Bad Food For Thought.

Back in India, I remember how mom used to urge me to learn to cook. She had tried every possibly strategy under the sun. She had tried to coax me with love, and then with anger. She had tried with emotional blackmailing as well. And the moment she did this, I would use fight or flight. There was something about the idea of cooking that used to scare me. What if I got burnt? What if the food was overcooked? What if I added certain spices and died of food poisoning? I used to be the black sheep in the family since both mom and dad are great cooks. That’s pretty much the picture back at home.

And then, I came here. I came to the land of opportunities. I came to the land of abundance. I came to the land where every small sized thing you order is still jumbo size by your standards. I remember the food I used to order initially, everything of the minimum possible quantity, and I used to end up taking more than half the food back home. I remember the stores where I was overwhelmed with the size of prawns and shrimps and potato chips packets. G, despite her classes, used to often bring me home cooked food (yeah, I know, shame on me). I came to this place where everything you wanted was cut and canned and ready to use. All you had to do is while your time in some nearby store, undecided whether the red bell peppers are better or the green ones. Bell peppers by the way mean capsicums. Egg plant isn’t a non-vegetarian plant produce, it’s our very own brinjal. Egg plant? How could an egg be a plant? And when G pointed to the cold storage racks and asked me to get her a packet of okra, I thought that okra was a Tamil word. Well, it isn’t. Okra means lady fingers.


Life so far here has been an immense learning experience. Let me not digress but rather stick to my culinary exploits here. On one hand we have the storage stuff. On the other, we have what I call the “pourage” stuff. You pour, you drink. Back at home, I remember how mom would fret that milk would turn rancid in the summers. I remember how she would peel, cut, dice, pulp, and perform the other verbs I wouldn’t even know. Here, there is no concept of boiling milk. There is no concept of making fruit juice or yogurt. You buy, you pour, you drink. Sounds cool, no?

What more, everything under the sun is available in flavors. I took a good 10 minutes to figure out whether I should take the strawberry flavored yogurt or the pina colada. I wondered if the Concorde grape juice tasted better or the passion fruit. Bell peppers were green, red, or yellow-orange. Potatoes were white or red. And the ones I thought were onions were actually jumbo-sized garlic.

I thought I had finally entered the land of the pizzas and the pastries and sushi and smoked salmons. I was constantly putting my connoisseurship to test, trying out on the Thai and the American food joints. When the department invited us for lunch, I was delighted. Mom, I told you I could do without learning to cook.

I was in for a surprise. The department hosted a grand lunch. There were so many trays of food that if you had your food from the first tray and started to walk, you’d feel hungry by the time you reached the last tray. And here starts the saga of how I got to make a complete fool of myself.

The food here wasn’t dal, chawal, naan, and dhokla. This was American food. It started with trays of fresh vegetables, uncut, uncooked. God knows how hard I’ve tried to stimulate my bovine instincts and enjoy the lettuce and the cabbage sans the green chilly or the lemons.

And then I didn’t even know half the fruits and the vegetables. I saw broccoli for the first time, the miniature version of mountain forests. Vegetables were to be followed by an array of sandwiches. I had a hard time figuring out which were the beefed, porked, hammed, or turkeyed. Everything other than chicken made me want to throw up. And chicken doesn't mean the cooked chicken curry from back home. Chicken here is eaten bland and boiled.


Post sandwich were packets of potato chips. Lunch looked like snacks. This was to be followed by varieties of something I mistook as white creamed pastries. So I cut out a large chunk of it. I was soon to discover my stupidity at the thought of having mistaken white cheese for pastries. And the dried raisins I thought were black olives actually.

So that was it- green leafy salads, sandwiches, pizzas, cheese, chips, egg-dipped cookies, cut fruits, and cans of beer and Coke. Where was the main course? Where were the fried rice and the reshmi kebabs and the fish fries and the dal makhanis and the gulab jamuns?

Seems every possible gastronomic nightmare I had started to come true. I would be unable to chomp on the pizzas that smelt of beef. There was no concept of curries, chutneys, and aachars. Soon I started to avoid the departmental lunches and dinners. I would no longer be allured by any seminar that announced “free pizzas and light refreshments”. The only good things I’ve had here so far are the chocolate pastries.

2 weeks of all this and soon I was only having the starters and the desserts in a meal. There was yet another lunch I had to attend and all I had were fruits and cookies that reeked of raw eggs. I had the appetite of an ant. I remember the day when I’d cried in relief when G had cooked simple chawal, dal fry, and south Indian vegetarian curry for me. It tasted like Heaven.

And then there was this Thai place I went to and since I didn’t know what was what, I ended up starting the meal with desserts. Well, this is because they had placed the desserts at the beginning and even that tasted like the sweetened and chocolatty version of Isabgol for curing constipation. You just couldn’t miss the constipated look on my face the moment I took a spoonful.

Also, let me tell you that the coffee here is bad. B-A-D. It’s strong, it’s bitter, and you’d add dozens of sugar cubes, yet you’d have the same constipated look on your face the moment you had a sip. The only good food I’ve had is in a Chinese food joint, where the food was somewhat “similar” to what I am used to having. Having said that, Chinese food here is in no way close to the Indo-Chinese food in Calcutta. Even the roadside "Gulmohar Chineez Hotel" in Calcutta serves better food.

One week of the terrible food and my digestive system went into the hibernating mode. Ask me how it feels like going to sleep on an empty stomach to wake up in the middle of the night and crave for paani puris, chicken rolls and dosas. So much for stubbornness and not learning how to cook.

I hope that the Americans aren't offended about how I found eating a nightmare here. I am just an outsider, with very different food habits. I remember how every time, I threw a tantrum when mom cooked bitter gourd or pumpkin curry. What I'd do to have it right now. 

sunshine.