It Isn’t Just Food. It’s Community.
In May this year, our 11-year old neighbour trotted down to hand A two jars of homemade mango chutney — an offering to bring cheer to his lockdown birthday. Sweet, spicy with a jam-like consistency, the bottle was decorated with blue sparkles and came with a handwritten note tied around its neck. For the rest of the week, presents arrived by way of cooked meals from friends — freshly baked bagels, hearty stews and mango cake.
The early days of the lockdown and the careful planning, buying and cooking of food it prompted turned my attention to food and community anew. Every day, A and I found ourselves in the kitchen, washing, chopping, and transforming ingredients into meals we would then sit down to eat together. We veered to childhood favourites in the beginning — tomato and chilli cheese toast, masala omelettes and kebab sandwiches. The memories embedded in them created a sense of safety, of being cared for. In a world of heightened anxiety, it was eating for comfort.
It was also a first of sorts for us. In the nine years we have lived together, the planning it takes for every meal — from making mental notes of what vegetables are in the fridge to having it all come together — has largely fallen to me. So much so that even on work trips to remote districts in North India, my day would inevitably start with a phone call to coordinate a long distance meal plan. The slowing down that the lockdown compelled and subsequent reexamination of the roles we had assumed shifted how we care for each other. Sharing a routine meant turning attention to an essential caregiving practice — the act of nourishing the body. In the few hours we’d now spend in the kitchen, there was recognition of the physicality it entailed and cognisance of where our food was coming from. For herbs, we turned to the pudina growing on the kitchen ledge or to the kadhipatta tree in the garden behind the building we live in. School projects were revived as mustard greens begin sprouting on white paper towels, turning their bright green heads towards the sun. I found myself noticing other fruit-bearing trees in my vicinity — like the bilimbi and its tangy, sour tasting fruit which my grandmother told me grew in her childhood home, and the breadfruit tree outside my window, heavy with green fruit.
There were conversations on how best to use each vegetable we would buy on our weekly market runs. So much so that for the first time in years, no shrivelled and neglected beetroot would be found languishing in the fridge at the end of the week. Nor any wilted and dried up greens.
The process of slowing down and turning food into meals opened up another way of looking at eating. Embedded in it was a connection to each other and the natural world — one that had become distant and separate in the rush and tumble of the day.
As the first month of the lockdown slipped into the next, there was a widening of this connection into a community of care. A dabba of Sindhi sai bhaji (Sindhi saag-dal) with pulao was packed for friends who live in the neighbourhood. On another occasion, Bengali style dahi baingan. Over the course of the next few months, an exchange system evolved. A gobhi paratha arrived one evening, well-timed to augment A’s iftar fare. On another occasion, chocolate chip cookies were dropped off, still warm from the oven.
In the absence of physical contact and being able to touch and hold, this exchange of food became a way to reaffirm nurture — the act of cooking a reflection of care and community. Every dabba given and received saying: I’m thinking of you. I hope this brings warmth and nourishment. Wendell Berry writes in Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food, ‘You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbours, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.’
Giving. Receiving. Gratitude.
I sit with these words and I’m conscious of the softening that comes from having participated in this giving and receiving. It’s a practice embedded in childhood — my mother sending me with a bowl of a special something to be shared with neighbours. The dabba would never return empty. Coconut barfi from a Maharashtrian household, sannas from a Manglorean family, freshly baked carrot cake from our neighbour. I remember other communities built around food — the tentative step taken on my first night in a hostel to share goodies with my roommate and two girls in an adjoining room. Three years later, an Eid feast cooked with fellow south Asians in Sussex for 40 course mates. Both occasions turned out to be the beginning of many more gatherings over food and joint cooking experiments that have grown into enduring friendships.
The power of food to shape and evoke memories and to build a sense of community has been well researched. Shankar Vedantam on the NPR podcast Hidden Brain says, ‘To eat the same foods [as another person] suggests that we are both willing to bring the same thing into our bodies. People just feel closer to people who are eating the same food as they are. And then trust, cooperation — these are just the consequences of feeling close to someone.’ Conversely, I’m struck by how powerfully food and the sharing of meals offers a glimpse of other ways of living, the partaking of a different culture. Office lunches exemplified this. The gathering around one table and opening of each lid was a portal of sorts into each person’s cultural heritage. The act of sitting down together to share a meal brought with it a sense of belonging.
But that the sharing of a meal could also be a way to restore dignity emerged through a conversation. While documenting the journey of young men who had once been in Mumbai’s juvenile home for boys, one of them shared that the first time he felt like a human being was when his lawyer offered him a cup of chai and shared a packet of biscuits with him. Growing up in rural Maharashtra where caste hierarchies ran so deep that he could never dare to eat in the house of a supposed upper caste person, this simple offer of a shared cup of tea and biscuits was life changing. A few years later, working at an NGO, he recalled how he was invited to sit down for lunch on his first day with all his colleagues. Same table, many dabbas. That daily ritual of sharing his tiffin and eating from theirs, he said, was one of the best moments of his day. It was a claiming of space as an equal.
Frances Moore Lappé writes in Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, ‘Embedded in family life and in cultural and religious ritual, food has always been our most direct, intimate tie to a nurturing earth as well as a primary means of bonding with each other. Food has helped us know where we are and who we are.’
As shrill voices of hate continue to dominate the air waves, I find myself drawn more than ever to the idea of a nurturing earth as a powerful reminder of our connection to each other and the natural world. I imagine what communities and neighbourhoods could look like where food is shared and meals prepared to sit across from one another to eat together, in cognisance of how much our bodies need. I think of the possibilities it holds to build connection, trust and perhaps make room to be human again.
