Eating omnivorously and ubiquitously has become the consumption norm of our times! This new Epicureanism of unregulated gluttony has been the driving force of our modern lives. Gastronomical innovations and transformations seem to bombard the matters and manners of food in our times. Rapid and spectacular inventions in shapes, colours, textures, look, packaging, parceling, advertising, delivering of food, including even the very manner of cooking and eating it, are not just awesome but mindboggling too.
Added to this new culinary culture is the capitalist method of production, distribution and consumption of foods. And its marketing cousins—those tempting advertisements in their hard and soft presence around you! They coax you to subscribe that the new experiments with food is a sign of modernity and your status, and if you do not try a new dish every day, you are backward. Sticking to staple food is a stale sign — as much of the food as of you! These mercantile principles of food have brought in vast and forcible changes in our culinary culture.
Everything about food, the matter and manner of it, the times and spaces of it, the mentalities and attitudes, as well as the cultures and rituals of it, has undergone radical changes. The most spectacular display of such culinary revolution can be witnessed in the picturesque menu-cards and the exotic names of the dishes with their deshi and continental categorisations therein! Commenting on the modern culinary snobberies, AG Gardiner, the English essayist, opines: “Extravagant dinners bore me and offend what I may call my economic conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and the great language of the menu does not stir my pulse. I do not ask for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose.’’
Food has certainly changed its domain — from the scared and private domestic sphere at home to the profane and public platforms of global world. So have our dining space and eating etiquettes. Internet, YoutTube and other social and digital forums are the ocular sites of such gluttonous culinary praxis. It would certainly not be a mistake, therefore, to consider such extravaganza of food in our times as the snobbery of stomach! And this snobbery is inseparable from our modern lifestyle, as much as technology and computers are now inseparable from us. Oscar Wilde satirises this strange synonymy between consumption and city life in his play The Importance of Being Ernest (1895): ALGERNON – How are you, my dear Ernest? What brings you up to town? JACK – What else should bring one anywhere? Eating as usual…!
Food has thus appeared to be a strong marker of our identity and culture. It defines us, our space, our history, and the culture we live in. But, it has also bred several doubts and questions. Are we really happy and content with the freedom and choice we exercise in our culinary culture? Does our eating culture really define us modern, civil and refined? Are we ethical in not just what we eat but how we eat it also? Well, the ocular evidences from the world of our crude consumption culture suggest otherwise! In fact, this culinary exoticism has disturbed our lives — bringing cultural hazards of many kinds. The picture is more peculiar in developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan or a continent like Africa.
The dominance of food capitalism, as we experience in the developing countries like India, is actually a kind of culinary crusade against the indigenous food culture. The menu of such global foods is actually the culinary syllabus for the oppressed! We the poor and oppressed are being baptised into Western menu, and in a visibly invisible way. What Macaulay’s English education did earlier to our culture is being reiterated by Westernised food culture in our times. It is an elite culinary carnival which actually promises more but provides meagre. We are more seduced into the culinary cleavage between ours and theirs, hygienic and unhygienic, elite and ordinary. Globalisation and its food service sectors are not only defining nature and kinds of food, but also maintaining the culinary divide to rule. Our oriental foods are now exotic matters for the Western eyes, as we ourselves were to them during the colonial era. Awarding YouTube certificate for cooking channels is a neocolonial incentive now. We still need Western stamp for our culinary standard!
Capitalistic food culture is a culinary bomb that threatens all of us now, no matter how best it facilitates and guarantees food and services. It has given birth to hunger, violence, sins and culinary crises of many kinds. Take for examples the cases of delivery boys beaten up in Indore and Bangalore, or the delivery boy who died in a road accident while rushing to deliver the food parcel. In fact, there are several kinds of such examples. The viral video of the delivery boy pilfering food from the parcel before delivering, the delivery boy in Bhubaneswar acting as Good Samaritan amongst the public, or the recent Haldiram halal controversy in Bangalore are quite a few. You could bring in race, gender, caste, class, region, religion, health, beauty, body, into this domain of culinary crises of our times. On the other hand, culinary globalisation operating through global capitalistic strategies has forced us to discard the virtues of food, no matter how richly we foot our bills at the counter. ‘Gluttony’ is a Christian sin, so it is in other religions too; yet we are being dragged into it. ‘Charity’ is a virtue across religions, yet we lavishly squander money on fashionable foods, when actually multitudes of people starve in places not very far from our restaurants and dining tables.
Similarly, in the very eating process, we have rationally profaned food and rejected its spiritual connections with body, mind and soul. We read such sacred relationship in Krishna’s reply to Arjun in the Bhagavad Gita: “For like as foods are threefold for mankind, in nourishing, so is there threefold way of worship, abstinence, and alms giving!” The Catholic concept of transubstantiation of Christ’s ‘flesh as bread and blood as wine’ would establish the spiritual symbiosis of food and humans.
We no more realise that food is not just a hunger-slaking item but also an integral part of a larger chain of place, people, culture, and Nature. The primitive poor fought for food due to their scarcity and ignorance of food, but the greedy millennials toil for food due to their excess knowledge of food. The difference between our ancestors and us is the difference between hunger and gluttony. And, I believe, a great lot of our present culinary crises will be eradicated, if we employ our conscience to realise this difference between hunger and gluttony!
The writer is Associate Professor, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University.