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Before we move on with this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, do check out another
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awesome podcast from IVM Podcast, Cyrus Says, hosted by my old buddy Cyrus Brocha.
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These days, there is a lot of talk on what it means to be Indian.
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There are cultural nationalists who say that XYZ is Indian, but ABC is not.
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This got me thinking about a fundamental question.
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What makes something Indian?
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Some of the things we think about as quintessentially Indian actually originated elsewhere.
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Take Indian clothing for example.
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All stitch clothing came from outside, so kurta pajama and salwar kameez are not quite
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Indian in that sense, and nor are the blouses you wear with your saree.
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So much of what we think is Indian food is not Indian.
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Rajma chawal for example, or potatoes, or tomatoes, or even chilies.
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I mean, in one sense they are not Indian because they came from outside, which is how many
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nationalists today would define foreignness.
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But on the other hand, the way I look at it, they are Indian because of the seamless way
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in which we've incorporated them into our traditions.
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By that thinking, a lot of what we think of as foreign is actually Indian.
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Like the English language, or blue jeans with kurta, or the guitar in our Bollywood songs.
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The world is a melting pot, and we can make anything Indian.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Bharma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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The topic for today's episode is the Indian-ness in Indian food.
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And my guest is a remarkable writer I've had the privilege to be friends with for many
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Vikram Doctor is an editor at The Economic Times, and I often describe him as the best
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food writer I have ever read.
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That's because when Vikram writes about food, he's also writing about culture, geopolitics,
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and history at the same time, with equal love and passion shining through for all of them.
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Through his columns, I've learned both about how a lot of Indian food originated outside
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India, and is yet, at the same time, now deeply Indian.
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I had a fascinating conversation with him on this subject, but before we cut to that,
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here's a quick commercial break.
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Vikram, welcome to the Seen in the NC.
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Thank you for having me.
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It's really great to be back in this podcasting space after almost two years.
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At which point, I will urge my listeners to head on over to AudioMatic.in and listen to
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the Real Food podcast by Vikram Doctor.
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How many episodes of that did you do?
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I think we managed about 48 or so.
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I mean, how many episodes already?
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Mine is, this will be episode 95, but mine is much easier.
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You just sit down and you record a conversation.
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Yours included tons of research and was meticulously produced and so on.
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We had a lot of people, interviews from outside, et cetera, which added to the interest, but
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also made it much harder to do.
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So what I'd like to do for all of my listeners who may not know who you are, the few of them
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as it might be, is kind of talk about how you got into writing about food in particular.
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You're obviously a very accomplished journalist.
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You work as a consulting editor at the Economic Times.
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But what I've always known you for is for being an incredible food writer.
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I often tell my friends, and I don't want to embarrass you by saying this, but I often
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tell people you're the best food writer in the world because the kind of depth of insights
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you have, not just about food, but the connections you make with food to politics, to geography,
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to culture, to everything just blows my mind.
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How did you get interested in food?
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Well, I mean, when I started off as a journalist, like a lot of young journalists, you know,
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all young journalists are made to do a few routine things.
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You're always meant to do a few film reviews.
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You're meant to do a few book reviews and you're meant to do a few restaurant reviews.
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So I started off doing restaurant reviews for, I think it was Business India at that
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And, you know, very quickly, I got very bored of doing restaurant reviews because I don't
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know if you agree with me, but I find the restaurant scene in Bombay is pretty sad.
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And for a basic economic reason, I mean, the rents in Bombay are so high, the overheads
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for restaurants are so high that it pretty much kills off any interesting restaurant.
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You know, all restaurants to make money have to become a sort of mean level food that they
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produce really interesting niche restaurants.
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It's happening now to some extent, but like 20 years back, it was pretty rare.
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This is early nineties you're talking about.
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Yeah, it was mid nineties and, you know, around that time, I mean, and I quickly ran through
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all the interesting niche restaurants in Bombay and I got really bored.
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And also beyond the point, I started appreciating what goes into producing restaurants and the
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amount of effort that people, you know, put into running restaurants is crazy.
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And I started feeling guilty beyond the point of just coming and having one meal and writing
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some stupid review about that.
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I mean, I'm not saying all the restaurants were good.
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Many of them were completely crappy, but even a crappy restaurant unfortunately requires
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So I just got bored about writing about restaurants, but I did discover something interesting that
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I could talk to anyone about food and you could strike up a conversation.
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It's very, very rare that you find someone who is not interested with food.
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And also what was interesting about food was that you could talk to people who people don't
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So for instance, women, a lot of older women, you know, people who work behind the scenes.
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Everybody's interested in food.
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Everybody has food stories.
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Everybody has food memories.
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It became a great way to learn about people and different aspects of India.
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And were you interested in food in a general way from before this?
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Because you know, the depth of knowledge that you show in your columns, for example, when
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you go to the origins of different kinds of food and you're practically going back hundreds
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of years and drawing all these intricate narratives.
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How do you gain that knowledge?
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I mean, part of it, of course, comes from talking to people.
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Like you said, part of it comes from talking to people, but also a lot of it comes from
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I was always interested in history and especially, you know, different sources of history, like
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personal memoirs, newspaper accounts, you know, these sources of history that often
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And I found that there was a wealth of material in that which people were just not looking
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There were all sorts of unusual sources of information, you know, for instance, especially
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One of the things people don't understand about the government, especially, you know,
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the agricultural department, is that we have this vast network of agricultural research
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institutes, almost any type of food, you know, any type of agricultural issue, there's an
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institute dedicated to that, who are doing all sorts of fascinating in-depth research
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And you can often write to the directors of these institutes and you'll get fascinating
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bits of information, you know.
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So I started, you know, one thing I'm particularly interested in is bananas, partly because I'm
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from South India and I've always liked bananas and I started becoming curious about the different
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types of bananas I would see on the street side, especially in South India.
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And I didn't know the names, so they had, you know, different names and I started trying
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to identify these bananas and I actually wrote to the director of the National Research Center
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for Bananas in Trichy, a very nice gentleman called Dr. Mustafa at that time, and sending
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him pictures of the bananas and he would very sweetly identify them and tell me a bit more
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And that's when I realized that the stories behind things are really fascinating and it's
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all there, you know, you just have to read about it.
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And I mean, just hearing about a National Research Center for Bananas is kind of funny
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So, you know, the way I've always thought of food is I kind of think of food and cuisines
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as a static kind of thing, that I know that, okay, this is Konkani cuisine and this is
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Tamilian cuisine and this is North Indian cuisine and blah, blah, blah.
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And that's partly because I'm at this fixed point in time and I'm looking at it from that
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And the more you read, and especially you get a sense of this through reading your columns,
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that it's actually really dynamic and a lot of what we think of as Indian food isn't really
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In fact, there's so much of an intermingling of cultures and traditions in this almost
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literal and metaphorical melting pot, so to say.
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And, you know, I mean, I think this is true of any country, but particularly India, because,
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you know, this was one country where so many different traditions, so many trade routes
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I mean, you know, we were at one end of the Silk Road, so many spices came, not just from
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India, but from Southeast Asia through India.
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So you know, that gave us all the connections towards Southeast Asia.
