Trends and Fads in the World of Food

The twin impact of the pandemic and heightened awareness of climate change in the past couple of years has led to several new and renewed food trends. It remains to be seen how many of these will become enduring trends, and how many are just fads that will wither away.

Here are a few trends or fads I have been noticing over the last couple of years.

Plant/Nuts-Based ‘Milk’. If at all they can be called milk. More and more brands of almond milk, cashew milk, oat milk, and suchlike are showing up. The dairy industry stalwarts like Amul take exception to these whitish extracts from seeds and nuts being called milk at all. I agree. We need a word to describe these insipid extracts of seeds and nuts. Any word other than milk. Because milk is sacred in India – it has emotions attached to it. Squeezing an almond and extracting a white fluid from it does serious disservice to the nation’s fascination with real milk. Not to mention the abomination that new-age cafés charge a premium for these fake milks.

Cloud Kitchens or Ghost Kitchens. The exponential rise in working from home, and hence ordering food to be delivered at home, has led to an explosion in the number of cloud kitchens. These are back-end kitchens without a front-end restaurant attached to them. The food is cooked and sent straight to delivery, without any on-premise service. This trend takes away the investment needed in running a physical restaurant, in a time when fewer customers are eating out. Cloud kitchens can hence operate from low-real-estate-cost warehouses, and do not need prime customer-facing locations. Restaurateurs are able to survive even after closing down their dine-in eateries; customers get affordable food. All very practical and all very sensible. But, where is the charm? Are we really getting to a future where we will eat food made in a faceless warehouse by nameless chefs? Dystopian.

Breads Are Going Sour. In the days of the first lockdown, when people were stuck at home with too much time on their hands, several Instagram-fueled weird food trends emerged. Remember dalgona coffee, anyone? Thankfully, such oddities died a natural death. But the culture lived on – I mean the culture of the sourdough starter kind. Several people took to nursing starters, and baking sourdough breads of variable authenticity. Bakers caught on to this new interest in breads that were a few notches above the household staple, the ubiquitous white sliced. Now, every city in the country has artisanal bakers churning out impressive sourdoughs, boules, and baguettes. If the pandemic has a silver lining, it is this; a country that is growing out of the British-era definition of bread as the bleached white not-a-grain-in-sight sliced bread.

Plant-Based and Cell-Based Meats. The pandemic-induced interest in wellness, and concern for the future of the planet, has renewed calls for cutting down on meat production and consumption. There is a move towards so-called smart protein. The ‘fake’ meat industry had been crawling along for years but has now taken off. This includes not only plant-based meat lookalikes, but also real meat grown in the lab from animal cells, without the wasteful process of growing full animals and then slaughtering them. This is one trend that looks like it is here to stay. The world needs to be weaned off the current environmentally-unsustainable industrial meat production.

FoodTech. There was FinTech and EdTech and many such industries where digital technology had found ways to disrupt the old ways of doing things. Now it is the turn of FoodTech. From delivery apps, to restaurant reservation apps, to QR-code-based menus, to app-based ordering at restaurants, to even back-end apps for restaurants to manage vendors, supply chain, restaurant revenue management, footfall calculators, and more. With the need to reduce staff, in times of reduced restaurant revenue, and the need for low-contact service due to the pandemic, the FoodTech market is rife with innovation. I will miss the comforting look of tattered haldi-stained paper menus at eateries, and the chats with the waiters as they recommend today’s special. Ordering from an app sounds so antiseptic, but I guess this is the way to go.

Nutraceuticals. Good, honest, balanced home food has all the nutrients one needs. But, the food industry keeps chipping away at ghar ka khana by pushing all kinds of ‘solutions’ at us – solutions in search of a problem. In the last few years, this trend has acquired another of those abominable portmanteau names: nutraceuticals. These are extracts from food, but spun into strange unappetising formats like pills, capsules, powders, bars, and potions. Dubious medical and curative properties are attributed to these. Food is food and medicine is medicine (and never the twain shall meet). Twisting good old-fashioned food to make it look like medicine is nothing but a throwback to the tricks of the snake oil salesman. This is one trend that I hope turns out to be an ephemeral fad. Eat honest food mindfully and eschew these magic potions.

Back To Basics. The heightened concerns for the environment and for wellness has, as we saw above, led to high-tech solutions or tricks – like plant-based meats and nutraceuticals. At the same time, the same concerns have also led to low-tech solutions – going back to our roots. India used to be home to hundreds of varieties of millets and other locally-grown grains. Naturally gluten-free, naturally nutritious. We had to go halfway around the world chasing magic grains like quinoa, before we realised that the most nutritious grains had been around in our own backyard, literally, for thousands of years. Our own homegrown superfood: millets. Jowar, bajra, ragi, barnyard millet, and many more. Over the past century, the organised agriculture system had made wheat and rice the dominant grains, and had pushed millets into near oblivion. The renewed environmental concerns about large-scale farming, and the wellness trend, mean that millets are fashionable again. A trend that is here to stay, hopefully.

These are just a few of the several trends that are changing the shape of food and food business. Which of these trends do you think will last? Which do you think should last? Any other trends that you have noticed? Do share your views in the comments.

Of Food Books, Cookbooks, And Recipe Books

In this column, I often fulminate against recipes. I believe that recipes have as much of a charm as a doctor’s prescription, minus the bad handwriting. Recipes instruct you to add one teaspoon of this, and two cups of that, and fry this for five minutes, and voila you have an exact replica of what the recipe writer wanted. And as much excitement as watching paint dry.

If following a recipe is so dull, so uninspiring, imagine following a whole Recipe Book. Page after page of do this, do that – and make the dish look like the airbrushed picture of my recipe on page 9, or you have failed. Why? Following a recipe book is like reading a textbook; passing an exam. All so creative and fun. Not.

Recipe books is a genre that should not exist. They just tell you the ‘what’, they don’t tell you the ‘why’ – do exactly what I tell you to do; don’t question; don’t try to understand the underlying principles. A recipe book will tell you how to cook that specific dish. It will not teach you how to cook. So, when you need to cook something else, you go to another recipe and then mindlessly start from scratch and follow another set of my-way-or-the-highway instructions.

Recipe books serve no purpose other than to create a whole generation of stressed home cooks; and fill several square metres of bookstore shelves. Recipe books are only a notch above self-help books in the extent to which they help anyone – other than the authors and publishers. As we all know, the ‘self’ in self-help books is the author – no one else is helped.

Having so handsomely trashed recipe books doesn’t mean I don’t like books about food. I like books that tell a story around food, and inspire, just not the ones that give line-by-line stern instructions.

