Long before AI ‘food dramas’, there was Arabic and Persian culinary poetry

Strawberrito is cheating on her husband Banananito. Chawal falls for Tacito (taco) during a trip to Mexico while his girlfriend Rajma pines away in their village in Punjab. Potato discovers the money-laundering scheme of his co-worker Brinjal at Onion’s car repair firm.

This is one genre of the ever-expanding, AI-generated universe of brain-rot reels: talking food and beverages, perpetually caught up in one drama-filled predicament or another.

Watching these “food dramas” was a reminder of a similar – though considerably more imaginative and decidedly less cringe-worthy – phenomenon that flourished across the interconnected Persian, Arabic, and Urdu literary worlds.

Between the 11th and 19th centuries, poets and storytellers from Cairo to Shiraz and Hindustan transformed flowers, trees, fruits, vegetables, and kitchen ingredients into rivals, vigilantes, rulers, counselors, and companions, endowing them with voices, personalities, and ambitions of their own. Through their quarrels, alliances, and adventures, these poets reflected on the social and cultural transformations of their times.

Many of these literary conceits are familiar to contemporary readers through the poetry of Rumi, Sa’di, Hafiz, Mirza Ghalib, and even the playful riddles posthumously attributed to Amir Khusrau.

In their verses, the rose could appear as a beloved, a bride, a queen, or the sovereign of the garden enthroned beneath a jewelled canopy. Elsewhere, rosewater – privileged by its association with the Prophet Muhammad’s sweat – became a rival to wine, boasting: “O wine, I am licit while you are forbidden.” The narcissus, meanwhile, might take the form of the beloved’s languid, intoxicated eye or a vigilant sentinel presiding over a gathering of drinkers.

Even court nobles and warriors engaged in such anthropomorphic literary exercises. A notable, though little-known, example is a munazara (debate poem) by Khushal Khan Khattak, the 17th-century Pashtun chief who, after falling out with Aurangzeb, led resistance against the Mughal state on the northwestern frontier.

In this poem, which contrasts fleeting success with the virtues of patience, resilience, and longevity, a fast-growing gourd vine climbs a pine tree and mocks its slow growth. The gourd boasts, “Look at me – in just one week, I have reached your height.” The old, wise pine responds, “Wait until the hardships of winter arrive; then we shall speak of age and growth.”

Culinary imagination

The same creative impulse animated kitchens, food markets and dining spreads. One of the most entertaining examples of this culinary imagination is a 15th-century Arabic work from Mamluk Cairo titled Kitab al-Harb al-Maʿshuq bayna Lahm al-Daʾn wa Hawadir al-Suq (The Delectable War between Mutton and the Snacks of the Marketplace).

Authored by Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Hasan al-Hajjar (the Stone Mason), the poem narrates a conflict between two camps, each represented by a range of personified edible goods.

The story recounts how King Mutton, proud of being savoured by the old money elite, is alarmed at the rising influence of his rival, King Honey, ruler of the “snacks of the marketplace”. Determined to assert supremacy, King Mutton dispatches his envoy – a sheep’s fatty tail – with an ultimatum demanding submission. King Honey refuses. Letters dripping with insults are exchanged. Armies are mobilised, and a full-scale culinary war begins.

On one side stood the meat camp: King Mutton joined by his wazir Goat Meat, commander Beef, and an assortment of meats, animal fats, and meat dishes. On the other stood King Honey at the head of a remarkably diverse coalition: His kingdom included Syrian and local milks, Lebanese yogurt delicacies, Sicilian cheeses, and honey imported from North Africa, Turkey, and Portugal, as well as sweets and sweetening agents such as fruit molasses; Palmyran olives; turnips, cucumbers, and eggplants pickled with mint; capers; olives; and salted lemons.

This army also included vinegars, Alexandrian fish paste, salted sparrows, salted fish, river mussels in oil and lemon water; fish dishes; and numerous river and sea fishes – both imported and local, preserved and fresh; fried eggs; omelettes; hot grilled colocasia; lentils; hummus; and broad beans.

Other members of this ensemble were cold snacks such as seasoned pumpkin in mustard seeds, beans in olive oil and caraway, fried spinach, and fried eggplant. Fats included clarified butter, sesame oil, tahina (a paste ground from sesame seeds), and fresh butter.

Before the battle, there was treachery. Sheep’s Tail secretly bribed several of Honey’s advisers, who agreed to betray their sovereign when war broke out. The first clash ended badly for Honey’s forces.

Hoping to reverse his fortunes, King Honey summoned reinforcements in the form of an impressive corps of fruits. They arrived in splendour and joined the fight, only to suffer an even more crushing defeat. The forces of King Mutton prevailed, and the meat camp emerged victorious.

Food, taste and hierarchy

Beneath this comically absurd warfare lies a simmering commentary on hierarchies of food, taste, class, and meal structure in medieval Cairo. Mutton and its supporters repeatedly dismissed Honey’s followers as the food of paupers and rabble, insisting that only meat deserved the status of a proper or “real” meal. Yet many members of Honey’s kingdom were expensive imports, hardly the fare of the poor.