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So then you had all the different waves of colonists and, you know, other people coming
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into India, bringing their own food traditions, refugees, immigrants, there's always been
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this vast churn of people across India, and each churn is accompanied by their own food
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So that's what's really fascinating.
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There's nothing, once you start reading Indian food traditions, you realize that nothing
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is static, that some of the things that we think are most intrinsically Indian are actually
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not that Indian in their origin, though we have made them Indian now.
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And I'll give you two fascinating examples.
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You know, we're recording this in November, you know, the festival Diwali has just got
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over and we have seen like all the religious seasons, all the rituals have been happening
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and you know, we've all these rituals have been accompanied by marigolds.
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And we think of marigolds as being one of the most intrinsically Indian flowers, which
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you can eat by the way.
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So I'm not actually, if you remember in monsoon wedding, there was that guy who was always
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So I'm not drifting too far away from food.
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Now what people don't understand is that the marigolds that we have today are actually
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They are Mexican marigolds, they're a type of plant called tagetis, which actually there
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was an Indian marigold earlier, which some people still grow, they're called calendulas.
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They both have the same bright orange color, but calendulas are simpler flowers, whereas
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the Mexican marigolds are much more impressive looking flowers.
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So at some point these Mexican marigolds came to India and we quietly shifted to growing
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marigolds for which have always been part of Indian tradition, but just growing these
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So to me, it's fascinating this Indian, all these Indian festivals are happening with
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And, and what about the other one you said?
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The other one is actually saffron.
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I mean, and I don't want to get too political, but you know, the way saffron is now used
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and as an adjective for a particular type of politics.
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When we say saffron, there's saffron rights, saffron activists, but saffron in itself is
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Now, let me qualify that.
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What is, what is deeply Indian, what is deeply Hindu is that orange color.
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That orange color has always been an intrinsically important part of Hindu rituals.
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And that would have come from, you know, occurred in the earth or from turmeric in particular.
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Turmeric is deeply Indian.
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It's a deeply Indian part of Indian rituals, but saffron is not, I mean, saffron is an
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interesting spice for a couple of reasons.
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One is it's a spice from the temperate zones.
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We think of spices as coming from tropical countries, but saffron actually comes from
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the crocus flower, which grows in temperate climate.
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So it's one of the rare spices, which comes from the more Northern latitudes, which means
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that there's only one part of India, which is suitable for it, which is actually Kashmir.
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So and the saffron in Kashmir is only recorded from around about the fifth or sixth century
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So saffron in itself is not deeply Indian.
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What seems to have happened, and unfortunately as with a lot of food stuff, a lot of this
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just conjecture, we started using kesar as an indication for that orange color, which
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was so deeply Indian, possibly because it was more expensive.
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It was a sort of aspirational, you know, it was more aspirational than haldi.
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So now we use kesar as a synonym for a whole type of Hinduism.
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But saffron is not Indian.
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So where did it come from?
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It probably came from somewhere in the Middle East, from somewhere in Turkey or somewhere
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like that, which is an area of a lot of biodiversity.
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What else came from there?
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I mean, wheat, of course, originally came from there, possibly a whole bunch of spices
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So basically rotis are not Indian?
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Well, yeah, rotis are probably not Indian.
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And in fact, through large parts of India, they have not been part of Indian culture
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I mean, especially if you come from South India, where I grew up, wheat, bread, rotis
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were simply not part of the culture.
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I mean, there were a few communities that made wheat rotis.
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But it really, wheat started growing in South India after the 60s for a very simple economic
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In the 60s, India was suffering from really severe famines.
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And we approached the US for aid, which the US under Lyndon Johnson gave us aid.
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But as always with Americans, it was aid on their terms, which means they didn't give
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The vast amounts of wheat grown in the Midwestern states.
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So we got wheat under the PL480 program.
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But once it came to India, the government had to make Indians eat it.
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And we weren't used to this.
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I mean, for one thing, it was a very different type of wheat from the sort of wheat that
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was being eaten in North India.
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You have lots of complaints from the era of people in North India who had to suddenly
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start eating this hard American wheat.
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And then it had to come to South India where there were no traditions at all.
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And through a process of commercial spreading, through a sheer necessity, through government
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promotion, South India slowly started eating wheat.
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And so now it's very common in South India to have bread and rotis and Malabar parottas
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But it's something which is less than 50 years old.
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And that's quite mind blowing to me because the Malabar parotta or the Kerala parotta,
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you think, oh, this is obviously so Indian as part of that cuisine.
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And you're pointing out that it's not even as old as Nehru.
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I mean, Kerala in particular, and I'm saying this because I'm half a Malayali, has always
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been a state where we've just seen a real wide amount of change of new products being
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And some of them are actually very precisely dated.
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For instance, tapioca, kappa, which is now seen as such a Malayali thing.
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You can go to Malayali restaurants and you have kappa biryani and kappa and fish curry.
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But kappa, tapioca, was very consciously introduced by the king of Travancore sometime in the
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mid 19th century when he saw that he needed some sort of starch substitute to make up
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for the rice deficiencies because of shortfalls in rice production.
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And he realized that tapioca was a tropical plant that grew easily.
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And he very consciously introduced tapioca into Kerala.
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And now tapioca is seen as intrinsically part of Kerala culture.
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And this was a king of Travancore, but before that, where did tapioca come from?
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Tapioca, cassava comes from the New World, from Brazil.
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So just to sort of go back to that earlier thing, which we digress from, which is the
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So what else comes from there?
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Wheat, you were saying, comes from there.
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As I said, saffron, a whole range of spices, a number of fruits, lemons, things like that.
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The Middle East is one of the great centers of biodiversity.
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And from there, not just ingredients, but we also had ways of cooking and entire cuisines
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come from the Middle East.
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I mean, you know, for instance, a lot of our traditions of frying and deep frying do seem
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to have come from the Middle East.
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And there are a number of reasons for this.
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I mean, while, you know, I don't want to generalize in saying that frying was not there in India
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earlier, it's true that frying was not common as far as we know from the earlier sources.
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And there's a very simple reason for that.
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I mean, a lot of food and cooking is driven by what fuel is available at your disposal.
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And in India, we did not have many fuel sources.
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Coal was relatively unknown in India.
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In fact, it was completely unknown until the British era, except in very small parts of
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There was wood, but then wood has always been a problem through large parts of India.
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Our basic fuel source was cow dung.
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And it's one reason among many others that, you know, cows are given this very special
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And if you know anything about cow dung is it burns with a very slow flame, okay?
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You can't get a very high heat on cow dung.
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What it's ideal for is for boiling.
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So we developed whole cuisines based essentially around boiling foods and our pots also became
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pots that could go on cow dung fires.
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So there is some truth in the point that people like Michael Pollan have made that, you know,
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Indian cuisine is essentially in its origins about boiling.
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But once the Muslims come in and these traditions come in, you get much many more traditions
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In fact, in many parts of India, frying is still seen as much more of a Muslim tradition.
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And a lot of the utensils, for instance, copper, which is ideal for frying because it conducts
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heat fast, is again seen as a utensil, as a type of metal used in the Muslim tradition.
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And again, we get, you know, many types of food.
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So one of the most intrinsic foods to India, which we think is of so Indian, are samosas.
