A Migrant's Kitchen: the impact of food on social identities

Neha Lamba Grover: Hello everyone, welcome to No Forks Given. We have today Dr. Krishnendu Ray, who is a food scholar and the director of the PhD Food Studies Program at New York University. Welcome Dr. Ray and thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Krishnendu: Thanks a lot for having me.

Neha Lamba Grover: So you have, I You grew up in India. You trained in political science in Delhi, like me. Got your doctorate in sociology at Binghamton and ended up as one of America's leading food studies scholars. So how did food become the lens through which you started to understand all these? Like, why did you get there? And why does it make sense to you, I suppose?

Krishnendu: Yeah, in some ways it was an it was an accidental journey. And I I did quite a lot of progressive politics, left-wing politics in India, along with studying political philosophy, which is what I was interested in. but when I came to do my PhD at Sunni Binghamton, because Sunni Binghamton had kind of a group of scholars like Emmanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Uriki, who were writing in journals like the New Left Review. I was familiar with their work, and so I had applied there. And what I was struck quite quickly was that I had not thought about cooking and feeding and all the work that goes into cooking, and that was obviously a very South Asian male privilege. and that startled me. I said, Wow, what else is hidden in plain view? And so that became a kind of an opening in my case to think about.

Neha Lamba Grover: Good.

Krishnendu: Quotidian, the everyday social relationships of cooking and feeding. And initially I was not intending to work on necessarily food, partly because there was very little work on food, and maybe we'll get a chance to talk about it today. But eventually I ended up working on food and the social world of largely the labor that goes into any food system.

Neha Lamba Grover: So in the migrants table, think you wrote that in 2004, you've looked at, I think, meals and memories in a Bengali American household. Now, what was it in that on those kitchens that the books weren't teaching you? What is it that, you know, that was surprising because I mean, to me, I had certain preconceived notions about Bengali food, to be honest with you. But when I was reading your data, I was a little surprised myself. But what was it that you found in those kitchens in that study that you didn't?

Krishnendu: Yeah. The first thing is I did this work in sociology and sociology was relatively slow to come to cooked food. And I would say I would probably date that after Pierre Bourdieu's work, which was a French sociologist. His work gets translated in English in nineteen eighty four, and then it becomes kind of quite important in sociology.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: In anthropology, food had been studied largely in some ways the food practices of non-literate people in often remote areas, isolated areas. And people often react to anthropological work by saying, if an anthropology comes to study me, that means I'm kind of a some kind of a dead end. so so, in some ways, I had not been exposed to kind of good, serious thinking on food.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: and especially about in in kind of food sociology and the practices of urban migrants. So when I started studying this, of course, I was initially your questions in grad school often are too big. I want to study immigrants, immigrant foodways. does it change? How does it change? And how how does it matter to people? And then I realized that immigrants is a very big category. So I have to reduce it to some kind of immigrants.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Krishnendu: And that and that would probably be useful if I could speak some of the languages. because most immigrants in kind of most important part about food is it is so quotidian, so in some ways unself conscious that it's often not available to especially a a a second or a third language, in this case English. So I because I knew my mother tongue is Orya, my mother is from Orasa, my father tongue is Bengali. And I spent time in Delhi, so I had obviously learned Hindi. So I wanted to narrow it down to a group of people with whom I could share a language that is kind of more commonsensical every day. I ended up with Bengali Americans because my aunt, who was the only one here in the United States, took me to a conference, Bengali Association of North America, and they were selling a $10 booklet on all the people. Who were registered in their organization? I spent $10. That was probably the best $10 I've spent. I don't think I would have done my PhD without it. So I ended up talking to a survey of about 126 households. I went and cooked and listened to people in about 40 households. And I would say, do you want me to talk a little bit about what I found in that study? So most

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah, absolutely.

