The chronology sounds fishy.
First they came for the beef. Then for the chicken. And now the fish?
Beef festivals in India, a country where Hindus regard cows as sacred, have long triggered angry protests. Recently a food delivery user was outraged when a restaurant sent her chicken biryani instead of veg during the festival of Navaratri when observers avoid all meat. Then fishmongers at a market in Chittaranjan Park in New Delhi were taken aback when men in saffron visited them and claimed that their fish market sharing a wall with a temple was upsetting their religious sentiments. The fishmongers protested that not only was their market perfectly legal, it predated the temple and it was market vendors like them who had helped raise the money to build the temple. The videos went viral.
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Soon it turned into a full-fledged fish market row. An opposition member of parliament complained about goons wearing saffron belonging to the ruling party. The ruling party called the video “false and fabricated” and an attempt to “stir communal sentiments.” A fish market official told a news channel it was false.
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This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Food fights are nothing unusual. One could say even the first War of Independence in 1857 was a food fight of sorts as rumours spread that cartridges were being greased with pig fat and beef tallow. As humans we are obsessed about what we eat. And about what others eat, something we regard with both fascination and revulsion.
Now thanks to social media the food of the other is just a click away.
On Instagram I follow an octogenarian grandmother from Bengaluru who teaches me how to make poriyals and rasams. I don’t understand a word she says beyond her cheery “Good morning” and “Byyyeee” but I love watching her anyway.
GRANDMOTHER1: Good morning….
I look at the colourful daily plate from a chef in India’s north-east and marvel at all the fermented things on it, foods I have never encountered and probably never will. A cookbook of Dalit recipes of Marathawada pops up on National Public Radio in the USA. Dalit, the ones at the bottom of the caste hierarchy were once regarded as untouchables. Their recipes never figured in cookbooks I grew up with.
Social media has truly changed the food atlas. These days I rarely use my old dogeared cookbooks. The Instagram algorithm, having figured out my taste, keeps feeding me new recipes from other parts of India (and the world). The food world seems a much smaller place now and our interest and knowledge about the food of the other keeps increasing. But keeping pace with that is our insatiable appetite for policing what others eat. We know using food as a way of targeting the other is literally a punch to the gut.
Hindu vigilantes lynching people they suspect are eating beef often film themselves so their derring do can be uploaded on social media for maximum effect. Rooh Afza, a rose flavoured herbal red squash that has been around from before Independence suddenly is in the news as a Muslim drink because of its origins.
Food remains the easiest way to tell others “not in my backyard”. Thus northeasterners will routinely find landlords unwilling to rent to them in metro cities in the rest of India because they fear the smell of fermented yams and bamboo shoots. Sucharita Kanjilal, assistant professor of anthropology at Bard College, New York points out that the book Dalit Kitchens of Marathawada that became a big success was also at heart a critique of labour stratification, land use and caste.
SK1: “All that gets pretty quickly glossed over when you make it a book about a kitchen,”
Instead it becomes a book that can be used for virtue signalling.
SK2:It's in my bookshelf. My friends can see it. Um, I might try out a recipe, of course, in my own home. Right. But what was the critique of that book, actually?
What this tells us is that our interest in the food of the other is ultimately about the food and not about the other. This is not dissimilar to Donald Trump talking about his love for tacos even as he builds a wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States.
We have become a country of food pop-ups and one where everyone’s food sticks in someone else’s craw. Even lynching in the name of mystery meat in the refrigerator or tiffin box doesn’t evoke the same outrage it did. As the political row over the Chittaranjan Park fish market shows when someone is ready to fish in troubled waters even a red herring will do.
GRANDMOTHER2: Byeeeee
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW