In praise of food and cooking in Corona times

 

Food is about….

Last week disparate experiences suddenly reconfirmed what I had always believed which was that I couldn’t rely on mediocre to bad imitations of Asian food small-town-German restaurant style to feed my guests at the first gathering in two years (two years with trials and tribulations) of not many people (because the pandemic is still lurking) that I am hosting here at my house in August. Because I said that Asian food would be the theme (referring vaguely to  Asian east of India in western European terms), Ina trying to save me the work of cooking for everybody took me on a restaurant and imbiss tour in search of passable Asian food. I fell in step until I tasted all the bad food which had nothing to do with me. I thought of the wonderful east Asian dishes that Maja and Franz my friends in Amsterdam have over the years cooked for me and my heart fell. I made a decision: I was going to cook generic South Asian because that’s what I know best (based on family and friend recipes domesticated to what is available in the supermarkets here and to my friends’ tastes). Food wasn’t about the eating since none of my friends were suffering from hunger waiting to be fed restaurant bought food by me; food, its preparation and endless discussion about ingredients, the correct flavour, who taught whom the recipe etcetera is all about connections, community, togetherness and dare I say, love.  

 

Three experiences last week in the space of a single day brought about this epiphany. First was my usual habit of reading the Guardian Culture and Lifestyle sections in the newspapers scouring for books to read, films to see (most of which I can’t because the cinemas haven’t opened yet) and for recipes. There in the culture section lo and behold was what seemed like a message appearing before me an interview with Elif Safak the Turkish-British writer about her new book The Island of Missing Trees. And in that conversation about the book which is about two lovers from Cyprus running away and seeking refuge in Britain in the 1970s because they belonged on the wrong sides of the political divide, the author talked about shared and disputed recipes the lovers brought with them. As Safak said food is about love and bringing people together something in me stirred. 

 

Second, as I did my along-the-canal 6 km walk with BBC radio 4 pinned to my ears, I heard a programme about the new food or nutrition policy post pandemic and post Brexit in the UK. It was boring, dry, and bereft of humour or of people who actually cook and eat the food. It was entirely about how government should use policy interventions to manipulate not just citizens who consume but farmers and food industry who produce, to do what the government wants. Albeit the policy recommendations were very sound promoting ecologically sound, less meat and more vegetables type diets. But these recommendations were being made to a government that was busy negotiating free trade treaties allowing for import of cheap and unhealthy Australian and US meats and dairy products to flood the market (at the expense of British farmers and certainly at the expense of good nutrition)! Would one trust such a government to control the circumstances under which citizens acquire their food products? The others in the discussion lapped it up until he said we don’t have an English culture of food when they rebelled. As they argued about bringing traditional English food back, I thought reality had left them far behind – the British cuisine surely has much more to offer with all the diversity ubiquitous in the land. Didn’t I hear from Annie sitting in London on one of our Zoom meets that she was going to cook a stir-fry that evening?

 

And the third experience leading to the epiphany was a Japanese film, Sweet Bean, which I was able to see because my friends Catherine and Hugo gifted me membership of a movie website during my convalescence. I am not going to tell you the story because all of us who love the ritual aspects of preparing food for our friends and loved ones should see this but in essence this film, beautifully made, talks about the making of a living, breathing sweet Bean sauce that not only livens up the Japanese dorayaki pancake bakery which sells it but also the lives of the three protagonists all of whom are outsiders in their society and who long for connections.

 

In the pandemic

Food and cooking acquired a whole new meaning during the past year not only here in western Europe where I was the whole time but among my friends in India and other places too. Restaurants were shut but more to the point during the periods of lockdown one thought twice before actually inviting others in case they passed on infection. In fact, it became immoral to invite anybody or be invited by without telling them about your movements in the previous seven days at least; part of the new normal was to lay down the law about who could visit whom where etc. So food as a way of togetherness, of celebration was abruptly halted by the pandemic like much else in our lives because togetherness was now a harbinger of the deadly virus. For me living alone this was very hard because it was with food and cooking that I brought people together and shared my life in this small town. But when I did and could escape to Amsterdam friends invited me over and cooked for me keeping in mind all the social distancing rules. I remember that during the short respite we had in July-August last year we once went to a restaurant with seating places outside on a warm day and it felt like an adventure.

 

With this part of our lives at a standstill we went online with our food communities sharing photos of preparations that we learned anew or cooked from materials that were sourced from speciality shops that had just reopened after the lockdown or growing things we never did before including the fact that my friend Jharna in Kolkata grew different kinds of gourds on a narrow window ledge of her apartment because they were afraid to go shopping (infection!!). Valerie became an excellent South Asian cook making dishes for her friends in London from recipes we had shared. And even my friend Madhushree (better known as Phuljhuri to her friends) for whom cooking is a waste of precious time, shared recipes of our favourite Bengali dishes. When I returned from the hospital with my arm in a sling, Madhushree had cooked comfort food, the rice-dhal-chhochodi of our childhood complete with fish cakes Bengali style domesticated to Europe.  

 

We had an international discussion of South Asians last year on my foody friend and feminist economist Naila’s Facebook site about the best gadget that could mix garlic and onion and make a dry paste (and not soggy). And we talked about food among other more serious political and social issues on our friendship zoom meets. And every time I shared a recipe with the Bread and Roses group Lina would pounce on me virtually demanding to know whether I had given it to her. I have been sending her my recipes of Indian dishes tasted 20 years ago when we lived together in Oxford and others too, which by the way, she never cooks but nevertheless must have first before anybody else because it’s about my love for her! And with a lot of help from BBC good food (suggested by Catherine) and The Guardian, with innumerable phone calls to Catharine for questions and advice (what does the zest of a lemon mean) I turned myself into a baker. The first time I baked was during the US elections to keep jittery me away from the telly and the constant projections the day immediately after the polling.