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I mean, you know, you remember what was the line that Lalu Prasad used?
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Jab tak samosa mein rahega aloo, Bihar mein rahega aloo.
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Now what is fascinating about that is neither samosas or aloo are originally Indian.
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Potatoes come with the British, samosas come from probably the Turkish tradition where
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you have something called sambusak, where you, and this idea of getting a wheat dough,
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which is kneaded with oil so it becomes flaky.
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That's a very intrinsically part of Turkic culture.
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You see it throughout central Asia and down to Turkey, but you have sambusak.
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So samosas and potatoes are, you know, something that have come to us from outside and this
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tradition of, of cooking deep frying things.
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And you know, one of the points you made to me when we were talking just before we started
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the recording for the show is that a lot of Indian cooking has adapted itself by pragmatism
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and therefore a lot of foreign elements get easily adapted because they just happen to
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See, I mean, this is a point, I think a very pragmatic point that I often emphasize that,
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you know, when it comes to cooking, we often forget who is actually doing the cooking.
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And the truth of Indian cooking is that vast amounts of Indian cooking depends on the unacknowledged
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labor of two types of people, servants and daughters-in-law who are treated as servants
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And this labor, you know, this unacknowledged labor is what really goes into creating food,
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And it's their labor, which would do all this really boring, messy, tedious stuff that went
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into a lot of traditional cooking.
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And nobody wants to do this sort of work.
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So as, you know, more people became empowered, as it became harder to, to force, you know,
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your daughters-in-law to work as like essentially slave labor, people stopped wanting to do this
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Let me give you one example.
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One type of food that is very essentially Indian, in fact, is banana flowers, okay, mochar,
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as you know them in Bengal, and it was there right through southern India, through Bengal.
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In fact, if you can go to books like the Supashastra, which is from something I'm forgetting that
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actually dates, but from Karnataka, it's an amazing book.
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It's a cookbook, which half the recipes are using banana flower in different ways.
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And you know, when you look at this, at the recipes, they're fascinating recipes from
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a historical perspective.
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But I just keep thinking of all the people who had to clean the banana flowers.
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And if you've ever cleaned banana flowers, you know, it's a tedious job because you have
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to oil your hands because there's a sort of sticky substance that's in the banana flowers.
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And then each petal, you know, each sort of proto banana has this sort of undigestible
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part which has to be cleaned off by hand.
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I've tried doing it and it's a real pain.
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I mean, the results are delicious.
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I love the banana flower recipes once they finally cook, but God knows it's not something
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I want to do every day.
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And so at some point, when these English vegetables, as they're called foreign vegetables, started
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coming in from different sources, people stopped cooking banana flower and they start to cook
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to these sort of Western vegetables or not Western, just outside India, non-Indian vegetables,
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which were just much easier to cook.
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I mean, you can cook red cabbage in particular so that it tastes a lot like banana flower
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and it's so much easier to cook.
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I mean, cabbage is not Indian.
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It's a very deeply European vegetable.
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But I often think Indians cook cabbage in really wonderful ways.
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It's just that because we don't value cabbage, we don't value all the Indian dishes that
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So we started cooking all these vegetables and these sort of traditional Indian vegetables
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I mean, the interesting irony is that these vegetables are now being rediscovered, not
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in India, but abroad because the huge growth of the vegan movement abroad is actually finding
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all these traditional Indian ingredients very useful because so much of Indian food is actually
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very easily adaptable to vegan food, especially from South India, where you have coconut milk
#
instead of cow's milk or buffalo's milk, then it's all essentially vegan food.
#
So you can go to New York and you can have these really fancy hipster restaurants which
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will serve you burgers made out of banana flower or green jackfruit, another very intrinsically
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Indian vegetable, whereas it's almost impossible to get these dishes in India now.
#
And you know, a few episodes back, I did an episode of The Scene in the Unseen called
#
Metrics of Empowerment, where I sat down with three economists, Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta
#
And we were trying to figure out some sort of out of the box metrics which showed that
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women have been empowered and, you know, the image that you painted of a male patriarch
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ordering ki, you know, give me more chaat dalna and somebody has to and then the daughter
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in law has to clean the banana flower and but gradually over the ages as those daughters
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in law become more empowered and can put their foot down, they choose to make cabbage instead.
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So in a sense, one offbeat metric of empowerment is a move away from banana flower to cabbage.
#
Oh, actually, you know, one of the best examples is something that has happened maybe if not
#
in our generation, but in our parents generation, which is the great shift to stainless steel.
#
I mean, I don't know if you remember this, but I do remember like, you know, these these
#
women would come to the houses with these these stainless steel vessels, they were these
#
sort of nomadic women, and they would ask the women if they had like old saris which
#
And it was amazing, like how many women would empty out their chests full of saris and exchange
#
them for these stainless steel vessels.
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And in a matter of about a decade, stainless steel, which was a very niche product, it
#
was, you know, originally used for making armaments, stainless steel became ubiquitous
#
For us today, many of us when we think of traditional Indian kitchens, we think of stainless
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steel, all that bright silver, ever silver, it was called stainless steel vessels, and
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you know, shops full of stainless steel vessels.
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But this happened in a matter of 10 years.
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It's not even that stainless steel is a particularly good medium for cooking.
#
It's actually not a particularly good medium because it doesn't conduct heat very well.
#
Things like brass and copper are actually much better conductors of heat.
#
But stainless steel is easy to clean.
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And if you've ever been through the trouble of cleaning brass vessels, you know what a
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I mean, to clean brass vessels properly, you need something acidic.
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So you had these sort of solutions of tamarind, we had to steep and then you had to clean
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And then once or twice every year, you had to get the kalaiwala to come.
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I don't know if you've ever seen that, that the guys would come and make little fires
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outside your house and put the tin lining inside.
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Taking care of brass vessels is a real pain, they're also like really heavy.
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So within 10 years, women in the kitchen very happily gave up all their traditional brass
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vessels for stainless steel.
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And that's actually a marvelous heading for the journey that the Indian woman has taken
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from saris to stainless steel.
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From saris to stainless steel, absolutely.
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Beautiful alliterations.
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We'll take a quick commercial break here and we'll talk more about Indian food and how
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it is not as Indian as you think, though I would hold that all food is Indian once you
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eat it here after this break.
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Hello everybody, welcome to another week on the IVM Podcast Network.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure that you are.
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We are IVM Podcasts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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I have a little bit of news for people.
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We are releasing a new version of our app and as part of that we're running a beta program.
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We have about 40 slots left for different users to participate in the beta program and
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if you'd be interested in doing that, please go to our website, ivmpodcast.com slash appbeta.
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That's ivmpodcast.com slash appbeta.
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Over there you'll find this form which will let you submit your email address to us and
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we'll invite you into the beta.
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Again, it's a limited availability so we're only going to be able to invite so many people,
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but if you're interested, please do subscribe.
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And this week on Cyrus S. Cyrus talks to stand-up comedian Sarumatha about moving from HR to
#
comedy and positioning himself as a first-gen stand-up comic.
#
On Simplify this week, the guys talk to Atul Choramani of Magna Sound about the golden
#
age of indie pop in the nineties.
