How the easy availability of new spices, condiments and recipes changed food trends in India

The Green Revolution of the 1960s, for example, ushered in the industrialisation of Indian farming by introducing new, higher-yielding varieties of rice and new technologies, from pesticides to tractors, had had an enduring impact on the diets of those I worked with. For many, the changes of that era heralded a shift from sangati, a heavy porridge made from ragi (finger millet) or jonnalu (sorghum), along with hand-pounded rice, to industrially processed rice as a staple. It had done so to the extent that many of the younger people growing up in Anandapuram were not even aware of the existence of those earlier preparations. And while new farming methods had no doubt increased yields, they had also, according to my older research participants, changed the flavours and mouth-feel of what they ate. “The taste was better back then,” said Abdullah, wistfully. It was a common trope among people over fifty. “The smoke from the firewood flavoured the food more,” he went on, “and because vegetables were grown in buffalo dung, without ‘medicines,’ they were more natural. You could even eat raw vegetables then, and they would really taste good. Now they are more bitter.”

Such comments were noticeably consistent across other parts of India (and indeed elsewhere). Farmers, herders, and artisans from comparable age groups in rural Rajasthan, for example, talked of a decline in taste and nourishment, which, as was the case for my interlocutors, they blamed on everyday chemical fertilisers and new grain varieties. Food talk became a medium through which to critique modernity itself, even as they partook of it. But material changes in the food also changed what it meant. Rice, for instance, had long been aspired to in South India but was now metonymic of food itself: instead of asking whether I had eaten, the question people in Anandapuram asked me was “Have you taken rice?” Other foods – there only to stimulate appetite for the main component of the meal – remained secondary.

Over time, the symbolic dominance of rice might again shift in relation to the material circumstances in which it is engaged. Even as recently as the late 1980s, for example, women I knew in Anandapuram spent hours shaking and sifting through uncooked rice in order to separate the grains from loose pieces of husk and stray stones that, in the intervening years, the industrialisation of rice packaging had virtually eliminated. No one ever told me that they wished to return to doing that painstaking work, even if they missed the drawn-out conversations with neighbours, the tempo of which was determined by the task, that often accompanied it.

But the visceral engagement with almost every grain of rice that they prepared had also made for a different kind of embodied relationship between rice and cook than that established through the more fleeting encounter of simply washing and boiling the rice that typifies contemporary preparation practices.

It meant rice was more important in structuring the day, and consumption of it was more valuable because of the time and effort invested in it. How rice was subsequently eaten had also changed. The ratio of rice to accompaniment had decreased in Anandapuram over the last thirty years, at least among families whose income levels had increased, and whose work had shifted from heavy manual labour in the paddy fields or pulling rickshaws to more sedentary occupations, such as driving cars or working in call centres.

A related change was that the availability and consumption of snacks – from industrially produced biscuits to savoury street food – had also risen in Anandapuram, Bhavanipur, and, I suspect, Hyderabad over the past two decades. Correspondingly, the dishes served to flavour the rice was less fiery than in the past, and the spices were often bought ready-ground in sealed packets rather than purchased loose and roughly pounded at home on a grinding stone, giving different textures as well as subtly different flavours to domestic cuisine. “My mother’s curries had fewer masalas [mixtures of spices] than people use now,” Venkatarao, a man in his early seventies, recalled. “She would only use peppercorns, ginger, curry leaves, coriander, and carom [chilli powder], lots of carom. People don’t have the capacity for that much chilli powder anymore.” Foods not only had less taste but, he implied, were now more bafflingly complicated than in the past, when a more straightforward way of life had been possible.

Nevertheless – and in direct contrast to Amaravathi’s earlier comment that milk direct from the buffalo herder was purer than packaged milk from the dairy – my friends in Anandapuram at the same time urged me to buy spices in sealed packets rather than those sold loose from sacks in the market, because they were less liable to be contaminated or, in local parlance, “duplicate.” There was an ambivalence toward change, as things seemed to be simultaneously getting better and worse.

Other dietary changes – hinted at in the prolonged description of Amaravathi’s family’s dietary habits above – included a gradual shift, as witnessed elsewhere, toward more processed and convenience foods, from noodles, pickles, and jam to biscuits and other confectioneries. Eating outside the house or bringing into the household dishes that had been prepared outside was also a growing trend. Meals in some households – even as they remained almost as structurally consistent as those Mary Douglas (1972) rendered into algebraic equations in her seminal essay “Deciphering a Meal” – had become increasingly sophisticated over the decades.

When I was called to dine at people’s houses on my most recent trips to India, for example, there were seldom fewer than three dishes on offer (a fried vegetable, a pulusu, and a lentil dish of some kind), even before curd, chutney, sweets, appetisers, and postprandial fizzy drinks and bananas were taken into account. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I was much more likely to have been served a single curry with the rice. Published recipes – online, on TV, and in recipe books, magazines, and newspapers – had also expanded the repertoires of a number of the younger women whose houses I dined in beyond those they had learned from their mothers and mothers-in-law. Here, food had become a medium through which women (for most domestic cooks I encountered remained women) could communicate both knowledge and sophistication, as well as demonstrate appropriate hospitality.

In short, then, this documentation of daily diets shows at least three things. First, it indicates that meat, while important, played a materially small part in the diet of most meat eaters, whose routine menus were predominantly vegetarian. Second, it demonstrates that the social meanings which food can carry are contingent on a wide arc of material and historical circumstances. Third, it suggests that it was not just that food – in the sense of identifiable dishes or preparations – was meaningful, but also that the processes of change in foodways could themselves serve to communicate attitudes about wider social change.

Excerpted with permission from Sacred Cows And Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India, James Staples, HarperCollins India.