Krishnendu: Dramatically, I would say when when I asked folks, does food matter to you? People said yes, but there was always a qualifying thing. the qualifying thing was eventually I gathered, they said, Well, I can eat Thai food, and I can eat Chinese food the day after. I can eat but that doesn't change my culture. So it's like attire, or it's like acquiring a second or a third language. They said food is a to me a lot more like attire than like.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: religion or marrying someone. You do it once in your lifetime, ideally. And so for me, that kind of that was an important qualifier. And most importantly in my case, I think I saw breakfast had changed, had become dramatically for this immigrant group of Bengalis, breakfast had become mostly North American cereal, industrial cereal, toast and tea, while dinner had become

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: much more conservative. So in a sense, as I talk to people, breakfast became a way in which immigrants, in some ways I thought, were preparing themselves to get out into the American world. And and dinner was in a way in which they shut the door on the American world. A lot more traditional and a lot more gender division gender division of labor.

Neha Lamba Grover: it. never even, I never thought of it like that because I was just thinking about, breakfast is probably because there's less time and you're on the go. But it's a very interesting way to think about how you're getting out into the world. And very often the chai becomes a coffee. I don't know if there's, I don't know if there's a little bit of self-consciousness associated with the fact that you could be grabbing it on the go.

Krishnendu: Exactly.

Neha Lamba Grover: But I just want to go back also to the comment about the language, the importance of language. I mean, you've talked about this association of language.

Krishnendu: Uh-huh.

Neha Lamba Grover: on cuisines and also the hierarchies. You've talked about hierarchies as well being closely associated. And I remember this film I watched a few years ago called The Hundred Foot Journey. don't know if you, where there's Helen Mirren is a French, you know, Michelin star chef, restaurant owner, and Amrish Puri comes and puts a little Indian stall in that little French village.

Krishnendu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes.

Neha Lamba Grover: And there is this obvious hierarchy, there's a snobbery associated with it. Can you talk a little bit about that? What are these hierarchies? How do they relate to, I mean, why does language matter?

Krishnendu: Yeah, so in some ways, maybe the first thing I would say about languages, I use the a term often used in Hindustani, especially Eastern version Bhojpuri, which is Kose Kose Parpani Badle Chare Kose Parvani, which is every two miles the water changes and every four the language. And water in in India, in many Indian languages, water is a mechonym for like what would be in Europe, in France would be called terwar. Okay. and like when we say, my grandmothers used to say, the cooking is beautiful in this region because the water is sweet. And when people say sweet, it's it's a referent to a certain kind of quality of territory and its water. So in some ways, the in the simplest way to think about it is food is what goes in, it's highly subjective until you start talking about it. So language is what comes out. Almost everywhere in the world, you eat and you talk.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: And you endlessly dispute taste, could taste. And in fact, language is what socializes what we think about taste. So that's, I would say, the first takeaway from thinking about food and language. And then specifically in the core in the case of this question of hierarchy of taste, I have done a lot of work around it. and and and some of it is kind of very simple and obvious. If you go to a French restaurant, that's changing right now.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: But if you go to a French restaurant, you could charge quite high prices and today Japanese. But that wasn't the case for the longest time for most cuisines in the world, especially Indian cuisines in the world, which came to be strongly associated with like a in some ways, a takeout place, a cheap Indian restaurant, often run by a Bangladeshi entrepreneur. And so that argument is largely an argument about. This question of what goes into behind demand when we ask for something and what is the price we are willing to pay. And Floyd Cardos, the Indian chef who ran, I think, the best in high-end Indian restaurants in at least in New York, Tabla, used yeah, used to say, where he for instance make rosemary raise made rosemary nan and and garlic nan and and paired it with all kinds of fantastic kebabs. He used to say, even when

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah, remember that.

Krishnendu: Even in New York City at a high-end restaurant, when there was a recession, okay, Tabla would be the first one to kind of pay the price because they were people were not willing to pay $40 or $50 for a dish that they're willing to pay for French or for Italian cuisine. And maybe with that example, let me close this out a little bit by saying it it's it changes over time. So

Neha Lamba Grover: Okay.