#
On the season finale of the Kinetic Living podcast, Coach Urmi spoke to fellow NTC trainer
#
Kunal Rajput and they talk about kettlebell sports, powerlifting and how his dad, a Mumbai-based
#
bodybuilder, inspired him to pursue his fitness career.
#
And starting November 19th, we have a very exciting project.
#
We're starting our first history project with Aniruddh Kanishetti.
#
It's called Echoes of India.
#
Please do catch it on the IVM Podcast app, website or wherever you get your podcasts
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
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I'm chatting with Vikram Dr. about Indian food and what makes it Indian and where it
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So Vikram, tell me a little bit more about the different streams of influences, where
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Like obviously there are trade routes, there's a Silk Route which ended here, as you said.
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There was, you know, the route from the Middle East, I presume a lot of the influences there
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would have come with the Islamic invasions and there were the different kinds of colonialism
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There were the various, you know, colonial routes of ingredients to India.
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But there are also routes that people are less aware of.
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For instance, we are so conditioned to thinking of products coming in from the West, that
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we often ignore all the influences coming from the East.
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And actually, especially from South India or especially in Bengal, there are massive
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traditions of influences from Southeast Asia, you know, intrinsically Southeast Asian or
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Far Eastern and also from the Americas because we, you know, again because of this Western
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focus we have, we forget that there was this huge movement of goods from the New World,
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from South America over the Pacific by what are called the Manila galleons.
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The Manila galleons were these fleets of ships that set off from Peru, from Mexico to Manila.
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This is Spanish because the Philippines were Spanish run.
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And arguably a vast amount of food products came to Asia over the Pacific through the
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Manila galleons and spread from there to India.
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I mean, again, we're hypothesizing which products these were, but quite probably it included
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pineapples, it could have been cashews, it could have been sweet potatoes, which are
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actually very interesting product because they may even have predated the Manila galleons
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and come with the Polynesian, you know, movement across the Pacific.
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And the one that's really interesting is chilies because we are still not very sure how chilies
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And of course, how they became such an intrinsically part of Indian society.
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Of course, chilies are from South America.
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That's the one thing we know for sure.
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But how did chilies become so essentially Indian?
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And again, we can only speculate.
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I mean, perhaps the best, the most interesting theory was the one put forth by K.T. Acharya,
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India's pioneering food historian, whose idea was that chilies substituted a particular
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spice which is now very rare here, which is called long pepper.
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Long pepper is something called pipali.
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And if you've ever had a really bad cough, you know, your mother might have given you
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this as a sort of Ayurvedic preparation and hot milk.
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It's a variety of pepper, which is long as the name suggests.
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And it looks a bit like a chili.
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It's much more spicy, much more peppery.
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And Acharya's theory is that this was used a lot along with regular black pepper.
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But the thing about long pepper is that it's not a very convenient spice.
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I mean, A, it grows only where pepper vines grow, which is really in the very much more
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tropical, you know, rainforest parts of India.
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It doesn't keep very well.
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I mean, you have to pickle it and it's not that as convenient to use.
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And when chilies came, chilies are a very easy crop to grow.
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They grow almost anywhere.
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People grow chilies in pots in their house.
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And you can always have chilies growing and it's a very easy source of heat.
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So Acharya's theory, it fits in a way from a lot of what we're talking like what we started
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off by saying about the marigolds.
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We just found chilies to be a much more easier way of getting heat into our food than long
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And this again goes back to what you were saying about pragmatism.
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And it seems to me that therefore a lot of our adopting foreign foods is as much an adoption
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of food itself as an adoption of technology in the sense that, you know, you want that
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spiciness in your food instead of the old technology, which is long peppers, you adopt
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a new technology, which is these chilies, which are coming from outside and who cares
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where they're coming from?
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I mean, you adopt them and you make them quintessentially Indian.
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So, you know, the basics of Indian food remain the same.
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It's just that the means that we used to get it other becomes slightly different.
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Another fascinating example is with the dals.
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Now, dal is something that again, that is very basic and intrinsic to Indian food, mainly
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because it's one of our main sources of protein.
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And we depend upon legumes on beans a lot more than most other parts of the world.
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And we have very traditional dals like moong and masoor and urad dal and also lesser known
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dals, which we started substituting.
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Once we encountered the new world dals.
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Now this whole process of exchange between these dals you named are Indian.
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The dals are named Indian.
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What is not Indian is rajma, for instance.
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And this is really interesting when you think about it, because, you know, you think of
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rajma chawal as being this essential north Indian dish, but rajma is not.
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Rajma is a new world bean.
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And this process is, which is called the Colombian exchange of old and new world products being
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Rajma is one of the key products that was exchanged.
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And you can even see it in the name because the hypothesis is that I named three dals
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earlier, moong, masoor, and urad, which is called mash.
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And the theory is that rajma means the king, the large urad, raj mash, okay.
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It just fitted into Indian cooking styles.
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And now it's an intrinsically part of India as rajma chawal.
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And what you pointed out earlier before we started talking was, I mean, on one hand,
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we were talking about how idlis are taking over India, which I'll ask you to elaborate
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But when I asked you if idlis are Indian, you said that maybe not that there is a theory
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that fermentation came from Indonesia.
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I mean, you know, again, as with a lot of food history is so much speculation, but it's
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true that Indonesia is a sort of center point for lots of fascinating fermented foods like
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tempeh and a whole range of other fermented foods.
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And one theory is that idli, which is actually a fermented food, is something that came from
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Indonesia through the long Tamil connection with Southeast Asia.
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And what is fascinating, I mean, earlier I'd spoken about the wheat invasion of South India.
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But to me, what has been equally fascinating the last few decades has been the idli invasion
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of North India, because it's happened for a very simple reason.
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I mean, when I was growing up, idlis were seen as madrasi.
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It was this very South Indian thing.
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You know, I had friends, you know, family friends who would come from the North and
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they would want to eat like idlis, you know, because it was intrinsically like Indian.
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And it was not that usual to get idlis outside South India.
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Now you can go across India and you will find idlis everywhere, particularly in roadside
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I mean, roadside dhabas have this sort of impression of being very North Indian Punjabi.
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But actually what you can get in them across India is idlis because they're seen as light,
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And this is the key thing, easy to produce in bulk.
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One thing that has really empowered idlis to spread across India is that it's the one
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food which is easy to make on a large scale, once, especially once wet grinders were invented.
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We still don't know who invented wet grinders, but it seems likely that wet grinders were
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invented somewhere in Iran, Coimbatore, because it has a whole machine parts industry and
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somebody, some bright person decided to fit a sort of grinder to the stone inside the
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stone list and you've got wet grinders.
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And slowly wet grinders started picking up and restaurants realized that they could use
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wet grinders to make the idli batter very easily.
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And then it was just a question of steaming them on a large scale.
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Now compare that to chapatis, chapatis are strangely enough one typically Indian food,
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which we have not been able to scale up.
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I mean, yes, there are chapati makers, but everybody hates the rotis that come from chapati
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Some daughters in law are called chapati makers.
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And you know, this is the problem with chapatis, chapatis have to be made one at a time by
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hand and people have all sorts of preferences, you know, people don't, some people like it
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more puffed, some people like it slightly burnt, some people like it really soft.