A step up from recipe books are Cookbooks. Definitions vary, but I define cookbooks as books that do have recipes, but around the recipes they also have stories about that dish, the context, the science, the history, the culture, the personal stories, the family memories, and the nostalgia. Cookbooks construct an ambience, a milieu, around the recipe. When you cook that dish, you as the reader are drawn into the wider cultural context. Not slavishly add one teaspoon of this and two tablespoons of that.

Cookbooks have tips, and hacks, and the science behind why an ingredient behaves in a certain way when treated in such a manner or mixed with that other ingredient. Here are just two examples of cookbooks that have this perfect combination of lots of context and science and stories and recipes:

Salt Fat Acid Heat – by Samin Nosrat. The book has delicious recipes. But, it has far more than that. It has distilled the art and science of cooking down to four cardinal elements: salt, fat, acid, and heat. The kind and amount of salt, at the specific stages of the cooking process; the type and quantity of fat to amplify flavour and texture; the kind of acid to balance the salt; and level and duration of heat to bring all the elements together. Samin Nosrat promises and delivers the holy grail – if you master these four elements, you can mix and match any ingredients and conjure up a delicious meal without poring over the dense instructions of a recipe. It tells you how to improvise and adjust as you go along. This is exactly like when that teacher in school, instead of telling you to follow the step-by-step instructions, taught you the principles behind them. With these principles you could solve not just that specific maths problem but all such problems. You are armed with the knowledge, and need not cling to a recipe like a lifeboat. You are free to swim the ocean. Samin Nosrat’s book is a guide to mastering those first principles.

Indian-ish – by Priya Krishna. This is an American take on Indian food. It helps demystify cooking. It explains how sometimes looking at a cuisine from the outside helps you peel away the layers of complexity and find the core ethos of Indian food. It is an American desi’s reinterpretation of Indian food, with family stories – tales of discrimination, exclusion, and blending in; stories of identity and the migrant’s woes. Stories of how Priya and her family simplified Indian food to make it (and them) fit in better in their adopted country. The stories give a context to the recipes in the book. You understand how that dish came to become a family favourite, and how it had to fight prejudice to get accepted in a culture where most recipe books sell a whitewashed version of so-called American food. Most importantly, the book is not bossy or didactic. It doesn’t say that this is the one right way – it encourages improvisation.

This brings me to the most exalted form of food writing – Food Books. The genre that completely eschews recipes. These books talk about food history, food culture, food science, food memories; they inspire you to rush to the kitchen and experiment. These books do not instruct. They evoke feelings. They take you down rabbit holes. Just a couple of examples of such books:

Masala Lab – by Krish Ashok. This book is billed as ‘the science of Indian cooking’. But it is far more than science. It is tips, tricks, hacks, and folklore. It explains the why behind the what. It creates metamodels and converts the most common steps into algorithms, so they can be replicated in another dish. It teaches transferable skills. Once you understand why a particular sequence of steps is needed, you can combine a sequence of algorithms and create ever new dishes, without having to follow overbearing recipe writers. This book is that maths teacher, who teaches you the first principles, and allows you to experiment with confidence.

Gastrophysics – by Charles Spence. This book takes you on a whirlwind tour of the concept of multisensory perception of food. It provides scientific evidence for what we all know intuitively – that our enjoyment of food has very little to do with taste; it has much more to do with the other four senses – smell, sight, sound, and touch. The aroma of the food, the appearance of the food (eat with our eyes), the sizzle, the texture – many of these foretell what the dish will be like, before it even touches our taste buds.

Armed with the arsenal of insights on what books help you learn how to cook, not how to cook one specific dish – go out into the culinary world with confidence. Read a few of these cookbooks and food books, and you will never again need a recipe book. Once you learn the basic principles, you do not need the instruction manual. You steer the ship, not cling to the lifeboat.

Ratatouille – From France To The World Via Hollywood

In this column, I have often talked about how food travels and transforms. How cultures clash and then meld, and new cuisines emerge through the assimilation of the ingredients and cooking techniques of different cultures.

The best cuisines of the world are those that have arisen out of this merging and blending. This fact was brought in sharp focus to me when I recently started digging into one dish – ratatouille. The trigger was the vast array of winter vegetables that are available in the city these days, a far cry from the boring variations of gourds in the summer – my gourd!

I was looking for a dish which could best use the colourful fresh vegetables. Ratatouille fitted the bill. This one dish, born centuries ago as a poor peasant’s one-pot stew in the Provence region of France has evolved beyond recognition, thanks in no small part to the eponymous movie Ratatouille – the highly acclaimed Oscar-winning animated classic of 2007 from Disney Pixar. For those who have not watched Ratatouille, please first go watch it. You should not be reading a food column without having watched the best food-themed movie ever made. But, in case you haven’t, this is a story of a rat named Remy, who dreams of being a chef – don’t judge, anyone can dream, just as anyone can cook. Remy adores Chef Auguste Gusteau, and follows his passion, to the movie’s finale (spoiler alert) when he creates his signature ratatouille. Except this was not ratatouille – the peasants of Provence would have been horrified at the fancy Michelin-worthy nouvelle cuisine dish that was passed off as ratatouille in the film. And given that Ratatouille was such an epic film, the world now thinks that what Remy-the-rat produced is Ratatouille.

As I say, there is no such thing as an authentic recipe – you do you. So if the director of Ratatouille calls the concoction in his movie a ratatouille, so be it. But, just to set the record straight, it is not.

Ratatouille comes from a long tradition of ordinary people all over the world throwing the produce of the day into one pot, and creating their own version of a stew – from the legendary soul food Gumbo in Louisiana in the southern United States, to the Korean Jjigae, to the Kerala Ishtu, to the Stroganoff of Russia, to the Rogan Josh of Kashmir, to the Hungarian Goulash, to the Berber Tagine of Morocco…I could go on. No fancy chefiness, no dramatic Masterchefy plating, just simple honest home food.

Obviously, such simple non-instagram-worthy food would not fit the aesthetics of an Oscar-worthy Pixar movie. So the directors of Ratatouille engaged the celebrity chef Thomas Keller – he of the several Michelin starred restaurant The French Laundry in California’s hip Napa Valley – as the food consultant to the movie. Keller went where all fancy people go for fancy-pants food ideas – to France. The fine-dining version of ratatouille – with thinly sliced vegetables aesthetically arranged in circles on top of a tomato garlic sauce – is actually called Confit Byaldi – developed by Michel Guérard, the godfather of French nouvelle cuisine. Now you know who to blame for the huge pretentious spotless plates at French eateries, with a tiny flowery circle of food in the middle, and swooshes of sauces around it, embellished with microgreens. That’s nouvelle cuisine – more drama less food.