Krishnendu: At least since the 18th, late 18th, early 19th century, French cuisine has been highly valued by Western elites. not true with a lot of other cuisines, including including Italian. Italian food, in fact, became a lot more visible in the United States to elites, in fact, late into the 1970s. And today, of course, you can do high-end Italian. And by the 1980s, by the 1990s, Japanese cuisine had joined. And today, for instance,

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: Some of the most expensive restaurants in New York City are in fact omakase restaurants serving Japanese food. So partly it is linked to my argument is it is linked to economic power, it is linked to, in some ways, a geopolitical positioning, the size of the economy. And given that, of course, inevitably, two things are happening. I had written a piece and it got extensive coverage in the Atlantic.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: Where the lead will tell you what it is, Joe Pinsker had written this piece where he had said the future is expensive Chinese food. So I think the future is expensive Chinese food and also expensive Indian food, slightly different because China is almost 20 years ahead. So in some ways, it is politically, it's hard power that is linked to soft power. And I have argued subsequently that soft power is not so easy to get. It is often, in fact, linked to hard power.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: power.

Neha Lamba Grover: Bye, guys. So that then, okay, that makes me think about, I feel that I've seen the New York food scene for the Indian food scene in New York change a lot in the last five to six years. I don't know if you agree with me because restaurants like Dhamaka and Sema. have wait lists that were unheard of for Indian restaurants. Earlier you just had your Lexington curry houses. You had a tabla, but was food presented very differently, Indian food. But this is authentic Indian food in that sense. And now the other thing I've noticed is... And just being upscale doesn't seem to matter. Restaurants like Sona, et shut down. It really has to offer something. The second thing I notice is that regional cuisines are starting to come out. They're getting away from the standard expectation of what an Indian restaurant ought to serve. So you have Masala Wala with. the Bengali food, all of them is impossible to get into. And suddenly all the other Michelin star famous restaurants seem to think that the New York scene has changed and there's Moussafe that's opened up because it's a Michelin star from Houston. There's Ambassador Club that's come in from London and so on. So what do you think is changing in terms of hard or soft power? how is New York, what is New York reacting to? Yeah.

Krishnendu: Yeah. your your your assessment is absolutely correct. in some ways, Indian some Indian restaurants are entering the upscale market, but also one has to keep in mind the sense of proportion. There are about 300 Indian restaurants in New York City, out of which I would say about 20 are upscale. That gives you a percentage range, right? very different, by the way, from French. Almost half the French restaurants.

Neha Lamba Grover: There

Krishnendu: In New York City

Neha Lamba Grover: it goes.

Krishnendu: are upscale. So that's the context. But you are absolutely right. The Indian high end Indian restaurant cuisine is becoming more visible, and it's becoming more visible for a couple of simple reasons. There is now very affluent and culturally fluent Indian migrants and people like me included, in some ways where professors, of course, physicians and engineers, and it has acquired cultural capital.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: It is linked to the rise of an Indian middle class, a professional class. I think it's inappropriate to call it middle class. It's in fact higher class. It's largely it's circulating around the world, major cities, and they want a place where they can bring their friends, their Indian friends, the American friends, and you see that enthusiasm in New York City, any any major marketplace. So it's partly linked to the changing nature of Indian migration.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: and which basically since 1965 has been a substantially kind of an educated almost 70% of Indian immigrants have at least a bachelor's degree, which is very unusual for any immigrant group. And it has some of the highest per capita household income, just like with, for instance, Taiwanese American and Indian American and Japanese American are up there. And which part it is that demographic change that is driving it. That's one direction. But in the demand direction, something has changed. Where sociologists say that Americans, at least since the 1980s, have become a lot more omnivorous. And they noticed it first, sociologists noticed noticed it first in music, that if you have if you correlate your assets and your income and your education, you are more likely to listen to jazz and country and pop and rock and

