Message on your Plate

Today just about anybody and everybody who inhabits the urban world claims to be a foodie. Our rural cousins have always prioritized food, their very livelihood demands that. It’s the city folks who had pushed it to the bottom of the list. Things are falling in perspective with everybody from the office-goer to industrialists, cricketers laying their claim on food. Even the glamour dolls, those ephemeral beings with vanishing waist-lines, who you’d think have nothing to do with the processes of ingestion and egestion shriek… I just looove food. Food joints are burgeoning. Earlier it was the good old street-corner Chinese takeaway, the Punjabi dhaba and a sprinkling of Udipi eateries. Now there is a mind-boggling range—Goan, Chettinad, Thai, Mexican, Japanese, Mongolian, even Hollywood! Not to be left behind is the great moulder of public opinion and taste, the television. Any channel worth its TRPs has a cookery show on air. Food is big business. But why? Why is the world turning into one big foodie zone?

Tasting limits
Everybody seems to have suddenly discovered food. That too, with passion. Is it a fad? May be. But then, a fad is more than just a fad. It tells us something about ourselves, our yearnings and desires at a particular point of time, conditioned by the predicament of our existence. Take Feng Shui for example. When we place that crystal lotus on the windowsill, it is hope that inspires the act. An eagerness for peace and a sense of security in an otherwise tension-ridden, stressful life.

Similarly, if we were to talk of this fascination with food where would the pointer point? Pleasure, may be. After all, as Freud pointed out and as the beggar on the street knows only too well, the urge for food, like (perhaps more than) the urge for sex, is a basic instinct. And pleasure accompanies the fulfillment of any instinct. But is that all? Say, when we go to a Lebanese joint and order that exotic dish, something we haven’t tasted before, which looks like nothing we’ve seen before, are we simply looking for pleasure? Isn’t pleasure a rather banal term when it comes to describing the experience we are searching for?

Something more appropriate would be adventure. It is our sense of adventure that impels us to experience the new, the exotic, something far removed from our everyday dal chawal, or the McDonald’s burger. It would not be very wrong to say that when we order that piece of the unknown we are actually looking for an intense experience. Or what Andre Bataille calls “limit experiences”, experiences “at the extreme limits of the possible”. An experience that seeks to transcend the boundaries of our living conditions, that brings us to the edge of reality.

Nothing illustrates this better than fugu, a kind of blowfish, highly prized in Japanese cuisine, that brings you really, really close to death, if it doesn’t kill you outright as such. Exorbitantly priced, Fugu comes equipped with a poisonous chemical called tetrodoxin found in its skin, blood, ovaries and especially its liver. One match-head worth of this toxin can kill thousands. Even touching a fugu the wrong way can be deadly. And yet the Japanese have been risking their lives and eating it for centuries. And now Hong Kong and US import it at the cost of thousands of dollars. Why on earth do people have to engage in such gastronomic adventures? Why flirt with death? Perhaps that is the very reason.

Fugu takes us to the very brink of life. It must be an extremely heady feeling. One moment you’re chewing and the other moment you could be dying. The sheer thrill of lapsing from existence to non-existence, all in the course of a single bite! But then, after you’ve completed your meal and you walk out of the restaurant, may be the air smells just a little sweeter and the parting hug is warmer. Fugu is invigorating because it brings one so close to the limits of life. And that is what adventure is all about.


Of human bondage
But then we are not on an adventure quest always. We also long for the warm, smug feeling of generalized pleasure. Back in the sixties Ismail Merchant was making his East-meets-West mishmash and like all fledgling filmmakers was cash strapped. He did not have enough to pay his actors. Undeterred, he did the next best thing. He stirred up a great meal. All ate together. The result was great bonding. A happy unit. A chummy togetherness. He completed his films and the question of money went to the backburner.

You don’t need to be Ismail Merchant to understand the vital importance food and eating play in enhancing human bonding. The earliest anthropologists have studied the eating habits and food patterns of the so-called natives in order to get a glimpse into the workings of their culture. To go back even further, all life-events like birth, death, marriage, in all cultures and religions down the ages have been marked by feasting. And, like any grandma would vouch for, eating together keeps the family together. In fact, one of the metaphors to describe the transition from the joint family to the nuclear set-up was the setting up of separate kitchens.

To stretch the argument a little further we could say that while eating together engenders human bonding, the very act of eating as such can be seen as bonding with the self. When we chomp away at a pizza all by ourselves and enjoy it thoroughly, we give a lie to the formulation that the post-modern individual is one schizophrenic wreck. We establish a real, tangible relationship with our object of desire, the pizza, in order to fulfill our quest for pleasure. No wonder, anorexia and bulimia are diagnosed as medical and psychological conditions that imply a breakdown of the system of selfhood. The anorexic cannot accept her body and takes recourse to denying the body what it rightfully needs to fit into some ideal, illusory mould. As against this the pizza-eating foodie is content, at peace with herself, denoting a healthy alignment between her body and self.

Suppose the pizza over, the lady digs into a rich dark chocolate mousse. Sinfully delicious! Like the fantasy, the transgressive element that spikes up the sexual act, increases the intensity and distinguishes it from mere copulation, so also indulgence, the element of sin in the experience of eating enhances the pleasure factor and makes it memorable. And isn’t heightened gratification of desire something we all seek and something that eludes us? If a chocolate mousse can do the trick then why not? What are a few extra calories as against the immense satisfaction that we derive? And if that satisfaction translates to a better relation with the self, an almost foolproof interrelation between the body, the self and the object of desire, what more can we ask for. It’s the ultimate recipe for psychological health!

