Musing on India Food

Food in India is eponymous it pervades every aspect of life. As an outsider I can only perceive the tiniest portion of this relationship, yet even so one feels the its importance. If one takes a street in India of any reasonably sized settlement you will be faced with a sometimes bewildering array of places to eat, places to buy food and above all people eating. This feels like a constant regardless of the time of day. The food denotes both a sense of place and a continuum of overarching foods that seem to run the length of this country. So idlys and dosa, accompanied by firey sauces spiced with curry leaves tell you you are down south, in the same way that the richer greasier fare of the north give you a sense of that place. However as I say there are constants, take for example the somosa, which from town to town and state to state is reinterpreted and reinvented to each areas taste but yet keeps its essential form.

This I think is why as a foreigner you are so intrigued with the Indian relationship with food because put simply it is everywhere. However, do not think that because of its commonality that its quality ever suffers. Yes, I am not naive enough to say that no bad food exists in India yet overall the care and attention that seems to given to each item seems to be of such a high standard so often. So that from a greasy pakora to an intense curry all seem to have had a degree of skill and care employed in their creation.

I think that the reason for this quality is that at their hearts the Indian people are gourmands and gourmands in the truest sense of the word. This might seem to be an absurd thing to say in a country in which millions of people regularly do not get enough to eat but if we put the issue (and please don't think I'm being flippant about this it is just that the issue is too big for the narrow focus of this piece) of poverty to one side it seems to be a truth that an Indian when they can will always eat well. To give an example of this I was on bus during my last travels in India (I can't remember exactly where but I guess somewhere in West Bengal) when suddenly the bus came to a halt in a tiny village and everyone got off. When the passengers returned each was carrying a small brightly coloured box. When I asked what was in those boxes I was told that this one village produced the very finest version of a particular typeof Bengali sweet. This is a dedication to food that rivals the French and even the Italians and goes along way to explain the incredable availabity and quality of Indias food.