This piece was written several months ago when I was in a particularly exasperated mood. Plus I was recovering from a badly injured hand and a lot of new things were happening in life. Not an excuse. I re-read it today and realized that sadly, it wasn't written with much soul. The piece comes across as shrill and contrarian for the sake of it, not at all in the tone I usually write in. Talk magazine published it this week. Let this story also be here, for though I cringe, I own this piece too.
I have a folder named Food under my pictures section on my laptop. This is full disclosure, before I write of the food fanatics that irk me. The Food folder has some memories, of which I shall not be apologetic about. Memories like the first chocolate cake I baked (disaster, it reeked of baking soda), a drink with a naughty name by a Goan beach, meals special for the people they were shared with and such like. My Food folder doesn’t though have any Instagrammed shots, I like my food fresh looking and not like something Marie Antoinette threw away and it was being auctioned, many centuries later. Why would people pay thousands for a fungied piece of bread or cake? Anyway, don’t let me digress.
I have a problem with food these days. Oh, no, nothing currently fashionable, I like food well enough to love cooking it as well. But food is food, shouldn’t it be? A basic necessity, something you need to get by from one day to the next, that is what food was, when I was growing up. Sure, with summer holidays and festivals and school teachers with imaginative ideas for essay writing assignments, food graduated to being fun and full of nostalgia for mango trees and grandma’s cooking. As we then grew into writers and youths with friends, moving to cities and having our first burns and disasters in our hole in the wall kitchens, food became that thing we bonded over; it made for some of the best anecdotes. Tying in with fond memories of good company and cheap wine, plates of food found place in pieces of noir when we wrote of the cities we found ourselves living in.
I loved each of these phases. I wrote in a regular food column too once, something I thoroughly enjoyed.
Then, Masterchef happened. And oh ouch ugh exclamations apart, I now have a long lasting bitter aftertaste in my mouth, where the cheesecake and penne arrabiatta earlier was. So much that food makes me feel tiresome. For food isn’t any longer just eaten, it is dressed like a posy of fake feathers on an anorexic model, painted on, put on a glass plate, photographed, the photographs treated and shared on every social media platform, and then eaten, if not already cold or melted. Tiresome.
I wonder if I can blame just Masterchef for this explosion in the focus of food being more on everything else but eating it. Maybe not. TLC has been gasping and baby talking about food and its fashionable tendencies much longer. Plus for a season I religiously watched Masterchef Australia, every night. And some reruns. Yes, I am a recovered MA junkie. Though now it almost feels like whipping a dead horse to walk that extra mile before the
franchise loses its charm, MA is still one of the nicer, better put together food shows among the hundreds that throng every channel in every language.
No, this obsession with food did not start with pressure tests and invention tests and pink clothes that we know the judges and chefs on MA for. Somewhere along the way, and I will hope to get to the bottom of it, food became the next top model. Only when you were done with admiring it could you pick at it gingerly.
My friend, lets call her M, lives abroad, in one of those Mid Eastern countries, I forget which. Good girl, good cook, known her for years. Even a papad that she makes goes up on Facebook, stylishly heaped on a plate, the background cleverly blurred; you can do these things these days even with mobile phone cameras. The recipes go up as status messages. There are a bunch of other equally bored girls who ooh and aah at each picture and scream and whine about how they want.a.piece.of.it.right.now! Tiresome, no?
Every time I am in a restaurant and my company or the people at the next table hold up a meal because they are not done taking pictures yet, I want to shake them up. Or better still, take a spoon and upset the arrangement on the plate, so that we, they can get to putting it in our mouths, which is the whole intention really. But no, you haven’t eaten a meal if the proof isn’t on social media, is it now?
I can’t wait for the fad to buckle under its own weariness. Soon. Very hopefully.