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: If you if your assets in some ways are in the bottom 20%, if your income is in the bottom 20%, and your education is in the bottom 20%, you tend to be a univore. You only listen to hip hop or you only listen to country music. So what was noticed since the 1980s is that the American elite consumer had become much more omnivorous, which was considered different from old-fashioned snobbery.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: Snobberry was disdained, and you he said, nah, I didn't, I didn't want to, I don't want to listen to hip hop, I don't want to listen to jazz because that's inferior, I don't want to eat Indian food because it's not out cuisine. That is no longer cool or kosher in any of the urban cultures. So now you say, I eat Indian food and I eat Mexican food and I eat Korean food and I eat French food and I eat Italian food, and these are the conditions on which I think the good qualities of of a cuisine. So The demographic has changed in terms of Indians on one side, and the American consumers' omnivorousness has changed. And you can see that in the Michelin data, in the New York Times data, which I track, the number of cuisines have gone up to it, it used to be seven, eight kinds of cuisines. You know, you had Italian, you had Mexican, you had Seoul, you had Indian, etc. Today, in some ways, global Michelin, New York Times. It's almost 40, 45 different kinds of cuisines register in your top 50 or top hundred. So you're beginning to see that omnivorousness taking hold on the side of the consumer. And then of course the demographic changes on the side of, in some ways, the the community that is contributing to this urban food culture, in this case, Indian food.

Neha Lamba Grover: And can you say that the monolithic view of, when you use the word Indian cuisine, it's also the regional cuisines are trying to also break out and develop an identity, whether it's Bengali, Punjabi, South Indian. I've seen now restaurants that are just around Kerala cuisine. then Sri Lankan cuisine wants to also establish that it's different. And then on the other side, very often, know, North Indian and Pakistani foods are very similar. I also feel that there is a little bit of arrogance that I see in some Indian restaurants where they want to clarify it's Indian and not Pakistani food or, you know, again, I guess it's because of the socio-political situation. Can you talk a little bit about this regional identity trying to break out? Yeah.

Krishnendu: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I I in fact think that's a symptom of upward mobility of a cuisine to make it regionalized. In my sense, it almost doesn't make sense to call something Indian food. It's like calling something European food, right? Yeah, if you're looking at it from very far away, there's something common between a Polish pierogi and an it and a Sicilian pasta, right? But if you get close enough to it, it didn't never made sense, partly because of the linguistic range and collin.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Krishnendu: Culinary range, which is why I think that that that saying that kose kose parpani but lechare kose parvani is useful because in fact, wherever there's a different language, there's a different cuisine. In India, in fact, I would say there are at least 125 mother tongues, 22,000 dialects. So the cuisines are varied and numerous, and it almost makes no sense to call something Indian food. And you should we should at least probably go down to the level of the state. And the linguistic category, and probably even further down at the level of regions and districts, et cetera. And we have seen this happen with French cuisine when we get Provençal, literally is provincial, but it's a region of you know of France, especially with Italian food. You know, I have taught for 10 years in the Slow Food University in the Piedmont region of Italy. And Piedmontese cuisine is very different from Sicilian. Cuisine, which is very different from Tuscan cuisine. And American elites have come to see it and recognize it and pay attention to the distinctions and the differences. So I think paying attention to the regional nature of Indian cooking is another sign, symptom of upward mobility of this cuisine. It is also happening, by the way, with Chinese cuisine. Yesterday I read something in the LA Times which talked about regional cuisine. within Cantonese, not only Cantonese and Sichuan and Shanghainese, et cetera, right? But five kinds of Cantonese cuisines, you know? And so that was that is a real symptom of kind of the way, think about the way we pay attention to wine. Okay. And the provenance of wine, the grape varietals, the regions, the way we pay attention to European cheese, we are just on the cusp of doing the same to some other cuisines.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: like Chinese and like Indian, and that is linked to the rise of the Chinese and the Indian economy and an elite class that circulates globally and demands in some ways a more higher insider standard than an outsider expectation of the cuisine.

