The next time a foreigner tells you that Indians only like very sweet desserts and offers you the example of our mithai (which can, admittedly, be disgustingly sweet) here is a reply you can offer.
The truth is that Indians consume 1.6 lakh tonnes of pre-packaged cake a year. In 2022 we spent Rs.4,000 crore on packaged cake. And if that is not convincing enough, then offer sceptical foreigners the example of Parle-G biscuits. Indians spend almost $1 billion every year on Parle-G. Yep, $1 billion.
When you consider how vast the population of India is, it may surprise you to know that every single Indian adult and child spent an average of around Rs.100 year per head on just packaged cake and Parle-G biscuits.
So, it isn’t just over sweet or very syrupy mithai that we love. We like to have our cake and eat it too. Indian food habits are not as simple or straightforward as we may imagine.
If you are wondering how, in a column that is usually devoid of numbers because its author is barely numerate, I have managed to quote such exact figures, then I have to confess that the numbers are not mine. I got them from a Nobel prize-winning economist.
Abhijit Banerjee is the second Indian to win the Nobel prize for economics. But unlike the first – Amartya Sen – he is fascinated by cake, by mithai, by shami kebabs, by khichdi and food in general.
You may already know this. Banerjee has authored a cookbook called Cooking to Save Your Life which sits awkwardly on his CV along with such weighty titles as Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times (written with his wife Esther Duflo) and most of his writing appears in academic journals. But his first cookbook was very good, was well reviewed and has been a steady seller which is probably why you’ve heard of it.
Banerjee is back with a new food book. But unlike the first one, which was praised for the quality of his recipes, I suspect that this one will be better remembered for the recipe-free chapters that contain his reflections on food, society and economics. There are very good recipes too, in between the chapters of course, but even if Banerjee had chosen to publish Chhaunkh, as the new book is called, without any recipes, it would still be worth reading. It stands up on its own as a collection of brilliant essays, some quite complex, made easily accessible by the lucidity of his style. (Not the sort of thing you usually say about prose by most Nobel prize winning economists.)
Like Amartya Sen, Bannerji owes his reputation to much more than mathematical economics models. It is his work on development that has won him much praise and his research has led to societal observations and impinges on areas that might be described as philosophy.
Unlike Sen who has been around for as long as Manmohan Singh (Sen is 91), Bannerji joined the field only around three decades ago and as he writes, he found himself in a profession where the fashionable view at the time was to worship the market. This influenced the politics of people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who did so much to enrich the wealthy and so little for the poor.
Bannerji rejected this kind of market extremism, and he now traces it back to a western orthodoxy in the 19th century which glorified the rich, seeing their wealth as being attributable to a high-minded willingness to forgo consumption and to save income to build assets. The poor, on the other hand, were portrayed as irresponsible spendthrifts, who could not be fully trusted with resources.
It is this sort of economics and the thinking that accompanied it that the Brits brought to India. It contributed to the deaths of millions during the Raj (over eight million people died in the 1876–78 famine) and more recently, to a worrying growth in income inequality around the world. (Which Banerjee dates back to the Reagan-Thatcher era.)
It is hard to work these ideas into a book about food, but Bannerji does it. He also makes the point that the old-fashioned attitude to poverty was that the poor should get just enough food to survive. God forbid that they used food for pleasure. That was the prerogative of the rich.
In fact, says Bannerji, food is one of the few sources of pleasure allowed to the poor. Research tells us that an absence of nutritious food makes people’s brains function less effectively. But even a little delicious food can contribute enormously to making lives more fulfilled and joyous. A couple of Parle-G biscuits given to a child do not cost a great deal. But the pleasure derived is much greater than most traditional economists used to imagine.
Though Bannerji does not actually say this in the book the cuisine of the rich is not necessarily as exciting (or as good) as the cuisine of the poor who struggle to find ingredients and are determined to get the best out of what little they have. In Italy, this is now celebrated as Cucina Povera but India, we probably pay much less attention to the cooking of the rural poor who use whatever little they can find. (The so-called farm to table movement at fancy restaurants – forgive me for saying this – is mostly nonsense, dedicated to charging high prices for specially grown vegetables.)
Wealth often creates a more-is-better approach. Bannerji gives the example of America, the world richest country, where anything will grow given the right location. And yet, except at the very high end, American restaurants are now about excess: “sweet and sour is both too sweet and too sour ; there is too much meat in the roast beef sandwich, if double chocolate cookies are better why not quadruple chocolate cookies… “.
America, he says, is full of immigrants who often came from backgrounds where meat was expensive and used sparingly. Pizzas in Naples are nothing like the meat filled deep-pan abominations of Chicago. China’s mapo tofu originally required only a few ounces of ground meat – the skill lay in taking the ordinary and creating something special.
Just as America has ended up with a culture of more and more, a similar pattern is emerging in today’s India. While obesity is still low, it has more than doubled between 1998 and 2015. It isn’t the poor who are gorging on foods that make them fat. It is the rich who are enjoying their new prosperity.
This is just one of the many ideas in his book. When I interviewed him for this column, he talked about the influence of Central Asia on India. Tashkent is roughly the same distance from Delhi as Calcutta yet, in our minds, it is part of some distant land. We forget that many of our rulers (including the dynasty that was later called the Mughals) came from central Asia and Pulao (called plov in Tashkent) may have come with them.
Yet we have edited central Asia out of our consciousness choosing instead to focus on Iran, Turkey, and Arabia and to claim that our Islamic food came from there. This is further complicated by names like Bukhara and Samarkand for restaurants that serve food that would never be recognised in any of those cities.
Many of us (including many Muslims) think of Islamic cuisine as meat, meat, and more meat. But as Bannerji points out, in much of the Islamic world meals begin with vegetables or with spreads made from vegetables, fava beans or chickpeas and end with something like a plov full of dry fruit, vegetables and yes, a little meat. The view that all Muslim rulers ate greasy mutton curries before getting to India is far from true. The greasy curries are India’s contribution.
There are more such ideas in the book; if you care about food, then you need to read it. Ideally with a cup of tea and some Parle-G biscuits by your side.