Anyway, this pretentious version of ratatouille made it via Guérard and Keller into the movie Ratatouille, and now, every time I google ratatouille, I see the ornate slices-in-a-circle Ratatouille avatar of ratatouille. I want the lower-case r honest-peasant-one-pot-stew ratatouille, not the upper-case R movie-version Ratatouille.

The ingredients in both versions are the same – aubergine, peppers, courgette, onion, garlic, tomato. In my down-to-earth version, I go the whole nine yards: I char the red and yellow peppers to de-skin them; I blanch the tomatoes and peel them; I salt the aubergine to dehydrate them. Then I chop the vegetables into bite-size pieces (not roundels), fry each vegetable separately. Then make an onion-garlic-tomato sauce, laced with red wine vinegar. Then – in a sharp left turn off-script – I throw in some chickpeas and Tunisian harissa – who says ratatouille cannot cross the Mediterranean to North Africa if it can cross the Atlantic to become the fake Hollywood version.

The result was a hearty homey honest humble wholesome stew. Julia Child would have been proud – I am in her camp; rustic chunky food, throw everything and the kitchen sink into a pot; no nouvelle cuisine for me.

Having said that, you do you – whatever floats your boat. I claim no authenticity for my version. Remember, there is no such thing as one authentic version of any dish. If the pretentious roundels of vegetables daintily adorned over a hint of a sauce and some foam and microgreens is your thing, then unfortunately that is your thing. Blame your ratatouille on Ratatouille. Or come to me for the real thing.

My Food Is Better Than Yours

Food is politics. Throughout human history, food has been used as a means to signal power and position in society. Food has been caught up in the identity of caste, class, religion, ethnicity, and nationality.

Sections of society always use food to differentiate themselves from other sections of society. The rich eat some food, the poor eat another. Brahmins eat some food and Dalits eat another. Hindus eat some food and Muslims eat another. These walls, all walls, are manmade. Nature abhors boundaries and division.

For example, for centuries, there was a huge diversity of grains consumed by all sections of society. There was wheat and rice, of course, but then there were dozens of humbler grains like millets – jowar, bajra, ragi, and so on. Since these millets were largely foraged, rather than grown on organised farms, they got classified as lower-caste food for the Dalits and tribal hunter gatherers. And they were looked down upon. This is a common trope in the othering of communities – based on their food, their caste, their language, their religion. 

It is another matter that many of these millets are now making a comeback as so-called health foods, and becoming a fad fuelled by Instagram influencers. Millets were always health food. Millets, often eaten as whole grain, have more nutrition and fibre than the polished bran-stripped wheat and rice most of us eat. Just like haldi was everyone’s humble food ingredient, until it was reborn in a fancy new avatar as turmeric latte.

Even more vicious othering has been happening with meat. Human beings have always eaten meat. In recent times, and particularly in the past few years of saffron-hued polarising politics – the politics of us and them – meat has become ammunition in the politician’s arsenal. Myths are being propagated: meat is the food of the Muslims, meat is the food of the lower castes, meat is unclean, meat is unhygienic. The biggest myth of all is that India is a vegetarian country, and meat eating is alien to Indian culture. It is not. By most accounts, only around 30% of India’s population is vegetarian. In most states of India, vegetarians are a small minority in single-digit percentages. Meat is everywhere, often leading to memes calling for tandoori chicken to be named the national bird of India. In the ancient Vedic period, all Hindus ate meat.

Even in Gujarat, the so-called vegetarian capital of the country, only around 60% of people are vegetarian. The other 40% eat meat. This is based on asking people. In reality, many more than 40% eat meat (many only outside the home) but do not admit in a survey that they do. The systematic stigmatisation of meat has pushed much of meat-eating underground. 

That brings me to the real reason why this week I have gone into this diatribe against phony food politics. The Municipal Corporation in Ahmedabad have decided to ban the sale of non-veg food on pushcarts (laaris) on public roads in the cities. That means no more omelette laaris, no more kebabs, no more fried chicken stalls. The reasons given are laughable: it is unhygienic to sell non-veg food on the street, it hurts sentiments, it causes traffic jams. Really? As if the thousands of maggi-pasta and paani puri laaris are all paragons of hygiene. And meat laaris cause traffic jams, while veg laaris do not? If we want to tackle encroachment and clear the pavements for pedestrians – worthy goals – then do it for all veg and non-veg laaris. And find solutions for the laaris, before sweeping them off the streets. The laaris need to earn a living, the public needs the cheap food that the laaris sell. Locking them up is not a solution. Not to mention the economic harm it will do to the thousands whose livelihood depends on egg and non-veg street food. Many anda walas will go under.

The undertone that non-veg is the food of ‘them’ not ‘us’ and it will hurt our ‘sentiments’ to see it being openly sold – that smacks of xenophobia and intolerance, bordering on fascism. History has shown that once we start down the us versus them path, it never ends well.

Besides, pushing pushcarts out of sight doesn’t mean that people will stop selling or eating non-veg. The whole business will move underground and into dingy back alleys, which will actually make it unhygienic. We all know how well other bans have done in Gujarat – those products have also gone underground and are peddled by bootleggers and gangs. Bans never work.

India’s main claim to fame is its diversity – of cultures, of languages, of religions, of cuisines, of ethnicities. Trying to paint everyone with one saffron brush will destroy the essence of the country. 

Bring back our egg & non-veg laaris. After a year of protests, the government has this week repealed the mighty farm laws. If protests can get a powerful government to change course on such a weighty issue, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Hashtag bring back our anda and chicken fry.

Fusion Confusion

Food does not flourish in a vacuum. It is an integral part of culture and identity. And when food travels, the context, and the culture around it, needs to travel too. Otherwise, food becomes just an isolated transplant from one place to another, without the stories and rituals that surround it in its country of origin. And food without stories is like chaat without chutney. We eat the stories; the spice is in the stories. Without the context, you might throw a whole masala dabba into your food, and it will still taste bland.

So, when we adopt a ‘foreign’ food, we need to do it with sensitivity to the milieu of its origin. And that takes time. Decades, centuries. Chinese food came to India via Kolkata, the birthplace of Indian Chinese food. It all started with Hakka Chinese traders who settled in the then Calcutta in the late 1700s, when it was the capital of the British East India Company. The Chinese immigrants needed to feel a nostalgic connection with the motherland, while making do with local ingredients. A new cuisine evolved over the ensuing century in and around Tangra, the Chinatown in Kolkata. 