Neha Lamba Grover: But talking about Indian and Chinese cuisine, I was reminded of the Indian Chinese cuisine, which is thrown out of Chinese cuisine that grew out of India. I till I came to New York, I thought I knew Chinese food till I went to Chinatown. And I thought, this is not Chinese food. Till I realized that we had developed our own Chinese cuisine in India. that also deserves to, I mean, it has its own market and we have Indian Chinese restaurants. I love Indian Chinese food.

Krishnendu: That's my favorite food. When I go when I go to India. Yeah.

Neha Lamba Grover: And it's got its own story. so these regional Indian cuisines themselves are going to write their own stories in the US. There are second generation Indians who are now, I see, also anchoring some of these innovations around food. I mean, I've come across some of them. was a Fontis is that sandwich store where I went to. They didn't say anything about being from India or India, but it was all Bombay sandwich, Parsi sandwich, and foods like that. So how, what do you? doesn't what kind of questions of that raise about authenticity? mean, especially right now, the world is becoming so polarized, this concept of authenticity and getting back to some pure original set version of yourself. I mean, similarly for food, because it's so, so closely tied to identity. I mean, what does it say about authenticity?

Krishnendu: Yeah, I think in some ways what you point to is all cultures, including Indian regional cultures, are hybrid, right? I come from Bengal, part partly Bengal, partly Odessa. My grandmother used to call chilies Lonka. Lonka was a reference to Sri Lanka because that's how, in fact, chilies came from the New World, through the Philippines, through the Sri Lanka trade, up the coast to India. And so my Odia grandmother would call it Lonka. And think about.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: Where would Indian food be without chilies, right? Or tomatoes or potatoes, all those famous Bengali biryani with potatoes, right? Cuisine have has always been this kind of partly a question of tradition and partly a question of improvisation, and always been hybrid. So there's that element of hybridity that is a story, interesting story to tell, especially in the case of say Chinese immigrants to India. and then The quest itself, the quest for authenticity, most academics dismiss it as that since all traditions are invented, there's no point in looking at this question of authenticity. But I think what the quest for authenticity hides in it is some aspiration for accuracy. Okay. Is this what I think the Chinese eat, or the Chinese in Kolkata eat, or the Chinese in in Hong Kong eat? And the second is I think there's an element of attempt to understand it as a sincere exchange of culture. So I think people are aspiring to this authenticity precisely because what you said, things are changing, things have become so hybrid that partly there's a sense of a disorientation. It is to partly still the movement in the world that we go for these especially authentic notions of authentic food. And for instance, when I crave authentic Orea food. You know, I'm I'm cra craving an Orea mashed potato with say must with a pungent mustard oil, raw onion, and green chilies. And that's in some ways what is often the Italians called cucina povera, cuisine of the poor, which are often local foods that you remember quite fondly in my context, in a context of relative scarcity, where we were not affluent. We couldn't travel much. There was no tourism. This is until into the late 1980s. We used to just go to my grandparents' home in Balasor, Odessa. And so that's for us the association of my authentic food. But of course, like if you like that same grandmother who calls Chile's Lonka, same grandmother, she she was monolingual, she just spoke Orya. Okay, but she wrote Orya in the Bengali alphabet because she was educated in Minnapu. So India is full of these exp kind of experiences. These boundaries, of course, are totally arbitrary. Okay. And it's depends on, like my Ai, in Audya, you call your grandmother, maternal grandmother Ai, unlike say in Gujarati. And my Ai would, in some ways, was a quintessential Indian of East Coast India, monolingual, speaking in Audia, but writing in Bengali script, because she went to school where only the Bengali script

Neha Lamba Grover: Bye.

