Food becomes eye candy

Eating habits of the Indian middle-class are marked by simplicity — cutting chai over newspaper, dal-sabzi-roti for lunch, samosa for snack, curry and rice for dinner.

But we’re getting adventurous. We are allowing ourselves to be seduced by and to fantasise about food. We’ve got a taste for cooking shows with their incomprehensible recipes and toothy celebs.

We set 24*7 food channels like Zee Khana Khazana on our list of favourites, stack up our book shelves with perfectly shot, beautifully designed cook books. We get perverse pleasure from watching Anthony Bourdain eat fried pig tails. We find comfort in lingering around the gleaming displays of HyperCITY and the breads and preserves of Indigo Deli. About 80% of site bookmarks have something to do with food. We cultivate the art of prattling off detailed descriptions of truffles and tiramisu, and take pride in revealing the best beef burger joint in town.

How did food become such a mental thing? Since when was it enough to simply be an ‘informed foodie’? All this, when our daily diet remains detached from the dream diets we obsess over all day, or designate for occasional indulgences. And that when our brand new taste, delivered by global food trends, involves ingredients that are often expensive, unavailable
or plain militate against what we like?

Fiction is sweeter than fact
And then, came food fiction. There were always the die-hards, tuning into Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay, but with MasterChef Australia, things sizzled up considerably. The imported show garnered a legion of fans over Mumbai, as dinner plans were adjusted to match with the show timing at 10pm, which quickly shifted to the prime-time slot at 9pm.

Michelle Karen, 24, remembers watching the show with fanatic devotion, her loyalty to a particular contestant unswerving. “I don’t cook at all. That’s not the point of such shows really. Have you seen how fast they work? Can you imagine trying to recreate that in your kitchen? The show was fantastic because of the art behind it. The speed at which they produced the food, which always made me hungry — I don’t think I ever watched the show without something to munch on,” she laughs. Karen says she aspires to one day stock a spice rack and grow herbs in the garden, but right now, she admits, “I have no time.”

People want entertainment from cooking shows, over technique and recipes. While these shows remain instructive for some, as viewer Upasana Puri points out — she often passes on tips to her mother — the entertainment quotient is rising. “These shows are about the strategy involved, the decor-matching and innovation,” continues Puri. “I don’t remember ever implementing a recipe, but I’ve learnt how to present food better, about world cuisine and quick-fix tips. If I wanted to get domesticated, I could watch Khana Khazana, but it doesn’t hold my attention.”

Food consultant Rushina Munshaw Ghildiyal believes that cooking shows make you think about what you’re eating, and interest and inspire viewers at home, even if it’s just sprucing up a plate of Maggi. “We travel, we watch, we’re curious about the world and its cuisines,” she says. “The information that is available is absorbed by us and we grow as individuals.” The extent of the growth of our cooking skills however, seems largely confined to minor deviations.

Shaheen Peerbhai, the woman behind Purple Foodie, one of the most popular Indian food blogs on the Internet, says her website is visited daily by ‘enthusiastic spectators’ who enjoy watching an expert at work. “I get emails from people saying that I don’t cook, but I love looking at your photos,” she says. “They want me to post Youtube videos, because that visual aspect is the most interesting to them.”

I like what I see
Food styling has blossomed from a media industry to a must-have in every line cook’s skill set. At Indigo Deli, the Palladium, a baker, a waiter, and the cooks, all are involved in making sure the displays remain pristine. On entering, you are faced with a glass wall displaying rows of plump breads displayed in all their varied glory — the 14 varieties of bread sell briskly. Chef Rodney says, costumers enter, discover and buy.

“We provide comfort food, but with great presentation. Lots of colours, charring the chicken to give it that golden colour, garnishing, they all add to the appeal of the dish,” he says.

But are we recreating the drool-worthy recipes at home? For most young professionals as well as working mothers, ‘cooking experience’ is rapidly being replaced by a working knowledge of the microwave. The ‘meal in a bottle’ lets you prepare anything from complicated pesto sauces to cake icing; providing the restaurant experience in minutes. Quicker, cleaner, and giving the would-be cook a familiar sense of accomplishment that two hours of sweating it out in the kitchen would, prepackaged food constitutes a whopping 82% of the sales at superstore Godrej Nature’s Basket. With colour, lighting, space, product information, smell, touch, sound, and interactive installations, stores provide a shopper with an irresistible sensory overload.

Ashutosh Chakradeo, head of buying and merchandising at HyperCITY, says the value of shopping lies in the “experience” provided, with display and service standards making the “mundane experience of shopping” into an exciting event. Foodie Aparna Joshi, 26, insists that the presentation of food at such stores always gets her reaching for her wallet. “It happens at restaurants as well. I even take pictures of my food before I’ve even tasted it. The visual appeal is huge.”

Pleased to possess
Ten years ago, broccoli and asparagus were worth their weight in gold, unavailable at most grocery shops. Now even your neighbourhood vendor will have fresh broccoli florets — albeit at an exorbitant rate. The all-purpose ‘oregano’, which took ten years of pizza delivery to ingrain itself in our collective unconscious, is slowly being substituted by a dozen other herbs. Smoked paprika, hazelnut oil, cranberries, blueberries, wasabi paste — if you see it on the telly, you can probably get your hands on it within the next 30 minutes, courtesy superstores like Godrej Nature’s Basket or establishments like Arife’s or Trikaya Agriculture in Crawford Market.

Peerbhai is a devotee of the influx of exotic ingredients into Mumbai, and gushes about how she no longer needs to ask her cousins from abroad to carry home a dozen ingredients for her. “A few years ago, no one even knew what Nutella was. Now people are trying out new things.”

Let’s face it. Food is always on our minds. And it is everywhere — on the television, in books, on the Internet, on restaurant plates — everywhere maybe except our kitchen. We want to prolong the tease rather than finishing it off with a bite. We like it like that.