 

But not all of us were fortunate enough to not only talk about food but to cook it and share it. Last year in 2020 as the lockdowns all over the world began to bite, some mildly monitored and some held down with an iron fist because citizens could not be trusted to do the right thing, the inequalities that had always been there began to surface. Many people went hungry while others were forced by the negligence of their governments to starve. In India millions of working people had to leave their temporary dwellings in the cities as their livelihoods were cut off and make their way on foot back to their villages because an overzealous and callous government had shut down public transport and overlooked the fact that these citizens, the majority, existed. 

A crisis in governance has marked India’s response to the scale and depth of the devastation. At this critical juncture, citizens have held the fort. As the tragedy unfolded there was immense solidarity which expressed itself in terms of feeding people making the long trek home in the heat of April. Langharkhana (community kitchens) traditionally organised by the Sikh community who see this as their religious obligation provided food in and around Delhi, Haryana and Punjab. A large national NGO operating in five Indian states which provided mid-day meals to children (under the government funded school mid-day meals programme) suddenly found that with the lockdown they could not operate their kitchens nor feed children since schools were closed[1]. Within months they reoriented the programme and organised take away packs with food materials. Others followed suit.

But most remarkable were the smaller efforts and initiatives in most towns and cities, led by students, professionals, local activists, and journalists that reach where the state and often, larger non-profits, could not[2]. Often in response to hyperlocal needs, with a strong understanding of local context, such initiatives were agile and adept. And because of their focus on localities, many concentrated their efforts in unregistered temporary slums in cities, because this is where most migrant workers were staying, having no permanent address in urban India and therefore no legal access to basic amenities. These initiatives carried a very strong equity lens – a lens that alludes most mainstream relief efforts in India today.

And lest we overlook the efforts of millions of women citizens who individually and in an organised groups have helped India to cope with the devastating crisis, I cite the efforts of the Kudumbashree programme in Kerala state, a government programme to empower women that exists in other states too under different names. This programme has helped self-help groups to come together and earn a living[3]. Many of these businesses had to do with food (besides the tailoring and other small-scale enterprises). In the crisis when everything was in lockdown activities like food preparation and selling had to be discontinued in most states. But the Kerala groups kept the Janakeeya hotels open to cater to poorer members of the community introducing the strict hygiene norms that have now become part of the Covid-19 response. Furthermore, they diverted their tailoring enterprises to making masks which in the first six months were in short supply and others into producing sterilising fluid. The Umeed Foundation followed, setting up self-help enterprises with women in poorer localities who had lost their livelihoods (most commonly making and selling food or worked as cooks) in urban India.

In most countries whether the rich west or in the not so rich developing world the pandemic brought about a food crisis in those parts of the citizenry that governments are most likely to forget. And here too it was left to citizens to fill the policy gap and to remind governments of their duty to the most vulnerable. Unfortunately, today in July 2021, the name Marcus Rashford is known among football lovers only as the young player who missed the critical penalty that gave Italy the European Championship instead of England and which unleashed a storm of racism but, Marcus the 23-year-old football player with a wonderful sporting record, is a hero in more senses than one. When the British government in the summer of 2020 at the height of the pandemic planned to discontinue the school meal voucher scheme, it was Marcus Rashford who stepped up and asked the government to change its mind. The vouchers were introduced in March 2020 to help families who struggled to afford food for their children when schools were closed due to the coronavirus lockdown[4]. Over one million children in the UK were eligible to use the vouchers as they usually have free school meals (BBC 15 June 2020). What started as a one person campaign, snowballed into a movement. Marcus Rashford cited his own experience of hunger as a child as his mother a single parent struggled with three jobs to keep the family afloat. The decision to discontinue was reversed by the government because of the intense publicity and pressure Marcus’s plea had generated. Marcus went on to raise more than £20m during lockdown after teaming up with FareShare, a charity fighting hunger and food waste. 

Living with the virus times.

As we learn to live with the virus, aware all the time that it’s throwing up mutants, our way back to what we think is normalcy is about being together again, meeting people we have been conversing with virtually, and of course at all these imagined gatherings food is the important ingredient. So for example five of us part of our so-called Calcutta zoom group (none of us live in Calcutta anymore and only two of us in India) have already planned our meet menu. Of late I have been receiving photos almost daily of the wondrous delights that Abhijit and Jashodhara produce from locally grown food and veg, grown in homesteads and farms of the tiny Himalayan village where they have retreated to from Delhi/Kolkata and which they now call home. They will be contributing big time to our Living-with-Covid together party.

And I have always dreamt of celebrating my friend and mentor Sunil Mitra’s life by organizing a commemoration in his village, something that could not be done last year when he died because of the lockdowns in the pandemic. And what better way is there to commemorate in a Bengali village but through food and by inviting his very own people, the entire village but especially those from the poorer, schedule caste neighbourhood who according to their account, lost their parent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Akshay Patra

[2] These are too numerous to profile in this Blog but reporting about them can be found in the online newspaper The Wire from India in 2020 especially 16 April 2020; and then several during the second wave when the need of the day became helping Covid affected people to access oxygen and other supplies when hospitals were overburdened, and ICU beds were not available. Here too the focus was on localities and this time in the rural areas where the government health infrastructure was non-existent. See The Wire 16 April 2021

[3] The online newsletter Feminisms in India July 24, 2021 had an article called Intersectional Feminisms – desi style, which talked about these initiatives and which inspired me to look at other sources, mainly the newspapers for more information.

[4] The initiative Marcus Rashford began is well documented by the BBC and The Guardian in 2020 and also 2021 when Marcus was at it again. See specifically The Guardian 23.10.20; BBC 15 June 2020. There are other numerous comments and news reports in 2020 on this.