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It's really difficult to scale up chapatis, whereas it's very easy to scale up idlis.
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And for that reason alone, idlis have become, I would say our national food in a way that
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chapatis no longer are.
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That's quite mind blowing, especially from someone who's grown up eating Bengali and
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North Indian food to hear you describe of idlis as.
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And the way you spoke of it, you know, a venture capitalist would love that.
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What should I invest in idlis scale better?
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And they're also again, a metric of empowerment because chapatis are labor intensive.
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The labor in Indian kitchens is usually done by unpaid women.
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So hey, in fact, there is one startup which has become hugely successful ID by simply
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making idli batter, which can be, you know, sold through chilled cabinets and it's become
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So I can go to like any kirana shop in Bombay and actually through most parts of most large
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cities in India and buy readymade idli batter, which then I just have to put into a pressure
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So much for my keto diet.
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So far during this conversation, you've spoken of things like saffron, marigold, chilies,
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tomatoes, potatoes, beans, rajma, all of which come from outside.
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What is there, which is quintessentially Indian, like for example, if 2000 years ago I had
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to have what would then be called an Indian meal.
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What would it consist of?
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I realize it's a very simplistic question because there are so many different regions
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Well, obviously rice, I mean, most Indian foods were based around rice and a few other
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I mean, bananas, for example, we tend to forget how important bananas have been because we
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just think of bananas in terms of the ripe fruit, but actually green bananas are cooked
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as a vegetable, are very intrinsically Indian preparation.
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A lot of ritual foods involve green bananas and that the text I was mentioning to you
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earlier, the super shastra, along with banana flowers, green bananas are one of the vegetables
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that they use a lot and bananas again may or may not have originated in India, but certainly
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in India is one of the largest sources of diversity for bananas and bananas have gone
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from India across the world.
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But what is really strange,
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We are a banana republic in that sense.
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We are a banana republic.
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We are better than a banana republic because we have this huge diversity of bananas.
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Whereas the banana republics which you're talking about are the Central American countries
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that started growing bananas for the American market.
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And these countries were growing bananas purely for commercial reasons.
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The bananas were not native to these countries.
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They were vast banana plantations and the companies like Dole and what is now Chiquita
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Bananas, which invested in these republics.
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And essentially became so powerful that they control these republics, which is why they
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call banana republics, only grew one or two types of bananas.
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That's what they were interested in because they were industrially grown bananas.
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Now I am making a point on this, which we will come to, but because bananas are something
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I'm very passionate about, they hit upon only two or three types of bananas.
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And the problem with monocultures, if you know anything about agriculture, is that monocultures
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are very dangerous because you get a virus which kills them, you kill all of them.
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And that's exactly what has happened with bananas, not once but twice that a virus comes
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which wipes out a strain of banana completely.
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And this has been happening across the world.
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So when the original type of banana got wiped out, the banana companies quickly innovated
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and found a new type, which is called Cavendish, which has now become the universal banana.
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If you go across to the west, there is only one type of banana that you know, which is
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long, beautifully yellow and completely tasteless.
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But it's great for the grocery trade.
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That's what you know, Cavendish is a banana, which is an industrial banana.
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Why do people eat it if it's tasteless?
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Because that's all they know.
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Americans, people in the west don't know any other type of banana.
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If they come to India, their minds get blown when they eat the sort of banana, the varieties
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of bananas that we have over here.
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But for them, there's only one type of banana.
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And that's what they see as a banana.
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Now what has happened is that two or three types of virus are wiping out this.
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What actually has happened in the past is repeating.
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The bananas are being, Cavendish is being wiped out across the Central American states,
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across the banana, the so-called banana republics.
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So what is happening now is that they're coming to India and they're growing Cavendish over
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here, which is one of the stupidest things possible because A, it's completely tasteless
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compared to our, you know, native bananas.
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And B, it's going to happen here.
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The virus will come here.
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The virus has already started coming out here.
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And what is awful is because they are growing these bananas and it's being planted in vast
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amounts in Maharashtra and Gujarat in particular for the Western market and the surplus is
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being dumped in the Indian market.
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So in the last 10 years, 10 years back, I could go to Matunga and Bombay and I would
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get five or six types of bananas from South India.
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Some of them grown in, in Versailles.
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Today, everywhere you get, you get what is called golden banana, which is Cavendish.
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It's not a patch on the traditional Indian bananas like, you know, Rastali's or all the
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South Indian bananas, but it's what we've started growing.
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And it's, it is really a tragedy.
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And there are many cautionary tales in this.
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One of them, of course, is of the value of diversity because we have such a diverse types
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You won't have this kind of thing happening where a virus cleans it out.
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And you know, the other is of perhaps a cautionary tale about a certain kind of globalization,
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which you know, wipes out indigenous forms of in this particular context is banana, but
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You know, you can extend it to culture and food and whatever.
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And, and it's a tragedy of education, you know, because we don't value Indian bananas
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We have forgotten how good they taste.
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I mean, I can still go to Tamil Nadu, luckily, where the, you know, Cavendish was not taken
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over the extent to it as in Bombay or North India.
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And you have these amazing bananas.
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You have a variety of bananas, you know, in a big, thick slice.
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Some of them slightly chewy.
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They have the red bananas.
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And it's a real tragedy that they're all being wiped out and replaced by this one tasteless
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banana, which is perfect for the international trade, which itself is going to get wiped
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out in time by, by the virus.
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So there's an irony in this, right?
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We gave banana to the world and then they gave a particular kind of banana to us, which
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It is really one of the ironies.
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It's in fact a similar irony to our giving chicken to the world and then being assailed
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with chicken to come us on.
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I mean, this is actually an interesting story too, because chickens sort of originated in
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Chickens, the modern chicken is a descendant of the Indian jungle fowl, which is native
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to North India and Northeast India.
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And it does seem to have been hunted in the past as a sort of game bird.
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But the domestication of chickens may have happened somewhere in Northeast India or Southeast
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So there are different theories about why chickens in particular were domesticated.
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For instance, one theory is that actually we, chickens were domesticated not for the
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chickens themselves, but for cock fighting, because cock fighting is part of various rituals.
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Even today in, in, in this is controversial, but in, you know, for some South Indian festivals,
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cock fights are seen as traditional and this is being opposed by animal rights activists
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But so one theory is that chickens were domesticated for cock fighting rituals.
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The other theory is that chickens were domesticated because unlike say ducks, they don't require
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They adapt quite well to chicken coops and houses.
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I mean, there are different, different theories, but the key point is that the main domestication
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happened through Southeast Asia from where then they spread across to the West and the
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What happened then is that in around the World War II, there was a huge demand for meat,
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especially in America, and the main meat sources, which was beef, was being sent to the battlefield
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So the people at home had to look for another easy source of meat and chickens became adopted
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as a quick easy source of meat because you know, you can raise chickens much faster.
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That's when chicken, it's as late as that.
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I mean, there are certain routes before that, but the mass production of chickens really
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happened during World War II and post World War II, that's when the broilers were developed
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because you know, the Americans were selling this idea of a world where, you know, of this
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vast prosperous America where everybody always had meat and chickens, broiler chickens were
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seen as the meat of the future.