Too many cooks, too many broths
I miss those days of Doordarshan when all you had was Chitrahaar, Rangoli and the Sunday 4 pm movie to keep track of. After the waves of cable TV began to hit, everyone, every thing looks the same to me, like species off some assembly line from a factory of capitalist propaganda, “consume, consume, buy, spend, waste.” If you are not watching TV, the newspapers are writing about it or you hear a colleague talk or an analysis is online. There is no escaping the overdose of whatever is in flavour that year.
And this year, for the past few years, it has been all about food. If man isn’t fighting to eat the meanest, weirdest food from around the planet, it is some out of modelling work model prancing about with a put-on accent teaching you how to make salad and salmon in a manner that guarantees you get her waistline in two weeks. Or it is a cook-off between good looking men and women, preened and made up with cues as to when to gasp and when to shed a tear. Those things make for great TRPs I hear. Something about people enjoying watching other people embarrass themselves and insult each other, making for great entertainment.
Reality television apart, there you have hundreds of cookery shows, destination food shows, competitions, baking shows, food challenges, healthy cooking, dessert cooking, salad making, food appreciation, wine and cheese things, in every language on every channel at all times of the day and midnight. Some are good, I grant them that. But you need some
fortitude to sift through the faff and get to the good stuff. All I want to show is exasperation. It doesn’t matter if you are the sorts that burns Maggi, watching Masterchef and its variants is supposedly “inspiring”, emulating plating ideas is akin to showing refined tastes and accumulate sophistication at your next Sunday brunch do with the rest of the swish set.
Food is the new porn, Cosmo tells me
Have you ever watched Nigella Lawson go through the motions in what is marketed as a cookery show? Cooking isn’t her USP, fool be whoever expects that. When I asked a friend why he watched her show, he gave me that indulgent look you give simpletons and very slowly explained how no one really watched her show to copy down recipes. She has famously, and often, been criticised for peddling food porn. The manner in which she kneads
store-bought dough before pouring in thick dark chocolate that oozes from between her fingers flirts with camera angles and clever editing to look rather suggestive. That is the whole point. Food stylists at these things must make a killing on every pay check.
When did food start getting as much talked about as sex? Or it is just safer in family circles to exalt the beauty of food and discuss every olive, every strand of saffron? The Indian tradition in hospitality has been to bond over food, to make every meal special by sharing it with family, friends, to carry cultural ties ahead by tying another round of the thread with traditional dishes, at least during festivities. Given how mothers in this country are happiest when
feeding their children, the cultural obsession with food isn’t surprising. But that doesn’t explain to me this fad for fashionable food that has grabbed the ladies that lunch by the taste buds.
Haute couture for the ladies that lunch
A lady with a Hermes bag and seven-inch heels, while at Sunday brunch with the designer kids and the rich husband with similar ladies and kids and husbands will no longer be caught dead eating anything as prosaic as the most elaborate biriyani. It has to be bland pasta in white dressing perhaps, coated first with glistening olive oil. Or some such.
Weary and tiresome, don’t you think? I don’t know who told them that the whole world is interested in what their breakfast looked like or how they licked the plate of sushi off. Amidst the endless inspirational quote photos and the inane status messages on social media, you are subjected to photos of every meal from every holiday, from different angles! Maybe this is a page from a book How to Lose Friends and Piss Off People that we have all landed on.
These things that popular culture historians call fads are meant to rise and fall quickly, aren’t they? When is food’s turn coming? None too soon, if I had my say. The pretensions, the herd following of the idiot box gods of culinary deliverance, please go away. There are times when you really just want to eat rasam and curd rice, thank you very much, even if risotto and penne is more in fashion. There are times when you want to eat food hot and not wait till it
has fulfilled its model duties.
It is just food people, food. That thing that our cavemen ancestors scourged for, that thing that mothers and grandmothers fed us all night all day if they had their way. Food. A basic necessity. Sure, bright food paint and fancy china wear adds to the charm. But nevertheless, it is food. Put it in your mouth where it is meant to go and get over the highhandedness already!
An edited version of this story was published here.
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