Krishnendu: was taught and cooking food from eastern India, which was largely coastal Oriya cuisine, rice and fish and santula, etc. And I think another of my favorite dishes that my mother carries on is basically an eggplant, seared eggplant in a yogurt sauce with whole common seed and dried red chilies. So these are ways these are hi they were hybrid at some point, like chilies, many of this food, they became naturalized and became attached to identity

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: And attached to affective memory. And then, in some ways, in my case, twice removed from that, I sentimentalize, maybe sometimes even over-sentimentalize that. But I think that's a very human quest where we change, we modernize, we are also looking for something continuous because of this discontinuity, because of this change, I think. And I think that your question and your examples kind of very nicely point to this dialectic between.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: a change and tradition.

Neha Lamba Grover: But at the same time, it's also allows that this concept of authenticities also allows the cuisine to be used as a political tool. I mean, I'm talking about the West Bengal elections, the more recent ones, and the whole beef war, which is, know, and recreating Indian identity or Hindu identity as being vegetarian, which it was never was. Or the government of UP with their...

Krishnendu: That's true.

Neha Lamba Grover: one district, one cuisine story with 208 vegetarian dishes when we want. So that is where you forcibly rewrite the script. But when you talk about political motivation, it ties into what you said about soft power is very difficult to obtain. These are attempts to, I guess in a way, achieve soft power in their context. Yeah. But the other side, so

Krishnendu: Brand. Yeah, brand soft power. Yeah. Mm.

Neha Lamba Grover: You know, and the Korean, I think government has done a very good job of creating that. Can you talk about this? You know, one didn't even realize, but everything from pop culture to the food that was delivered.

Krishnendu: Yeah. So I I think two parts, yeah. Two parts to it is that's why it I think is dangerous to be get to get too fixated about one tradition and the example of vegetarianism. The parts of India I come from only even Hindus, only three percent of Hindus are vegetarian, or less than seven percent of Hindus are vegetarian. We were always rice and fish eating cultures, especially Eastern Peninsula India. And partly because of

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. On.

Krishnendu: The relative weakness of Jainism through which Hinduism, through which, in some ways, dietary habits change in places like Rajasthan and Maharashtra, up to Karnataka on the West Coast. In fact, vegetarianism is much more in the north and the west than in the east and in the peninsular south. So, yes, one has to be careful not to create this idea that there is kind of one cuisine that has been in place. And it's historically unsustainable. A Hindus, most Hindus, like if you just give the abstract number, about 30% of Indians are vegetarian. And that's a high number compared to other countries in the world. But that also means that 70% of Indians are not vegetarian. And most of them are Hindus who are not vegetarian, Hindus like me, Hindus like my parents, who are very religious, but they are fish and meat eating, especially for instance, with Kalipuja, for instance. Diwali, we celebrate with Kalipuja. And in Kalipuja, one of the important dishes is goat meat as an offering to the gods. So that's kind of one dimension about it. So you your your point is very well taken, not to get too fixated into this question of authenticity, so much so that we create a prison house of culture. Cultures survive because they change.

Neha Lamba Grover: I my mind had actually started wondering too, thinking about the work you've done in the space with restaurants, your book, The Ethnic Restaurant from 2016. what does the restaurant kitchen tell you about the dynamics of immigrants, I guess, in this case? And compare that also to street vendors.

Krishnendu: Yeah. Very, very good. So, in some ways, in my ethnic restaurant, I studied it because my first book, The Migrants Table, was about home cooking, largely women's cooking at home. and that's true about in the US, that's true about in India too. Women's cooking, women as someone who is part of the household, either as woman of the household, housewife, mother, wife, etc., or in fact is domestic worker. India has

Neha Lamba Grover: Yes. Yep.