As all immigrant communities do, over a century, the Chinese immigrants achieved a finely balanced assimilation of their culture with Indian sensibilities, ingredients, and tastes. They figured out that Indians love spice and oil. The Chinese masala-fied and fried their food into delectable Indo-Chinese classics.

This cuisine is an organic slow assimilation of Indian and Chinese food, combining the deep-fried, spicy flavours of India with Chinese ingredients like soy sauce and vinegar. New sub-cuisines emerged. Like Schezwan, an Indianism for the spicy food from the Sichuan province of China; dried red chillies replacing the difficult-to-find Sichuan peppercorns. Other wonders appeared over the decades, like Manchurian-style cooking, where meat and vegetables balls (much in the styles of koftas and pakoras) flavoured with quintessential Indian aromatics like garlic, ginger, and green chillies, are battered and fried, but then they eschew the garam masala and take a sharp left turn to soy sauce, cornflour, and vinegar. 

Similar slow assimilation happened when sailors from East Bengal (now Bangladesh), working on British ships in the early 1900s, disembarked in English port cities and started making a version of Indian food, tweaked to British tastes: mildly spiced, doused in a surfeit of cream, yoghurt, and tomato sauce. And a whole nation got hooked to Chicken Tikka Masala. The cuisine grew organically and slowly. It is now a sub-genre of Indian cuisine, with its own variegated history and stories.

We could go on – how Chinese food became American, when the Chinese immigrants customised their cooking to suit American tastes and ingredients. The now-ubiquitous General Tso’s Chicken travelled from its humble origins in the Hunan province in China, via Taipei, to America – getting more greasy and more sickly sweet, less hot & sour, as it went along. The greasy sticky sweet late-night Chinese takeaway has been the fuel for the techies in Silicon Valley churning out world-changing innovations.

All these mutations were assimilations over decades, where the two cuisines and the two cultures mingled. Cooking methods and ingredients did a slow dance to achieve new heights of flavours. Immigrants become a little local, the locals became a little foreign. Everyone thrived and flourished on this new food, that belonged neither here, nor there, but everywhere.

That brings me to the dreaded F-word. Fusion. When a cuisine or an ingredient is uprooted and dropped unceremoniously on another cuisine, suddenly and not organically, one gets abominations like overcooked pasta drowning in a pink sauce, that is more masala gravy than a sauce. One gets noodles, doused in masala and topped with a mountain of nondescript processed cheese. The pasta has a pride of place in its Italian home. There is a whole culture around pasta in Italy, with the endearing imagery of the doddering nonna hand-rolling the exquisite pasta shapes. And then leaving them just al dente, and lightly dressing it in a flavourful sauce of vine-ripened tomatoes. None of that culture accompanied it when pasta arrived at the ubiquitous food carts on every street in India. There was no cultural dialogue between the pasta-making Italians and the masala-making Indians. The pasta was cooked to within an inch of its life, and plopped into an Indian gravy masquerading as sauce.

That is mindless fusion. Forced merger of two cuisines – without the slow-cook assimilation of the culture – leads to fusion confusion. And, before you know it, we are left with abominations like Butter Paneer Pizza; two great world cuisines murdered in one stroke.

You Are What You Eat

An aphorism by the 19th Century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin has entered popular culture, ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es’; that is, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’. In English, we often tone down the exuberance and floweriness of the French language; we have reduced Brillat-Savarin’s aphorism to the phrase, ‘You are what you eat’.

So far so good. It stands to reason that food, which we ingest three (or seven) times a day, will have an impact on who we are. The aphorism innocently meant that we need to be mindful of what we eat, as food is our main source of nourishment and nutrients.

A century later, the gazillion-dollar diet industry took this simple you-are-what-you-eat and made a whole monster out of it, thriving on the emotions of fear, guilt, and shame. They told us that we were eating all wrong, that we needed to go on exotic, impractical, and bound-to-end-in-failure diets. They literally plucked random berries, grains, and leaves out of exotic parts of the world: acai berries, goji berries, quinoa, chia seeds, kale…the list goes on…and called these ‘wonder foods’. They told us that fat was bad; then they said, oops fat was good, sugar was bad; then carbs were bad, starch was bad, gluten was bad, fun was bad, life was bad. That we should forsake all the pleasures of eating, and survive on fat-free, sugar-free, carbs-free, gluten-free…fun-free, life-free diets. 

The advent of blogs and social media meant that everyone and their cat was a nutritionist, telling us to go on a paleo, keto, Mediterranean, vegan, no-grains, intermittent fasting, detox, Atkins…or some such taste-free-pleasure-free diet. They started writing listicles about the 7 amazing health benefits of goji, and the 9 amazing properties of chia, and 13 ways kale will change your life (for some reason, these benefits come only in odd numbers).

The word ‘diet’ in the dictionary still means ‘diet /ˈdʌɪət/ noun 1. the kinds of food that a person or community habitually eats’. The diet-industrial-complex hijacked this word and twisted it so that there was nothing habitual about the foods that started getting listed as ‘diet’ foods.  The diet industry promised magical transformations, that we would achieve the prescribed body weight and shape and live for ever, if only we partake of the berries in their Buddha bowl. Buddha did achieve enlightenment, but that was for eight other reasons, not for the goodness of his eponymous bowl. They turned the act of eating – which was always a joyful indulgence – into a guilt trip. We started wondering if this next bite of golden fried pakora will kill me; we started to fear that dollop of aromatic ghee on top of our tadka khichdi. Will the diet police condemn me to a life of shame if I am caught enjoying a butter-slathered sourdough slice?

For decades now, we have lived in constant fear that all hell will break loose if there are no ‘superfoods’ in our diet. The joy has been sucked out of the divine act of eating. Menus often have calories written next to each item – almost screaming, how dare you ask for this burger, do you not see the 735 calories written next to it?

This diet mania is largely an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. When did you last see a French or an Italian person on a diet? What is good for the Brits and the Americans, is good for us Indians – we simply copy-paste trends from those countries. That reminds me of an eye-opening book I read a few years ago; French Women Don't Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano. If you do not have the time to read this book, here is a one-line spoiler: they don’t get fat because they eat wholesome fresh, good quality, ‘normal’ food; they eat everything – the so-called fattening things like bread, butter (French food swims in butter), cheese, le bœuf. They savour every bite. They eat in moderation. They eat for the pleasure of eating; no guilt, no shame, no fear hangs like a dagger over a French dining table. If you have a happy relationship with the food you eat, the food will be good to you. If you have guilt and fear every time you eat a fried-to-gold samosa; well, the samosa has fillings too, it will not be good to you.