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So that's when broiler chickens were developed, this completely unnatural bird, which matures
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in just a matter of a few weeks and lives in these, you know, cooped up conditions and
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develops these huge heavy breast meat.
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You know, typically, originally chickens didn't have this heavy chicken breast meat.
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I mean, this comes with chickens which are bred for like sitting in cooped up conditions
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and broilers developed from there through a lot of other American innovations.
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For instance, the spread of antibiotics because the problem with raising chickens in these
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cooped up conditions is that they get diseases and they all fall sick and coincidentally
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enough, the 1950s were when America was discovering all the wonders of antibiotics and they realized
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that putting antibiotics in the chicken feed makes chickens grow much faster.
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And that's where this completely unnatural bird, which has nothing now in connection
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really to the Indian jungle fowl was developed.
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And now we have taken it into India because we have a vast population which wants meat
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and chicken is the easiest meat because it can be produced fast.
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It doesn't have any of the religious and cultural hassles of pork or beef.
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So we are developing this vast chicken industry.
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So there's a massive irony here that chickens which originate in India are now becoming
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the mass Indian meat, but it's a horrible meat.
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It's a horrible unhealthy meat which has no connection at all to the Indian jungle fowl.
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So in a sense, chickens have traveled the same distance that bananas have.
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The modern chicken is like the Cavendish banana or the golden banana and it's tasteless and
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it's come from the West.
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It's come from the West.
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When we gave them the original thing.
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And it is this completely, I mean, you know, once you read the research that's going into
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the problems of antibiotic use in chicken feed, and this is spilling over into humans
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because antibiotic resistance is rising because of this vast lavish use of antibiotics in
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animal feed among other reasons.
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So it's deeply disturbing to see this huge upsurge in chicken production in India.
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So within our culture, how do we keep our sense of what is Indian food?
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For example, you might say that bananas and chickens are Indian, but as you just pointed
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out what a lot of people who might now go to Matunga and buy golden bananas think of
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as Indian isn't really Indian.
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How do we preserve our sense of what is Indian food regardless of where it originated from?
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I mean, I think we just need to look at authenticity in buying food.
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I mean, you know, authenticity is a problematic concept because then, you know, people get
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into things of like, you know, disputes over whatever is, you know, really authentic, etc.
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I think we should just look at authenticity in terms of produced in the simplest possible
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way, you know, trying to buy it as close to the producers as possible.
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One of the really encouraging things that's happening across India is that we are seeing
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a lot of farmers, farmers markets, people, you know, producers selling food directly
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And that's really important.
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I mean, supermarkets do have a role to play in the wider business sense, but the level
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to which supermarkets have grown in the West and in the developed world to the extent to
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which they control both consumers and producers is a deeply disturbing.
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And you could argue that the impetus behind that is the same impetus behind this wonderful
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exchange of cultures is maintaining what, which is pragmatism.
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Look, supermarkets have many benefits.
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I'm not going to argue with somebody who's at the end of a busy day, doesn't find the
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time to go to a farmer's market and actually, you know, get the produce and clean themselves.
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We need, you know, to be able to make things easily.
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It's just that we need to look at the larger costs involved and sometimes the costs involved
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with supermarkets and are not visible to us, but are very real and deeply problematic.
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Like for instance, the cost of health issues that are coming from, you know, antibiotic
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Is it then fair to say that while say the history of Indian food or the history of Indian
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cuisine has been a journey where we take influences from everywhere, whether for pragmatic reasons
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or otherwise, and it all becomes Indian once it's adopted.
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So it's not fair to say, for example, that chilies or tomatoes or rajma aren't Indian.
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Once we've adopted them and made them our own, they are Indian.
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But now we've come to this place where we are taking a journey almost in the opposite
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We're driven by the same pragmatism as before.
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We are now, you know, changing these food habits and adopting, for example, Cavendish
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bananas and what you call antibiotic fed modern chickens and moving away from what can and
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cannot be described as our roots.
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I just think, as I said, people need to be a bit more mindful about the food and what
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makes it a lot easier is that a lot of these foods are still available in India.
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You know, many of these foods which, you know, have been taken up by the West as these fantastic
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modern ingredients are actually available in India.
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They're available in two sources.
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One, they're available as part of rituals.
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A lot of traditional Indian foods survive as part of temple rituals.
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So for instance, during this whole thing, during upvas, that we don't eat grains.
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I mean, it's an interesting practice because what essentially is happening is upvas foods
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go back to the traditional Indian foods, you know, the Indian foods of the field, of the
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I mean, that's the sort of idea that you would eat the food that the rishis would eat.
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Now, again, a lot of food that is actually eaten during upvas is like things like sweet
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potatoes, which are not intrinsically Indian, but at least it's a way of giving you a diversity.
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So, you know, for upvas, you will not eat rice or wheat or something like that.
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And many millets like ragi are very intrinsically Indian.
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And so simply because of these upvas rituals for temple purposes, a lot of foods are preserved
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and are available in India.
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One of the biggest struggles in the West has been just making these foods available.
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Actually in India, most of these foods are available.
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You just have to go to a traditional market.
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You have to ask grandmothers because many of the upvas rituals are kept up by grandmothers
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and they know where to get all these foods from.
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But is that going to change with time with the decline of the joint family and you know?
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But what is great is that people for health benefits are rediscovering the values of all
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And the other way that all these foods are available is actually with poor people because
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the many of these traditional foods, because they look down on, are seen as food only for
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And yet they're available in a city like Bombay.
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And it's quite fascinating.
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I often, you know, sometimes when I go to markets, I don't go into the main market because
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the main market is where all the sort of prestige vegetables, what you call English vegetables
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But if you look on the margins of markets, you will find old ladies sitting, they'll
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have a bed sheet, a piece of cloth, and they'll have some bunches of greens of, you know,
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which they have picked.
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It could be like drumstick leaves.
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It could be things like Malabar spinach.
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It could be like, there's a whole range, pumpkin flowers, a whole range of forage greens, which
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are just available for anybody who goes out and picks them.
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And these are available very cheap.
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And they're sold for people who know them, who know their value.
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They're often extremely healthy because they have all sorts of nutrients which are not
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necessarily available in the sort of prestigious vegetables.
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But they're there for poor people.
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I mean, for instance, like one type of green I found being sold in the mill areas, actually
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safflower, a safflower leaves, okay, not the oil, which is what are pressed and used for,
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you know, safflower oil, but the greens of safflower.
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Now, this is a very traditional vegetable in interior Maharashtra, which is where a lot
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of the mill workers come from.
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And it's still sold in Bombay in these areas.
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It's a delicious green, but I can only buy it on the roadside.
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I will never find it in a market like even on a supermarket.
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So if I may take this opportunity, you know, for listeners of my show who like to cook,
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why don't you recommend four or five interesting offbeat things which they won't find in supermarkets
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which you'd recommend them to try?
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Well, drumstick leaves.
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I mean, you know, if you want a plant that is very deeply Indian, it's drumstick.
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And drumsticks are a wonderful plant because it's a tree for one thing, which means that
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it produces through the year.
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The drumsticks, which are what we're familiar with, is water going through like sambar and
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dal and dishes like that.