The result is a text that probably captures a reactionary impulse among the old elite of society against the flooding of Cairo’s markets with a diverse range of imported produce.

The mass or easy availability of these delicacies may have been perceived as indicating a shift in taste fuelled by a parvenu merchant community, and as threatening the dominance and prestige of the old elite’s dietary preferences, centred on locally procured meat and its by-products.

King Honey and his army of foods were thus snubbed and relegated to the category of snacks – smaller in portion and seen as less substantial and combatively less nourishing.

Other rivalries within the edible kingdom that found an audience in the early modern Persianate world were contests staged by a 15th-century poet from Shiraz between the staple dish, bughra (a seasoned flour paste, meat, and vegetable-based preparation), and rice, a relatively new entrant to the culinary order. Having risen to prominence in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, rice dramatically transformed the cuisines of the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia. The Mongols had first encountered rice as a dietary staple in China and went on to popularise it in the other regions they invaded.

These poems were penned by Abu Ishaq Hallaj (the Cotton Carder) Shirazi. A boon companion at the court of Timurid ruler Iskandar Mirza, he earned the title Bushaq-i Atʿima (“Bushaq of Foods”) for building an entire literary career around culinary poetry.

Parodying the great Persian masters – Firdausi, Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafiz – he subjected their lofty compositions about heroes, lovers, mystics, and kings to the vocabulary of kitchens, markets, and dining spreads. Bushaq’s poetry circulated widely in Mughal South Asia, forming part of a shared literary universe that stretched from Iran to the Indian subcontinent.

In Bushaq’s Dastan-i Muza‘far wa Bughra (The Story of Saffron Rice and Bughra), written in imitation of Firdausi’s Shahnama, rice appears as an ambitious newcomer that challenges and ultimately prevails over bughra’s established supremacy.

The poem narrates how rice begins life buried in mud and water, only to be beaten and stripped of its enclosing husk, as if lamenting its condition like a tragic lover in a Persian romance. Upon reaching the grocery store, rice finds itself seated beside ugly black lentils and cries out to God for deliverance: “Give me meat, give me oil, give me saffron!” This plea expresses an ambition to climb the dietary hierarchy through sophisticated cooking and seasoning techniques, such as the addition of meat, oil, and saffron, which signified refinement.

Eventually, rice is adorned with these ingredients, crowned, enthroned, and acknowledged as ruler of the dining spread by the surrounding dishes.

In another of Bushaq’s compositions, Majara-i Birinj wa Bughra (The Quarrel of Rice and Bughra), the conflict takes a different turn. This time, bughra overcomes the combined forces of rice and fried meat by imprisoning them inside a gipa – a stuffed tripe dish. The conflict might have escalated into another culinary war had a squash not intervened as mediator. Peace is restored, and the rival foods conclude by paying tribute to one another’s tastiness.

Beneath this reconciliation lies a history of cultural assimilation. It mirrors the evolution of Timurid cuisine, which was shaped by the convergence of diverse culinary traditions: Central Asian and Turkic influences exemplified by Bughra and Gipa, and the growing prominence of rice, fostered by increased contact with China and India, which encouraged the adoption of this grain and the creation of new dishes based on it.

The Timurid culinary repertoire reached Hindustan through diplomatic ties, the migration of Sufi saints, and the movement of artists, all of which linked the region’s sultanates with the Timurid courts in Khurasan, Herat, and Shiraz. This culinary connection took deeper root with the arrival of Babur, the Timurid prince who founded the Mughal Empire.

Recipes for bughra and gipa are recorded in manuals from the regional sultanates of Malwa and the Deccan, as well as in Mughal cookbooks.

References to Mughal emperors consuming these dishes also survive in autobiographical and biographical literature, including an account of Humayun and his retinue finding time, amid a demanding military campaign, to gather and prepare bughra.

In Hindustan, however, Timurid cuisine encountered a foodscape where rice was a longstanding staple. As a result, the South Asian khichri came to sit as comfortably on elite spreads as pulao and rice biryan(i).

Pulao and biryan(i), though of Central Asian and Iranian provenance, were reworked in Mughal kitchens by incorporating spices and ingredients readily available in Hindustan. What began as a quarrel between different foods ultimately gave way to cosmopolitan cuisines shaped by movement, encounter, and exchange across Asia.

All this to say, the next time an AI-generated lovestruck mango or a scheming tomato appears on your phone screen, remember that food has been talking for centuries. It simply had better things to say, its stories were crafted by sharper minds, and telling them placed no significant demands on water, land, or energy resources.

Neha Vermani is an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Durham University. She is a historian of early modern South Asia, and her research focuses on the intersections of food practices, material culture, and scientific and ethical discourses on the body, the senses, and the natural world.