Eat good quality dadima-style ‘ghar ka khana’, or whatever floats your boat. Indulge in pizzas, and mithai, and burgers, in moderation. Enjoy what you eat. Do not ask what the seven health benefits of this food are. Eat good food, and the nutrients will do their work, they have been doing that for millennia. Do not tell yourself that this meal should not cross the random 700-calorie mark, and do not let the self-styled nutrition influencer tell you that nirvana is attained through exotic berries and grains like acai, quinoa, chia… do you notice how most of these ‘wonder foods’ are from Latin America? Stinks of some shady mafia pushing these on the gullible white man, who then sells these fads to the rest of the world.

Eat well, eat everything, eat in moderation – no binging on one food, no ostracising another. Your body knows what is good for you. The body has its defence mechanisms, it will tell you when some food doesn’t feel right. Listen to your body and eat with your heart. Bon appétit.

In Praise Of The Thali

If you are this far into my series of columns, you know that I savour every bite of my food. I pick apart the colours, textures, tastes, smells, and sounds in every bite, and mindfully immerse myself in the party in my mouth.

But the Western style of serving food makes it difficult to enjoy that symphony in the mouth. In this style, the food is often served as individual plates to each member of the dining party. Not a sharing platter. So, if I order a risotto and my dinner partner orders a penne arrabbiata, we are each expected to dutifully dig into our own dishes, and not covet the neighbour’s dish. The first bite of my risotto is divine. The creaminess, the al dente bite of the fat arborio grain, the luscious umami mushroom flavour. To die for. But then I take the second bite, and it’s more of the same. Still excited, I take the third and the fourth and the seventh bite…still the same. You get the picture. This risotto is the best I have ever eaten. But I figured that out in bite number one. Then it’s all downhill from there. This regimented bite consistency is killing me. There is no surprise, no new experience in bite eleven; no surprise in bite seventeen. After the first few glorious bites, I must settle into the monotony, until I wipe the plate clean in bite twenty-six. Yes, the monotony is so soul-killing that I have often resorted to bite counting. A plate of risotto served at fancy white-tablecloth establishments lasts for an average of twenty-six bites.

That is my problem with this to-each-his-own style of serving pasta, or risotto, or steak, or shepherd’s pie, or quiche. They may each be Michelin-worthy. But, telling me to eat twenty-six identical bites of even the most divine food is torture. 

Then there is the issue of the food served over several courses. You eat the delightful but monotonous five bites of the hors d’oeuvres, then the six sips of the soup, then the seven bites of the appetiser, then the twenty-six bites of the main, then the six bites of the… At any one time, you have just one option: scoop the next spoonful, with the absolute certainty that it will be identical to the previous spoonful. No surprise, no suspense, no squeals of serendipitous delight. Everything is laid out precisely in the menu for each course. All Precision, No Surprise: that could well be the epitaph of the whole western civilisation.

That brings me to the antithesis of bite consistency. The glorious thali. The Indian thali is drama in every bite. It lays out all its wares altogether. It’s like a child in a toy shop. Everything is up for grabs, all at the same time. In a thali, there is no starter and no main. You dig into the whole treasure trove. It’s not just that every bite is different. There is bite variation within each bite – you corner a bit of the rice, spoon some dal on it, slide in a bit of the vegetable onto it – any of the seven little bowls of vegetables lined up like a golden necklace around the thali – drop a bit of the pickle, and finish with some crumbled papad on the mound. That is a meal in a bite. When that construction hits your mouth, well you are in multisensory heaven – the pulpy rice, the syrupy dal, the spicy veg, the tingling pickle, the crunchy papad.

The thali defies categorisation. It cannot be put into a genre, not placed neatly under a section in the menu. It is all of the menu and more, and all of that in every bite. The thali often reminds me of Bollywood movies. A typical Bollywood movie defies the genres of Hollywood: Drama, Thriller, Romance, Action, Comedy. A Bollywood movie is all of these genres over the course of the movie; nay all genres often within the same scene, albeit unintentionally. The movie glides seamlessly from the chawls of Mumbai to the snowy peaks of Switzerland; it glides from a gruesome killing in one scene to comedy in the next; or a comical gruesome killing. That is the thali for you. Gliding from screaming hot sambhar in one bite to the lusciously syrupy gulab jamun in the next. 

Give me the humble thali any day over the celebrity chef’s five courses.

The Joys of Eating Alone

The words ‘eating alone’ conjure up images of a loner, an anti-social soul, a sad person. Do not judge. Yes, sometimes the solo eater might be all of these, and I know some such sad loners (see, I am judging now). But there is a time for social eating, and there is a time for solo eating. 

Let me compare this with solo travel. When one travels alone, to trek in remote mountains, wander through rainforests, visit secluded monasteries, and daydream by a sparkling bubbling water stream, no one calls that person a sad loner. Solo travel has been romanticised to the level of an artform. There are so many positives of travelling alone – you are the master of your own itinerary; you need not visit every sunset point in the travel guide; you need not follow other people’s choices on where to stay and what to eat. 

In solo travel, you need not engage in mindless chatter with your travel group. You can take in the sights and sounds and smells of where you go – amble down the path less travelled; serendipitously discover unknown gems; find hole-in-the-wall delights that guidebooks and travel bloggers had missed. You travel like a traveller, not a tourist. We think we are travellers, but in a group, we become tourists. 

Group travel turns every journey into a tourist trail – ticking off places from a list – 6:45am mandatory sunrise selfie; 7:30am shaky picture of the temple as you drive past; 8:30am soggy croissants and lukewarm coffee at the industrial buffet breakfast hall. Burn the list and the guidebook; go where your soul leads you.

There may be a time for group travel. That is all I have to say about this form of travel. I am not going to wax lyrical about this touristy travel format.

That brings me back to where I started – the joys of solo eating. When solo travel has such an exalted aura around it, why is then solo eating often frowned upon? There is an existential tension here. We are told that food brings people together, that social eating is social bonding, that breaking bread together breaks barriers. And then we are told to eat mindfully. How does one eat mindfully, when one is expected to engage in small talk with the person on either side of you at the table, and dodge the uncle across the table guffawing at his own joke and spraying a mist of pesto in your face?

Before you label me a sad loner, let me repeat – there is a time and place. I have done more than my fair share of communal eating. And it is fun; especially when eating bad food. The company distracts you.

Here are the often-underappreciated virtues of eating alone.

When eating, I want the food to be the hero, not my dinner companions. I will be companionable with them before the food, and after the food. But leave me alone when I engage all my five senses in enjoying the delights on my plate, not the not-so-delightful people at the table.