Spiritual marketplace
But, why now, of all times, has food generated such a renewed interest? After all food is nothing new. It’s as old as the birth of the ameoba. And cooked food came into existence long, long back when the caveman accidentally dropped that bit of kill into the fire. The modern day tandoori chicken is only its sophisticated cousin. But when exactly did food cross over from mamma’s kitchen to the big, wide world? It’s difficult to attribute a precise date to this leap. I would hazard a guess that it happened around the time spiritualism entered the commerce, an aspect that like food, touches the lives of all individuals in society.

Various Zen masters and spiritualists like the market savvy Deepak Chopra and Ravi Shankar have packaged spiritualism and sold it to corporate houses. And I’d like to suggest that in their own unique way they have been successful in tackling a very old problem, something that was triggered off rather unwittingly by Galileo in the seventeenth century.

A telescope-maker by profession, Galileo directed one at the skies and discovered that Copernicus was right when he said that the earth moves around the sun. The Church of Rome, which had hitherto subscribed to the theory that the earth was stationary and had provided all answers to the predicament of human existence, felt its authority had been questioned. Following a long inquisition, Galileo was put in a dungeon. But the ideas he espoused viz. knowledge through observation, the basis for scientific inquiry flourished. And thus began the split between faith and reason; between religious, spiritual experience and scientific, empirical knowledge. This marked Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which set the parameters for modernism and capitalism where it’s machine over man, productivity over health and where good refers to money, and has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics.

But in the past two decades or so things have been changing. In the domain of business we see a convergence of two opposing fields, viz. empirical knowledge, e.g. market surveys and spiritual experience, e.g. stress management. Spiritual practices like meditation, introspection etc. employed extensively in human resource management are proven techniques for enhancing efficiency, increasing productivity and thus adding to profit-making.

Jack Welch, the management guru’s mantra is to do things straight from the guts. Further, venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, responsible for some amazing success stories of late-capitalism, employ two criteria for deciding on investment. One, does the person with the proposed project inspire trust and two, has he done the venture capitalist a good turn in recent times. And then, after IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and EQ (Emotional Quotient), SQ (Spiritual Quotient) is all set to hit the market. So, where goes the pure rational approach?

My argument is that the interest in food is directly related to the spiritual entering the scientific, empirical sphere and is part of the whole process of moving towards a holistic existence. What is happening at the macro level, in the case of industry, where spiritualism enhances productivity, is reflected at the micro level of the individual, where food is re-discovered not as a means to sustenance but psychological well-being. It points to an inward-looking, holistic approach to the life process. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it is the burden of rationality, and the pathologies that it unleashed that has brought us to this turning point where we are looking within, exploring the self. Consciously, as in business or unconsciously, as in the case of food we are dipping into the long-neglected reservoir of competencies and abilities, the intangible assets that lie within us to make the most of our lives. The passion for food which encompasses the body and the mind, and spiritual wellbeing that includes creating wealth, relate to the impulse to experience life, complete and undivided. In the foodie zone its not either/or but both.

And by one big foodie zone I don’t mean a nightmarish homogeneity, a world shorn of all differences. Talking of South Asian culture Ashis Nandy uses the analogy of a salad bowl as against the melting pot. The melting pot creates a final homogenous product while all the ingredients of a salad retain their distinctive flavour, texture and taste, they co-exist with their differences intact. Fusion, the current buzzword alludes to such a coming together. The foodie zone is a salad bowl. It celebrates pluralism, the markers are clear, yet there is a kind of cohesion.

Politically speaking
Food and taste are the last bastions of any cultural identity. As any expatriate will vouch for, when homesick the one thing he yearns for is desi fare, something he had turned his nose at in his adolescent years. You can change your looks, with a little effort you can even change your mind-set, but one thing you just can’t tamper with is your sense of taste. But Indian cuisine has infiltrated and colonised the strongly fortified region of British taste and cuisine.

Robin Cook declared Chicken Tikka Masala the national dish of UK. Prince Charles added the royal seal of approval by announcing his liking for it. Imagine the plight of the Queen who swears by barley water and breakfasts on porridge and scrambled eggs. But then, think of the immense revenue the Indian food industry generates, a whopping 3.2 billion pounds a year. Add to it the fact that all her royal trappings are subsidised by the taxpayer, of which that paid by restaurateurs and producers of multiple curry products must be a substantial amount. So, expediency demands that she turn a blind eye to her son’s flirtation with those natives, their cuisine and their dabbawallahs. That’s the only way she can maintain some semblance of dignity and those diamonds on her tiara.

Nothing new about it though. It is well known that Britain’s wealth came from the colonies but what is important is that today it is the Bangladeshis who are calling the shots. Most of what goes as Indian food is actually Bangladeshi, the most neglected portion of the Indian sub-continent. Both, when it was part of greater India and later as Pakistan’s hinterland. Today it is a nation-state that has one of the world’s lowest GDP. But the process of infiltrating is on and the wretched of the earth are poised for a take-over.

Politically speaking, it is only Gandhi who with his innate bania shrewdness would have read the writing on the wall. As it is he had a penchant for food. He often experimented with various kinds of food like Spanish onions and goat’s milk. He also popularised the fast unto death, something the Indian woman had for long been using to get what she wanted. He would definitely have fore-grounded food as yet another weapon to set right the wrongs of this world.


Message on the plate
So, when that pretty young thing says that she is a foodie, don’t dismiss her claim as vacuous. Listen to her. And listen carefully. For these are magic words. Encrypted in them is a message. A message that asks us to enjoy our food so that we can, howsoever precariously, hold on to our humanity in an increasingly dehumanized and mechanized world. To ensure a certain degree of cohesiveness, of togetherness, to ensure our survival as psychologically healthy human beings the world does indeed need to turn into one big foodie zone. Ultimately it is the mundane act of eating that connects us, both, to ourselves and to the world at large. Let’s welcome the gastronome tucked away in some crevice of our consciousness. Eat to live and let live!