Food Fetish (Or, Every Emotion Can be Eaten Whole)

If there’s something that puts my internal food snob on immediate High Alert, it’s the phrase ‘I’m a foodie’. It’s just such common parlance these days, inundating conversations across the board: formal introductions and polite conversations and first dates. Perhaps I encounter it more often because I am incapable of hiding the fact that I am an ex- FoodReviewer. Perhaps it’s because I just like being a snob. Or a glam-ex-designation-dropper. But it makes me wonder (and not always about my vanity). There’s something to be said about how loving food has been upgraded to something of a virtue in the last decade. Something akin to connosieurship, even if it’s street food you’re talking about. People love to declare certain dishes ‘the best’, ‘the most authentic’, ‘the most unique’. They talk highly of refined palates and delicacy of flavour; dishes are ‘subtle’, menus are ‘sophisticated’, preparations are ‘authentic’. I miss people talking of what food does to them, not just what's been done to the food. There’s hardly any talk of what food simply was in my growing up days: gluttony, excess, just-the-way-I-like-it-to-hell-with-authentic. (I guess snobbery has a bit to do with hanging on to out-of-fashion politically incorrect ideas.)

There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to be the Ultimate Foodie: a food encyclopaedia, a comprehensive food index that prefixes everything food with ‘oh but the real story behind it is…’ or ‘the correct way of eating it is…’. I wanted to be a know-all with inexhaustible brag potential, encountering the wonder of food with a chronicler-hoarder’s equanimity, that tempered accumulative greed. But the more I taste, the more I hunt for food-trivia, the harder I find it to be the food expert. I am guilty of the food reviewer’s biggest flaw; I can’t not be emotional about food. The more I taste, the more I crave to go home, to taste the only flavours I once knew.

The only reckoning now, is that food is panacea for every phenomenon in the world. It's a bit like music; it has the power to talk about everything in the universe, really. It’s the shortest distance to any random stranger, shorter than six degrees of separation. It’s the most insidious in associative memory. Coffee is solitude is half-moon stains is winter afternoon sun is feeling super-lucky. Pancakes are a half-eaten stack and a conversation so luscious you want to swallow it whole. Besan ki roti is a bad cold chased away by a love so unaware of its generosity, that it could only be a mother’s.

Perhaps I say this because I have discovered that the pleasure of eating is sharpened by the pleasure of cooking - which has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with feeling. Typed and pasted in my notebook, or scrawled neatly in my head, recipes are banal, unsuspicious objects; a sum of actions, a universally applicable formula, wholly dismissive of personal quirks. But if I surrender myself to their prim directives of ‘take’ ‘chop’ ‘set aside’, they reveal themselves in the shape of the people who gave them to me. Cooking brings me close to people this way (and I don’t just mean it in that ‘way to a man’s stomach’ way, though that one is just so uncomplicatedly true). Sometimes it draws me close, impossibly enough, even to people that they once were. Today, inadvertently, I conjured my mother from 10 years ago, while trying to reproduce her methi ka parantha recipe wholly from my memory of eating them for breakfast every winter day in college. It took more than a few trials and errors, but I got it down to pat - replicating even her parantha’s flaws perfectly (‘tis enough to say she didn’t care much for its aesthetics, only the taste, which was beguilingly comforting). I want to keep this recipe flawed; I want to pass it on as Mummy’s Methi Parantha (1999-2002) , not just Perfect Methi Parantha.

My father’s recipes, on the other hand, have made me a believer of the infallibility of cooking techniques. To solve every problem (from leaking taps to emotional pain) all that is required, Papa always says, is an application of scientific technique. ‘Technique se duniya chalti hai! (it’s technique that makes the world go round!)’, he’d always declare with glee, when I was a kid and in dire need of fixing something I'd screwed up. (I’d just nod along until he’d fixed things, quietly muttering ‘scientists, uff!’ to myself.) When in the kitchen, he would mouth culinary axioms that made my eyebrows contort into various kinds of incredulous frowns. Then I found myself in the tiny kitchen of my husband’s ISB apartment one day, with an ego too large to call mummy for cooking tips, and internet recipes that didn’t quite explain things in detail (‘cook onions till brown’ – how brown? Beige-y brown? Muddy brown? Chocolate brown?). My father hollered in my head suddenly, grinning over a cooker-full of Kosha Mangsho, ‘Smell it, and you’ll know whether you’re cooking it right!’ I followed him and my nose, and have been sniffing my way through cooking since then (remarkable, since I am otherwise rather nose-dead). It never fails to amuse my MiL (who at first worried whether this is an unhygeinic north Indian kitchen thing), and adds to the perpetually growing list of Things That Prove Swaati is Weirdly Wired. I’m not complaining. Back then, Papa’s kitchen axioms seemed esoteric at best. But having tried them out now, I like to think that esoteric is just another way of saying, ‘This works only if you believe’. I like to think of myself as esoteric; to be believed in is to feel like god, isn’t it?

I guess I do have things in common with The Foodie I detest, then. It is perhaps to do with our common fetish, our common discovery that food can be revelatory, that it makes us shared and exceptional, all at once. We’re both trying the same conversion in two different ways. He’s math, I’m fiction. He’s essentialising himself in a set of choices - mystification translated in a quick, impressive, statistical sort of way. I’m revelling in the possibilities obscurity presents, gathering each of my choices, turning them around one by one, poking and tasting until I’m closer to why they are my choices - until the only taste I can remember is of feeling, not food.

Either way, we’re both hungry people looking for answers. And so The Foodie and The Food Snob will meet, again and again. All the yummy food in the world is watching us infinitely, with a bewitching, wicked laugh.