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But the leaves are also extremely nutritious.
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I mean, it's actually fascinating.
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In Africa, there are whole, you know, NGOs that are devoted to like selling the benefits
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of moringa, as it's called.
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And you know, all these projects to grow moringa within cities.
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I've seen projects where, you know, schoolchildren are encouraged to grow moringa so that the
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Leaves are an extremely great source of nutrition and protein.
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And again, this is something which is sold by the roadside.
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Dried fish is another product, which again is falling out of fashion completely.
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And in Bombay in particular, dried fish is very intrinsic to Bombay.
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You could say that dried fish was one of the things that almost founded Bombay.
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Because if you look back at the history of Bombay, you know, Bombay was a very poor place.
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I mean, it has very little to recommend itself.
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It had a harbor, but that was about it.
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I mean, there were no natural products.
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There was nothing really.
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It had coconut trees and it had dried fish, I mean, dried Bombay duck, basically.
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And you can read reports, the British moaning and groaning about the smell of dried fish.
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You know, just like even now, today in sort of swanky neighborhoods like Bandra or Varsova,
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you have people trying to stop the fishermen's colonies drying fish because it's the smell
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is reducing the value of all these really expensive apartments.
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And yet dried fish is intrinsic to Bombay.
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It was a very important product for a very simple reason.
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During the monsoons, the boats couldn't go out.
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And so you didn't get fish.
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So you had to have dried fish.
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Dried fish was your key protein source, which tried to do over the monsoon months.
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And there's a whole range of dishes that the traditional Bombay communities like the
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Pathare Prabhus or the CKPs cook, which use dried fish, their vegetable dishes, which
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use dried fish or dried shrimp to add flavor.
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They're delicious dishes because, you know, just a little bit of dried shrimp or dried
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fish adds a great depth to your dish.
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It's like the way fish sauce is used in Thai food or Southeast Asian food.
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But unfortunately, we have stopped cooking these dishes because there's one uncomfortable
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And now that we live in apartment buildings and now that we have enclosed kitchens, the
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dried fish smell is really hard to get.
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The neighbors will complain.
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No restaurant wants to serve dried fish dishes because what they say is that the smell will
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come into the dining room.
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The hotel restaurants can't serve dried fish dishes because they sell this.
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The stink will come into the hotel rooms.
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So these dried fish dishes, which are really delicious, nutritious and important to India,
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are completely vanishing from our lives.
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Moringa, dried fish, well banana flower, you know, green jackfruit, all these things that
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are becoming trendy abroad.
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I mean, these are all the sort of like foods that people really should try and experiment
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Yesterday we were talking about restaurants and how, you know, I had done an episode with
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Ashok Malik about TV channels and he'd made an interesting point there that the license
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cost of TV channels just setting up and running them is so incredibly high that they end up
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aiming for the lowest common denominator and you don't get enough variety and diversity.
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And the same point has been made by, for example, Amit Doshi of IVM podcast, who partnered with
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me in producing the scene in the unseen, where he talks about radio and he says that, you
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know, you look at the diversity of radio in New York and contrast it with India, where
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the license fees are so high at lowest common denominator.
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So everyone's churning out Bollywood music.
#
And you pointed out at the start of this episode that it's the same with restaurants, that
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restaurants are fundamentally such an expensive, high investment business because of real estate
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and blah, blah, blah, that they aim for the lowest common denominator and your early days
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as a restaurant critic, this frustrated you because I presume you'd get the same butter
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Because culturally, I think in a sense you have more openness and more influences coming
#
in even from outside, but a lot of the new restaurants that I see, and this is obviously
#
my bias because I'm a relatively Westernized elite here, a lot of the new restaurants I
#
see will be like molecular gastronomy kind of restaurants and more influences from the
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But is a diversity of Indian food beyond what the West has sent back to us finding any kind
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I think there are a few positive signs.
#
I mean, one of them actually is YouTube.
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You know, a lot of people have realized that YouTube is a great way to chronicle recipes.
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There are so many YouTube channels or YouTube videos of Indian housewives making very traditional
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Indian recipes that are really useful because, I mean, you are allowed to see the sort of
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slight hand movements, you know, especially when you're making something like rotis.
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It's very minute things like the hand, how you roll the dough, whether you throw a little
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bit of water on the tawa to create a bit of steam before you put the bakri on it, which
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prevents the bakri from sticking on the tawa.
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These are the very subtle things which are sometimes very hard to write in a recipe,
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but YouTube allows you to capture that.
#
So I think one of the really important things that's happening is that YouTube is allowing
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a lot of people to chronicle a lot of very traditional Indian recipes.
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I mean, I'm not saying that the videos are often great.
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I mean, often the picture quality is a bit iffy and things like that, but at least the
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recipes are being chronicled.
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I think the fact that it's becoming easier to publish a book is allowing a lot of people
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to publish very traditional recipes.
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In the last 10 years, most of the really fascinating cookbooks I know that chronicle traditional
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Indian recipes have been self-published.
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What would you recommend for my listeners?
#
I mean, it's hard to recommend these because, you know, they're very hard to get by the
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nature of being self-published because, you know, they're often not available on Amazon
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But there are amazing community initiatives, nearly all run by women, which are chronicling
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And, you know, one amazing cookbook is a book called Dadi Manu Varso, which means the grandmother's
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treasury, which is an attempt to chronicle the recipes of the Palanpuri Jains.
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Now, if you know anything about the Palanpuri Jains, they're a really interesting community
#
because they're very rich because they're the community that controls the diamond business.
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And so, you know, they're across the world wherever diamonds are traded and sold and
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But because they're so spread out, a lot of the people in the Palanpuri Jain community
#
have started worrying that they are going to lose out the very traditional Palanpuri
#
And these are recipes that are interesting for multiple reasons, one, obviously, they're
#
So they won't cook a lot of like root vegetables and things like that.
#
So they use things like fruits, like guavas and, you know, fruits and a lot of dried vegetables,
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desert vegetables, because Palanpur is very close to Rajasthan.
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So you have a lot of like those sort of dried Rajasthani vegetables, which are used in their
#
So a group of women in Bombay got together and decided to chronicle the recipes.
#
And because they had money, they were able to put a lot of money into doing it.
#
It's an amazing cookbook.
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It's half in Gujarati, half in English, because they wanted to make it really accessible.
#
It costs about 650 rupees to buy, which is much less than the cost of production.
#
But it's an absolutely detailed, painstaking chronicling of every part of the community's
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cooking down to the utensils that are used and, you know, all the traditional dried ingredients
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that are going to making Palanpuri Jain food.
#
And like that, there are different community initiatives.
#
Sometimes they're not community initiatives, sometimes just a family.
#
It's becoming very common now for people to do tribute cookbooks to their mothers or
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And these books are always interesting.
#
I mean, I have a huge collection of them simply because they have one or two offbeat, really
#
unusual recipes, which are chronicled in them.
#
I mean, what would be great was if some way these books could become available, you know,
#
And to some extent that's happening.
#
I mean, there are a few print on demand producers.
#
I mean, there's a company called Notion Press in Chennai, which is doing this.