When the food is delightful – the food I cook, for example (just saying, hypothetically) – leave me alone. I want each bite to be an event. I want to feel the aroma in my nose, feast my eyes on the colours, feel the texture on my teeth, hear the crunch and the slurp. That is even before my tastebuds go into overdrive. All five senses, standing up to attention.

Finally, when you eat alone, you get to eat what you like, not what you think you ought to like. You don’t need to impress people; you don’t need to pretend you like kale (inside scoop – no one likes kale; it is the star of a whole global faux-wellness industry built on pretentiousness).

I Am Not a Foodie

I hereby launch a petition. Ban the word ‘foodie’. This neologism did not exist until the early 1980s. It first appears in restaurant reviews by Gael Greene, the food critic at New York Magazine. And even after its unfortunate invention, it made only small ripples for a couple of decades, when someone wanted to talk about a person who had an ardent interest in food.

The original meaning of foodie was a kind of poor man’s gourmet. A gourmet was an epicure who appreciated fine food served in refined premises. Foodies loved food, period.

Then came social media, and suddenly everyone and their cat is a foodie. If you have more than 20 followers on Instagram and can cook anything slightly more complicated than a boiled egg, you seem to think you are a foodie. It has become a catchall word to describe anyone from a humble home cook to a food enthusiast, to a gourmand, to a food critic, to a professional chef, to a cookbook author, to a sustainable food activist…let me stop here, you get the picture.

I know people who take extreme-close-up-out-of-focus pictures of every samosa they eat on the roadside call themselves foodies. I know those who watch food television 4 hours a day but can’t switch on a gas cooker call themselves foodies. I know celebrity chefs who call themselves foodies. 

A word that means everything, means nothing. There are so many evocative specific words to describe everyone on the spectrum. Why fall for a meaningless generalisation?

There are food enthusiasts – and I presume you are one, otherwise you would not be reading this column. These are people who like food (makes me wonder, are there people who don’t like food?) and like to eat well, and talk about what they eat. This includes everyone who has at least once posted the cliché ‘I live to eat, not eat to live’.

A notch up is a gourmand (or gourmet or gastronome, depending on how French you want to sound) – someone who likes food & drink a great deal. If it was just liking food a lot (or liking a lot of food), the person would be called a glutton. A gourmand is a refined glutton – one who is educated enough about the topic to not just eat a lot but be able to write a whole Twitter thread on the virtues of poaching versus boiling an egg.

Then there are connoisseurs, those who know the art and science behind food & drinks and can survive through a whole 5-course-3-hour meal discussing the subtleties of the five French mother sauces, and where you can substitute a velouté for a béchamel without having to lay your head down on the guillotine. 

Then there are food critics – those who go eat out at restaurants and write erudite columns about how the soup had the consistency of dishwater, and how the Maillard reaction on the grilled aubergine had been allowed to go on for 30 seconds too long, and how the arugula instead of the basil in the pesto was a stroke of genius.

There are food activists – who think milk from a cow is a violation of the animal rights of the calf, that squeezing an insipid white fluid from an almond is a gift to humanity, that the food-industrial complex was hastening the demise of the planet, and that kale and quinoa will save the world.

There are even home cooks, who live for Instagram likes, and tell the world (or at least their 147 followers), in 10 pictures or less, how to make paneer butter masala. Some of them have even started speed dating their aloo gobhi to fit into a 30-second Insta Reel – and can’t believe their luck that Instagram now allows 60-second videos on Reels. 

And then there are the guys doing vox pops with every street chaat bhaiya, gushing over every spatula stroke, and breathlessly proclaiming ‘this is the best chaat in the city’, and posting shaky videos on Instagram, balancing the camera in one hand and dripping paani poori in the other. You can continue to call them a foodie, who cares.

And all of the above food-related labels owe their existence to the real OG foodies – the chefs. These are food magicians who do the real cooking in restaurants, and whose cooking the rest of us talk about, write about, fill newspaper columns reviewing, or try to emulate at home.

We are spoiled for choice on labels to describe all kinds of food people. Please do not say foodie. I will not know if you are talking about someone who, for the first time, made a cheese sandwich, or someone who just catered a 500-cover banquet at the fancy downtown hotel. 

Do You Have Time?

Define cooking. You start with some base ingredients – say, vegetables, dal, rice, meat. Into these base ingredients go some additives – say, oil, salt, spices, condiments. The defining transformation happens when heat is applied to the ingredients and the additives. 

So, cooking is a simple combination of three factors: the base ingredient, the additives, and heat. The ingredients, additives, and heat do a little secret dance, and out comes a delicious dish.

Simple. Or is it? We are missing a key factor: Time. The ingredients, additives, and heat interact with each other over time. The transformation depends on how much time the additives spend with the ingredient, and how much time they spend with heat. We don’t often think of time as an ingredient in cooking. 

In these days of fast life and fast food, we think we are being smart when we do more in less time. But taking half the time out of cooking – for example, by cooking quickly on high heat – is like taking half the salt out or half the oil out. Will your dish taste as delectable with half the required amount of salt or oil?

Ingredients need time, on low heat, to slowly reveal their hidden potential. A dal makhani needs to simmer for an hour for the natural cream hidden inside the urad bean to bloom. You cannot force it. Potatoes need to roast an hour for the outside to get crisp and the inside to go all pulpy and creamy. Without adequate time, you can make edible food, but not magical. Time brings the magic out.

The villain of the piece, robbing ingredients of the time they need to bloom, are these so-called fast cooking devices like pressure cookers (and their fancy cousins like instant pots). Smash your pressure cooker. Pro tip: pressure cookers make quaint plant pots in your balcony.

I know, in Indian kitchens the pressure cooker is king. No cooking session starts without at least something going into the pressure cooker, for two whistles, or twenty. The noisiest and scariest device ever invented. Boil your dal in an open pot. Yes, it will take three times as long. So what? Remember, time is an ingredient. If the dal wants an hour to slowly simmer for its magic to manifest itself, then respect that dal’s wish. Who are we to tell the dal to do its trick in 20 minutes? 

At a classical music recital, would you ask the singer to do her alaap at 3x speed so you can get the piece done in 20 minutes instead of the hour that the raag needs to reveal its beauty? Would you jog through an art gallery, cursorily waving at each masterpiece? 

Our obsession with speed, with efficiency, has crept into our kitchens. We pray at the altar of efficiency, not creativity. Slow down, smell the roses. Let the dal boil for an hour, do other prep meanwhile, spend time with the family, listen to music, read a book, go for a walk. 

