BOOK REVIEW Food Journey is very different from the gushing food books that come out every second day

Published : Apr 18, 2024 11:00 IST - 7 MINS READ I usually look askance at books on food and cookery, which seem to be the publisher’s favourite genre these days. In my experience, most of these books peg themselves on the lazy nostalgia of privilege, exoticise everyday dishes as “authentically local”, and, more often than not, present impractical recipes, which are likely to produce disasters if followed to a T. Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart, a collection of essays on food from the north-eastern region of India, is very different: it is rooted to the earth, from where all the food comes ; it never fights shy of revealing the politics of class, caste, gender that underlies food; and it is as much about food as about its absence, starvation. Techi Nimi begins her essay, “Civilising the tastebuds”, by saying: “My love and appreciation for homegrown, homecooked, traditional Arunachalee cuisine is rooted in my personal experience of feeling disdain and shame towards it.” She goes on to explain how the boarding school in Assam that she attended as a child would never serve the food she ate at home since tribal cuisine was deemed too unsophisticated for the “civilised” dining table. Class war The concept of food as a site of class war comes out most graphically in the filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya’s photo essay, “Tastes from an unruly city: A very Shillong story in photos”. “Classical dishes, taste, and violence” dismantles all rosy notions about food by showing how it can be the cause of violence, terror, misery: “In our household, the celebration of food was also built on exploitation, fear, anxiety and hurt—where failures to meet my father’s standards often resulted in domestic violence.” Like Chaya, Rodrigues does not flinch from recording reality in all its brutality, even if it concerns his own family.