#
And they are offering a sort of pejorative term for this is vanity publishing.
#
But basically it's publishing for you and you chronicle it.
#
And they produce a nice quality book and they put it on Amazon, they get the ISP number
#
and they do all that backend stuff and they'll even do an e-book if you want it.
#
And it's these sort of publishers who are not the big well-known publishers who I think
#
are doing an amazing job in helping a lot of Indian cooking get documented.
#
So that might keep the recipes alive, but are ingredients getting extinct?
#
I mean, it's some ingredients like all the banana varieties are definitely becoming harder
#
But again, I mean, I try to be hopeful and I think what is helping here is the growth
#
of traditional markets, the growth of farmers markets, small markets, people really becoming
#
interested in these sort of things who are trying to make these recipes available.
#
Many of these ingredients are being promoted for health benefits, which may or may not
#
That's not all of them are what they're touted to be.
#
But if people believe that because they're healthy, they're going to keep consuming it,
#
And I'm going to sort of, I've taken a lot of your time.
#
I'm going to end this episode by asking you a question, a version of which I ask all my
#
guests on the topic of their expertise.
#
I mean, in a sense, what I realized talking about Indian food with you is that talking
#
about Indian food in a sense is talking about globalization.
#
Because all of Indian food, I mean, this globalization has been with us for thousands of years and
#
all of Indian food is basically, you know, to use the cliched phrase, a melting pot.
#
And we see the same process of globalization now accelerating and bringing about, you know,
#
different manifestations of it.
#
In some cases you have, you know, supermarkets driving out local markets and, you know, Cavendish
#
driving out all our different kinds of bananas, but equally you have our recipes proliferating
#
on YouTube and so on and so forth.
#
So my two part question, what makes you hopeful and what makes you despair about the trends
#
of globalization with reference to Indian food?
#
Well, what makes me hopeful, I think, is the fact that I started off by saying that the
#
fact that I started writing about food writing, because I could talk to anybody about food.
#
Food is the one thing that connects everyone and everybody is interested in food.
#
You can talk to anyone about food and their food memories and their food experiences.
#
And you have a way of connecting with everybody.
#
So we're dealing with something that is of a lot of interest to people.
#
I mean, we can see it in the way that politicians so often use food metaphors, you know, in
#
their speeches, because they know that food connects with people at a very primal level.
#
So I think we're dealing with something that is very basic, that is very, that really literally
#
hits people at a gut level and it's always easy to interest people in food.
#
So that's the positive side.
#
The thing that makes me a bit, I don't know, despairing, but definitely sad is that people
#
don't open their minds and they don't want to experiment with food.
#
They become very closed.
#
And, you know, one thing that I find particularly depressing is the sort of rigidity with which
#
we're getting into the vegetarian non-vegetarian divide, which was essentially not something
#
that was there in India in the past.
#
I mean, yes, you had some vegetarians and you had a few people who ate a lot of meat,
#
but those people were traditionally, you know, just a very few rich people.
#
Most people ate a sort of mixed diet, which was largely vegetarian, but many of them did
#
eat meat in small doses.
#
Sometimes, as I said, we were talking about dried fish as flavorings in their food.
#
And these are very important, very nutritious, completely delicious dishes.
#
And they're getting completely lost because we are seeing a polarization between vegetarian
#
Vegetarians are becoming fanatically vegetarian.
#
They won't even eat eggs or any kind of meat.
#
And sadly enough, non-vegetarians are also becoming fanatically non-vegetarian because
#
if you want, they want to eat chicken, they just want to eat chicken, you know, they just
#
want to eat full on meat.
#
For many North Indians, it's almost a macho thing.
#
Or they do keto diets, like you do.
#
So yeah, there's a macho element, exactly, you know, and people are more prosperous,
#
I mean, we should never be sad that people are prosperous.
#
And because they're prosperous, they want more meat and that's, you know, prosperity
#
is always a good thing.
#
But it's a bit sad if they define prosperity as only eating meat.
#
And in the process, I think a lot of traditional Indian foods are getting lost.
#
I mean, what I call these semi-vegetarian foods, which are very important, they're delicious
#
dishes, they're nutritious dishes, and they're environmentally important dishes because,
#
I mean, there is certainly a cost that is being attached to this huge rise in meat consumption.
#
There's a cost that's coming in things like the rising antibiotic use.
#
There's an ethical cost, which is coming in the ill-treatment of animals.
#
And you know, this is something I think food writers will have to grapple with.
#
Like a lot of people, I have mixed feelings about the vegan movement.
#
But I think the vegan movement is really challenging us to think about essential things, like how
#
is it possible if you are well-off?
#
And again, this is a position that comes from a position of luxury.
#
I do not think you can ever tell a person who's starving, like, don't eat meat.
#
But if you're a well-off person and you have the option of not eating meat from the sort
#
of industrial production of meat, where you know that there is so much abuse of animals,
#
the rampant use of antibiotics, how can you continue to eat meat unquestioningly?
#
I'm not saying don't eat meat.
#
I'm saying question it.
#
And India actually has a solution to all of these issues.
#
To many of these issues, vegan food is natural to India in a way that it is not in most parts
#
We have these vast vegan, vegetarian, semi-vegetarian traditions, and we're forgetting those.
#
And I think that's a bit sad.
#
So that would have been a good note to end, but I thought of another question to ask you
#
when you mentioned the ethical dilemmas of meat eating, which is, I think at some point
#
in the future, it's only a question of when we can argue about, but at some point it's
#
definitely going to happen that it's going to become commercially viable to have lab-grown
#
And that was basically synthesized an entire animal log in.
#
And it looks like chicken, it tastes like chicken, but it was never alive to begin with.
#
It's fascinating, yeah.
#
And that's going to happen.
#
And when that happens, I can imagine that someone like you would respond in two ways.
#
The negative response would be that, oh, food diversity is struck down the same way that
#
you bemoan the loss of the jungle fowl, that it hits food diversity.
#
But ethically, then it's a great boon because...
#
Ethically, it'll be a great boon.
#
And I think it's a reminder to us that tradition, diversity, I mean, are all important things,
#
but there are other issues like animal welfare, health, environmental costs that also have
#
to be taken into account.
#
That's a fantastic note to end the episode on.
#
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Vikram.
#
I learned a lot from you today.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do hop on over to audiomatic.in and listen
#
to all 48 episodes of Vikram's brilliant podcast, The Real Food Podcast.
#
Also, please Google his name.
#
He's written hundreds of brilliant pieces on food over the decades, among other subjects,
#
and an hour spent entering the rabbit hole of Vikram doctor's writing is an hour well
#
Vikram doesn't happen to be on much social media, but you can follow me on Twitter at
#
Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A, and you can browse past episodes of The Scene and the
#
Unseen at sceneunseen.in or thinkprakati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Do you have a night routine?
#
Well, everyone has one.
#
And the to-do list usually looks like this.
#
Brush your teeth, set that alarm, get into your pajamas, and switch off those screens.
#
But here's one more to add to that list.
#
Tune into the Positively Unlimited Podcast for a dose of positive action and tips on
#
how to build powerful mindsets.
#
Episodes out every Monday on the IVM Podcast app, ivmpodcast.com, or wherever you tune
