Why are Indians so insular about food?
First of all, apologies about the broad generalization, but this something that has been bugging me for a while and I just want to vent. I love to eat all types of food and love to try out new things from different cultures. So far I have spent about six months in the US and have enjoyed being able to buy jicama and rosemary and miso and steaks and fish sauce all in my local supermarket. I’ve also enjoyed exploring wonderful restaurants both in a big city and a small one. I’m back home in Chennai now for a three week or so vacation. Yesterday the extended family and some friends went to lunch at a local Indian restaurant. Observing me attacking the food with gusto, my uncle asks "So _______, enjoying the food after all the inedible stuff in the US?" It was a rhetorical question so no answer was required, thankfully. Seriously, is it so hard to believe that there are good things to eat outside the Indian subcontinent and that Indians don’t have a monopoly on being able to cook?
This attitude is pretty pervasive. If you were to randomly sample a number of Indians about what kind of food they preferred, by far the most common answer would be Mom’s food. Which is all fine and dandy, I’m glad you love your mom’s food so much. But the flip side of this is that Indians are very suspicious of foreign food. I remember once when my parents and I were thinking about booking a trip to Europe or South America with a tour group. The big selling point of these tour groups seemed to be that they would provide "Indian meals" for lunch or dinner and sometimes both. I mean, WTF? Why would you want to travel halfway across the world only to eat the same dal-chawal you would have back home? But I honestly feel that this would be thought of as a plus by most Indians, who absolutely hate to have unfamiliar foods presented to them. The same uncle and his wife travelled through Europe with a rice-cooker and a case full of pickles and powders and that was what they mainly ate.
Despite having a fairly conservative population when it comes to food (and other matters too, but that’s another post), Chennai manages to sustain a handful of excellent non-mainstream restaurants that cater mainly to the expat community. For example, an amazing Japanese restaurant — Akasaka — and a wonderful Korean one named In Seoul. I have tried to persuade my non-vegetarian friends and family to come to Akasaka in the past, with me footing the bill. Their attitude is almost invariably something like "Raw fish!!!! EEEK!" I then explain that they really don’t have to eat the sushi and sashimi if they don’t want to and that there’s plenty of "cooked" food that they could eat there. Still no luck. The other day my parents, I and some family friends went to In Seoul for dinner. One of them announced loudly that he was not eating anything and reacted with disgust to every offer of food from what we ordered. It was more than a little irritating.
This may seem like a small thing to get worked up about, but it saddens me to see the self-righteous way in which most Indians insist that that Indian food is the best of all. Why even try to experience other foods, when we’ve got the best right here? I don’t even think that it’s a particularly South Indian characteristic, witness this hilarious and all too familiar post on Jabberwock. The whole post is wonderful but I’ll just quote a particularly juicy excerpt:
“Frankly speaking,” the chap then said, in the tone often employed by people who use that phrase (and “to be honest” and others such) as if they are about to bestow a hitherto undisclosed Indubitable Truth on the world, “nothing can compare with our Indian food. Even people who come to India for the first time from other countries forget about their own food after tasting our home-made cooking.”
All of this would be perhaps bearable if I weren’t also subjected to the self-righteous moralizing of people who refuse to be open to new food. There is this weird assumption that certain kinds of food are unclean and that the people eating them must be unclean too. I remember my shock when I heard a classmate of mine dismiss all Chinese people as dirty panni-eating (pig-eating) creatures. Since I happened to love eating all forms of pork products, I couldn’t help but take this personally.
Maybe such an attitude shouldn’t come as a surprise after reading this fascinating little article in the Hindu about the Indian responses to the 2007 Global Attidudes Survey recently carried out by the Pew Foundation. Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the statement, "our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others." Perhaps, Indians topped the list in agreeing with this statement, with a staggering 93%!
