Food is a source of guilt, not nourishment, for many.
My relationship with food was never easy because I was an overweight child.
But the process of coming to terms with a world that fears scarcity — pockets that are seeing it amidst this pandemic — has no doubt changed my stance a bit.
Some days, I ask my parents: Have you stocked up? Are you getting everything? Are people kind enough to deliver stuff home?
My parents are far away in Kerala. They are also old and locked up in their homes.
Food then is Love.
Buying groceries — that very insignificant act of making a list — has now become a weekly ritual for our family of four. It’s nice to see my daughter make fragrant pastas and perfect cakes: her way of dealing with what she considers life to be.
But it’s also good to tell her that she has to make do with what we have — mundane cooked rice or boring brown rotis — until her next grocery trip. It works sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t.
The grill outside burns intensely on nights that my husband grapples with stress at work. He places strips of meat and thickly cut vegetables — a peg in hand — furrowing his brows, as if the sound of food sizzling is some kind of odd music.
Food then is Solace.
As days go by, Janaki — our helper — promises to cook delicacies I have never heard about: Sri Lankan Rotis and Sambol.
She reaches out to her daughter miles away in Kandy, who sends pictures of Vesak Day lunches in Sri Lanka. Janaki misses the Buddhist temples here. They are dark now. Closed. People used to share prayers in them…and food.
Food then is God.
Mother tells me about rattling rickshaws that appear out of nowhere. The rickshaws are a welcome sight, she says.
They are crammed with yellow bananas and green vegetables for the entire colony. It means someone is still working hard somewhere. The soil is fertile. Crops are growing.
Food then is Hope.
A civet cat scrambles up our mango tree every night for fat ripe mangoes that Father hasn’t managed to pluck. Partly eaten fruit is strewn across the backyard, but the birds and squirrels get them.
Mother tells me about the cat that sits above their gate, waiting for her to pour some milk in its cracked blue cup and Father tells me he has managed to order those glucose biscuits — those that smell of wheat and sugar — to feed them to the wild crow on the sill every morning.
Food is Life…for all.
It is sometimes the only way to cross bridges. Perhaps that’s why we are discouraged from pointing fingers at cuisines. Rejecting a food could mean rejecting a people.
Food then is personal.
My daughter made a lemon cake for my husband’s birthday a few days ago…yes, it should have been at a better time, but any time that marks love and gratitude could be a good time…a bearable time, at least.
From the starving elephants back in India and migrants stuck on roads to the neatly packed langar rotis in Singapore and the many, many untold stories of food — or lack of it — I’ll keep these in mind…
for who wants to go back to being clueless about food…and what it means to be hungry…?