Do not be disrespectful to the dal by throwing it into a pressure cooker. You can hear the distress of the dal through those soul-destroying ‘whistles’ of the monstrosity. They deceivingly call it a whistle. That is not a whistle; you whistle a love tune on a verdant mountainside. Those are blood-curdling screams for help from the defenceless dal, being tortured in that pressurised hellhole. 

Show some love. The sublime dal makhani, cooked in an open pot for an hour, is a piece of art, not the dull soulless dal that has survived third degree in that torture chamber, the pressure cooker.

Fast food is overrated. Slow food is good food.

Nothing Authentic About Authenticity

Some people say food is life. Well I say, food is more important than life. Food transcends life. With something so important, no wonder people get inordinately passionate, viscerally emotional, and violently possessive about their food. What really is their food?

This brings me to the authenticity wars. I know at least two nations who would rather go to war than concede that the delectable falafel was not first made in their country. Punjabis would need to down a few Patiala pegs in shock if told that aloo gobhi is not Punjabi. How is aloo gobhi so Punjabi, when neither the aloo, nor the gobhi, was known in India until the potato came to India from the new world through the Portuguese, and the cauliflower came to India with the English colonialists? Every Punjabi will insist that their family recipe for rajma is the only real rajma. Really? When a couple of hundred years ago rajma (red kidney beans) had not yet left the shores of Mexico?

Is the authentic dosa from Tamil Nadu or from Karnataka? Tell any resident of Udupi in Karnataka that dosa is Tamil, and you will be crushed flatter than said dosa. Idli has a cult following in much of Tamil Nadu, but many scholars believe that the technique of steaming rice came to the Tamils from present day Indonesia, where Hindu dynasties had kingdoms in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Is the chicken tikka masala a Delhi invention? Tell that to any self-respecting Bangladeshi curry house owner in London, and you will not enter their premises ever again. Would Mumbaikars boycott the beaches of Goa if Goans were to suggest that the pav – the soul of Mumbaiya pav bhaji and vada pav – was invented in Goa, inspired by the Portuguese? 

Is the taco really Mexican, or a Mexican twist on the shawarma carried to Mexico by the Lebanese migrants a hundred years ago? Many cities in India – from Lucknow to Hyderabad – claim they are the custodians of the real biryani. Are they? Didn’t the biryani, like so much of North Indian food, come from the Middle East and Central Asia?

The chaatwala on the aroma-infused smoke-laden streets of Chandni Chowk in Delhi will hurl his bowl of chaat masala in your face if you suggest that his samosa came from the Middle East. The not-so-sweet truth: the quintessential Indian jalebi started its circuitous journey as zalibiya in Persia; gulab jamun was the more exotically named luqmat al qadi in the Middle East. To top it all, if you are still hung up about authenticity, drop your glass of masala chai now, as tea did not come into India until 200 years ago from China, when it became embroiled in the murky opium wars between the British Empire and China.

Almost all the food we now call American has its origins in either the slave trade with West Africa (the soul food of the southern USA is almost entirely African in origin) or in Europe – the hamburgers and sausages from Germany, the pizza from Italy. Apples were introduced to America from Europe, and yet we say nothing is as American as apple pie!

I hope I have convinced you that no food is originally from anywhere; nothing is authentic. The world is a large melting pot. And thank goodness for that. This melding and merging and mixing and mutation and metamorphosis of ingredients and cooking methods is what has enhanced every cuisine in the world. Try to imagine Indian food without potato, cauliflower, tomato, chillies, rajma, tandoor, jalebi, samosa, carrots (say bye to gajar halwa), pav, chai, coffee; I could go on. You don’t need to imagine; welcome to the Indian kitchen of 300 years ago. Raise your hand if you want to go back to that Indian food. Good good, I see no raised hands.

Making Sense of Taste

We eat with our brains. This concept has a fancy name: Multisensory Perception of Flavour. While we think we just engage the sense of taste when eating, we often engage all five senses.

What happens on the tastebuds is only a small part of this multisensory experience we call taste. We feed the mind and not just the mouth. Cognitive neuroscientists believe the brain combines the signals from all the senses, to create a crossmodal perception of the taste of food.

Let’s look at some of the five senses that complement our sense of taste.

Sight

It is a cliché to say that we eat with our eyes. We really do. Studies show that when two identical cups of ice cream have different colours, the pink ice cream is perceived as tasting sweeter, while an identical tasting green ice cream is perceived as more sour.

We do not consciously analyse the sensations on our tastebuds. We use heuristics – shortcuts in our intuitive brain (often called System 1 brain). With cultural conditioning, we have come to expect pink foods to be sweet and green foods to be sour. We taste what we think we taste. We often don’t engage the rational brain (often called System 2 brain) when making such snap judgements. So, the same ice cream tastes sweeter when pink than when green.

When we eat a dessert from a round plate, it tastes sweeter than the same dessert served on a square plate. The heuristic: roundness is associated with sweet and angularity triggers feelings of sharpness. Food on white plates tastes sweeter than food on black plates. Try these at home. Serve the same dessert to your family one day on round plates and another day on angular plates; then on a white plate and on a black plate; see the reactions.

Sound

The sounds around food affect our perception of the taste. Studies show that potato chips served in ‘noisy’ foil packs are perceived as crunchier and tastier than the same chips served in a ‘quiet’ polyethylene pack.  

The sizzle of frying and clatter of utensils from an open kitchen makes customers at restaurants rate the food as tastier than the same food served from a closed kitchen where customers can’t hear the cooking.

At a beach resort, the sounds of waves impact the perceived taste of food. That is why, when we come back from a holiday, even if we follow the exact same recipe, the food doesn’t taste as good as it did at the resort. The sounds on the beach had more to do with the taste of food than the food itself.

Coffee tastes different when consumed in a café with the buzz of conversations and the sound of grinding coffee. That same coffee tastes flat as a takeaway. The coffee is not flat; your ears are not receiving the auditory signals you associate with good coffee. 

Touch

Food tastes better when eaten with hand, not cutlery. The touch of food on skin, the texture, the warmth sends positive signals to the brain even before the food touches the mouth. 

In a study, the same food, in the same restaurant, was served with heavy cutlery to some customers and lightweight cutlery to others. Those who eat with heavy cutlery rate the food better on taste and quality. The food is the same. The heft of the weighty cutlery tells our brain to expect premium food, even before we taste the food.

I have just scratched the surface; just to nudge you to start noticing the many factors impacting our perception of food. Taste is only one small factor.

This Professor Cooks. And talks about food ideas, food science, food culture, food hacks, and food history. Watch this space for some food, and a lot more food for thought.

