Column

Eating is not just about satiating the appetite, although that is its primary purpose.It is part of the ritual of living.I am not aware if Karl Marx had any views on good food, although his appearance would suggest he was a man with a robust appetite, and possibly so was Engels (although, he was a mill owner and accustomed to the good things of life).Anyway I have not seen our Marxist friends produce any work such as the dialectic of the omelette.

These thoughts dawned on me at a dinner the other night in Delhi, when my host who had lunched at the Wasabi that very morning saw that great tribune of the people, Sitaram Yechury, tucking into his black cod with mizo with rare gusto.My hosts were taken aback that paragon of the proletariat could be so ostentatiously seen ordering and consuming dishes, the cost of which would keep share croppers in Nandigram alive for several months.This is something a lot of the old socialists could not be accused of, bless their cotton socks.Though I had a different take: a man who enjoys wasabi can’t be all that bad; in fact he went up a notch or two in my estimation. If he enjoys good food, he may well appreciate writings on good food, and when the bloody revolution comes I, for one, may not adorn the nearest lamp post. There is, of course, the possibility that the commissar disagrees with my gastronomic judgments and I could well end up not dissimilar to a chicken yakitori, skewered, but let that pass.

The man enjoys good food, all power to him (not nuclear, of course).

And there is Claude Levi Strauss (no, not the person who invented jeans) but one of the most significant anthropologists who rose to prominence by developing what is known as structural anthropology — the idea that all cultures order the universe in a similar way, which for you and me means that all cultures are more similar in ordaining social practices than may appear to be the case.Fundamental to this was the mythological and social implications of food.Much of this was set out in his magisterial opus
Mythologiques written in the ’60s where he expounded on cannibalism, and examined the social status of cooking techniques.He argued that roasting was very posh (hauteur) whilst boiling was common and proletarian. All these seemed rather dated, today the poshest people I know steam their food, the commoners fry their food with the cheapest and most rancid oil.He also argued the human invention of honey or mead, led to a higher level of civilisation.This is interesting as honey is often seen as a super food, not just something you put on toast (shades of Winnie the Pooh), but a magical elixir which has curative properties. It is also something which is branded and people pay huge amounts of money for honey from a particular location and a particular type of bee.

Our own master, KT Achaya, the doyen of Indian food historians, has come back into
vogue with the republishing of his great works, including his Dictionary on Indian Food.He was, of course, more of a historian than an anthropologist but his work is invaluable for those who want to excavate the origins of food and its social context.

Email: javed.gaya@gmail.com