In the first instance, the book is informed by my 25-plus years of research and writing about Indian food and it is in part a memoir of these experiences. For this work, I specifically spent time exploring India’s metros — megacities, soon to be megacities (including Hyderabad) and emerging city’s — and I interviewed Indian chefs, restaurateurs, food writers, bloggers and journalists, food producers, agriculturists, food entrepreneurs and winemakers, along with domestic cooks and everyday consumers — I even went to a prawn processing factory in Visakhapatnam.
I then enriched my ‘field’ investigation by grounding it in academic and popular research and writing on aspects of India’s contemporary food and drink culture, commerce, and production as well as on the type of global food trends I saw impacting India’s food choices and habits. After this, I had to weave all this together into what I hope is a compelling story for readers.
The chapters ‘Women: Agents of Change’ and ‘Software Eats India’ are very intriguing. Please take us through them.
The title ‘Software Eats India’ is a play on the famous comment by tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen that ‘Software is eating the world’ and this chapter is all about food delivery apps. It captures the ‘history’ of these apps in India from their gloriously hyped emergence to restaurant industry disgruntlement and the ensuing #logout campaign, through an initial low and the eventual high of food apps during the pandemic years. It then describes how the global investor-funded food app companies undertook a major public behaviour change to train Indian consumers to use apps to get their food. It then explores a possible food future mediated via food apps, which are about software, not food, and how the anticipated profits of these enterprises are in large part predicated on human labour reduction.
In the subsequent chapter, ‘Women: Agents of Change’, begins with the fact that the domestic labour of women has created, and maintains, India’s diverse food cultures, and that most meals eaten here are still prepared by women ‘inside’ the home.
However, as Indian women are moving ‘outside’ of the home to work and enjoy social and leisure activities this is changing the food being eaten in the home. One of the key themes of the book concerns this movement of food from outside to inside the home, for example, the ever-increasing use of processed and packaged convenience food components in domestic cookery or fully prepared meals delivered to the doorstep. The availability of convenience foods is a boom for women, freeing them up from domestic kitchen labour but what might the potential consequences of this be? I also look at the rising number of female chefs leading and working in professional kitchens in India over recent years and why this work has become more acceptable for women.
Apart from writing, what other interests do you have?
I work full-time in the knowledge translation space at a university so when I am writing a book as well there is not a lot of space for too many other interests, also I find researching and writing about food so interesting I don’t need too much else. In saying that, I love cooking and hosting dinners, I practice yoga, I read, enjoy pottering with plants (and aspire to become a good gardener one day). I don’t own a car, so I walk and ride my bike a lot as I love being outdoors. I love podcasts about real-life crime, scammers, history and scandals and wellness grifters and television drama series about the same.
What’s next?
My immediate future involves being in India to promote the book. Once that is done, I will be ready to begin a new book project. I have another book I want to write on Indian food but I have been doing research for a book about celebrity chefs in colonial (19th century) Australia that I think will be the first cab off the rank. And the first chapter in that book is about an Indian man born in Surat who sailed from there to London in the early 1820’s, got caught stealing in London, and was transported to Australia as a convict, where he had a number of adventures that earnt him a type of celebrity, eventually going onto become the cook for one of Australia’s most important explorers thereby enhancing his own fame by proximity to his noteworthy employer.