Burn the Recipe and Cook With Your Heart

People often say, cooking is an art, not a science; cook from the heart, not the head. Having proclaimed that, the said people promptly open a recipe book, or watch a recipe video, and slavishly start following instructions – add one teaspoon of this, 20 grams of that, one cup of the other. Why do we have to measure and follow every word of a recipe, as if it were a doctor’s prescription? This sounds more like a chemistry lab than a kitchen, and I do not remember when I last created delicious flavours in a lab. Follow your heart and add what feels right to you at that moment – and the operative word is ‘feel’. Cooking is all about feeling, not knowing. There is no right or wrong recipe. Burn the recipe and cook with your heart. Even if you start with a recipe (or ten), use it as exactly that – a starting point. Then ignore the recipe and create your own magic.

I do not cook by recipe; nor do I tell others to cook by my recipes. If you simply copy a recipe, you are just reproducing a faint photocopy of someone else’s masterpiece. Create your own masterpiece. Good artists don’t copy other people’s paintings; good writers don’t reproduce other people’s literary works. In those creative domains, copying is called plagiarism. Why then should cooks plagiarise someone else’s creation by a line-by-line reproduction of their recipe?

Treat recipes as inspirations not prescriptions. If you follow a prescription, you are robotically reproducing what someone has already produced. If you just keep copying recipes, you are not adding to the net knowledge in the world. New ideas, new discoveries, new flavours are created when you go off the beaten track and create your own masterpiece. In following a recipe there is no suspense, no joy of discovery, no serendipity. If you throw in different ingredients, take a sharp left turn halfway through a cooking session, and do something wild, you discover, you create, you surprise yourself.

Would you read a book if you already knew the ending? Why would you cook with a known end result? That is boring. Without surprise and discovery, cooking becomes a chore. You surely want cooking to be an exhilarating experience and not a chore!

Go wild with your heart and your imagination. 

Cooking Up The Future Of Education

It is a cliché to say that the lockdown was good for amateur culinary skills. In the past year, I have spent far more time at home, and what else do you do at home but cook and eat.

My other interest is education. As I say in my Instagram bio, I am a professor at a university when I am not cooking. Wearing my professor hat, I often ponder over what is wrong with our education system, and how we can reinvent the world of education.

My cooking hat and my professor hat often collide. I then start to think of what cooking has taught me about education. Here are a few of these mashups:

Lesson 1: Creating Masterpieces

I cook from the heart, not the head. I get a feel the cooking with my five senses, and often the sixth sense too. Cooking needs intuition, gut feel, emotions. I do not just follow recipes. I treat recipes as suggestions, not prescriptions. If I just replicate a recipe, I would be doing a faint photocopy of the recipe writer’s masterpiece, not creating my own masterpiece. 

Similarly in education, we often put too much emphasis on students memorising facts, learning from textbooks, listening to professors, dutifully taking notes. And spilling it all out in the exam. Following the textbooks and professor’s lecture does not add to the total net knowledge in the world. It is like following the recipe as a prescription rather than a suggestion. We need to allow students to debate, disagree, and come up with original ideas; not just reproduce the ideas from the professor and the textbook. 

In our High Power Distance culture, children are taught not to disagree with their elders. That creates a top-down one-way education, which is a barrier to creating new knowledge. Our education system needs to allow students to experiment, and debate, and disagree, and create new ideas. Just like experimenting with new spices and new cooking methods, going off piste, creates exciting new flavours in cooking.

Allow students to create their own masterpieces, not copies of their professors’ masterpieces.

Lesson 2: Mix Spices; Mix Disciplines

The best cuisines are those that have assimilated ingredients and cooking techniques of other cuisines. Indian food is a melting pot of Persian, Arab, Turkish, Portuguese, British, Chinese influences. Such assimilation creates magic; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Similarly, interdisciplinarity is the future of education. As we integrate the concepts and methodologies of various disciplines and take an interdisciplinary lens to a challenge, we see solutions which a single discipline would never have been able to see. Problems of the world need an interdisciplinary approach. Whether it is the pandemic or climate change. These are not a science problem – it is a science, and economics, and politics, biology, and sociology, and behavioural economics problem. 

Our education will bring out magic only when many disciplines meld, just like food brings out magic when many and varied cuisines meld. When spices mix, we create flavours that are beyond what any single spice could have created; when disciplines mix, the resulting interdisciplinary approach extracts hitherto unknown solutions.

Lesson 3: Outcome Not Output

People often focus on the Input and the Output of cooking; instead, we need to focus on the Outcome. The input is the ingredients and the recipe steps. The output is the dish that comes out at the end of this process. But, if I just follow the steps, and measure out the ingredients as specified, we get the expected dish as an output, no surprise there, no aha moment, no magic. The magic happens with the delight on the faces of your family and friends when they eat your creation. That is Outcome, which is more than just the Output. 

In education, we focus too much on input (lectures, textbooks, attendance, exams) and on the output (marks, grades, degrees). The outcome of education is not a degree. The outcomes are the life lessons, the development of self-reliant young people, inculcating the spirit of learning how to learn. Almost everything we can teach students today will be obsolete in the next couple of decades. People need to learn how to learn, so they can constantly reinvent themselves throughout life.

Lesson 4: Smashing The Bed Of Procrustes

The industrial farming system forces farmers to produce fruits and vegetables that are perfect in shape and size. So they all neatly fit into prefabricated containers and look good on supermarket shelf. Wonky, gnarly, ‘ugly’ vegetables are discarded. We grow produce for yield, size, appearance; not for flavour. All carrots looking alike is considered better than each carrot growing into whatever wild shape its heart desires. Let the carrots be ugly and grow wild. That is brings the flavours out.

Reminds me of the Greek myth about Procrustes and his bed. He used to host travellers to sleep in the infamous bed of Procrustes. If the guest was too short, Procrustes would stretch the guest to fit the bed; if the guest was too tall, he would chop off their legs to make them fit the bed. No wonder, his name became synonymous with forced uniformity. We often use the phrase Procrustean Education to describe the dominant model of education today. Every student is stretched or chopped to fit the exact template, sit in the same classrooms, take the same exams, and get the same degrees. 

‘Ugly’, wonky, misshapen kids are either beaten into shape or fall off the assembly line. I am a proponent of the Ugly Food Movement, fighting for the wonky carrot. I would like to see a post-Procrustean education system where each child is allowed to flourish in their own areas of interest, and not forced to fit into a template. Innovation and creativity happen when one follows their heart, and not when one is churned out like identical bots from an assembly line.

I will continue to occasionally write about cooking my way through the education system.