Krishnendu: the 10 to 100 million people who work in domestic kitchens, often women who are part of this cooking. So this is kind of so my first book was on home cooking. And I realized what I was not attending to was cooking, public cooking, cooking on the streets, cooking in the marketplace, which is why I wrote my second book called The Ethnic Restaurantur. And the importance of that book was simply: we have data in the United States census from 1850 onwards. We have collected data on. People's occupations and people's birthplace. So for instance, in New York City, more than ninety percent of New York City's bakers, butchers, saloon keepers were I I either Irish or German. Okay. And eventually, this is 1850s, and then in the eighteen eighties to nineteen twenties, they'll become Italian and Greeks, etc. So there has been a long history. Of immigrants feeding Americans. So I was intrigued by this question, which is what do immigrants make of American taste? Because historically they have fed Americans. We know a lot about American studies of immigrant foods. What I did in the ethnic restaurant was to turn the lens around and say what do immigrants who have fed Americans through American history, we have a record of, what do they make of American cuisine?

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: what changes, what does what doesn't, and and what do they bring to that transaction in taste. So that's what I would say the strength of that book. And of course, that still left out one other dimension, and that is the food straight on the street, street food. I began to work on it. I've written a little bit and a large section on my of my next book is going to be on street foods. street vending. And a good example to give you you you raised the example, for instance, of Sona, the high-end Park Avenue Indian restaurant, which has closed now. but for instance, it started doing Panipuri. And Panipuri now you can find almost in any high-end Indian restaurant, often associated with alcoholic kind of a dipping sauce. You know alcoholic dipping sauce, which is to jazz it up a little bit. This is associated, I think, with a kind of a

Neha Lamba Grover: I was going to say that, yeah.

Krishnendu: Two, I think a two-part process. One part is street foods in India and Southeast Asia and South Asia is largely the food of rural to urban migrants. Okay. India, Thailand produce a lot more rural to urban migrants than they produce jobs in cities. So there's a limitation of employment. So people in some ways get into the business of selling food, and what we call street food is largely born. This kind of a migration from the countryside into the city. So that is one dimension, much more visible, has always been visible, has become more visible, and it has become more visible, and which is the second part, which is with digital photography, cheap cameras, and social media presence, street food becomes much more in some ways, I would say, picaresque. It's easier to take pictures of. Post about it's out in the public, it is i it is in the open. And also think about what street foods are. Street foods are often fried, or pickled or or with immense amount of sugar because this is all food that has to stay safe without refrigeration. And all those characteristics make street foods very visibly, visually appealing. Compared to most Indian home cooking, which will if you think about the dals and the raitas and etc and the and the curries, they kind of they're usually brown and yellow and they fall flat. They don't stand up. Okay? So between this rural to urban migration, which is the supply side, and then this visual aesthetic of representing food on Instagram and on TikTok that has kind of totally exploded, that has driven kind of this two-sided mode of appreciation. of street food even in high end restaurants like Sona or any other places.

Neha Lamba Grover: Interesting. I had chef Mayank Ishtibal on one of the earlier episodes, you know, and he had talked literally about that. was talking about the five senses that they hope to appeal to at the restaurant. But the fact that one of them is the photographer, you know, they have to be aware of the what kind of an Instagram shot it makes in the wasafar food is very visually, yeah, attractively presented. What about what do you think the

Krishnendu: Photogenic. Yeah.

Neha Lamba Grover: know, celebrity chef cultures doing to popularize certain cuisines. mean, everything from we talked about Sona, which was always touted as Priyanka Chopra's restaurant. And then I think in Bangalore, Vikas Khanna's just so, that restaurant so much about him as much as the food. So what do you think about what celebrity cultures do?

Krishnendu: Yes, yes, yes. Totally. So in some ways it's like we are doing what the Italians did with the Renaissance, right? They created the celebrity artist. Okay. And if you look at the first kind of solid Italian book, Vasari's Life of the Artist, where he he where he identifies all these artists and their little biographies, you know, two, three page biographies around it. So in some ways, what we are seeing is the celebrity culture associated around food. And and that is partly related, I think, to

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: The importance of the visual culture of food in American culture that happens largely after, in some ways, food television takes off. And Food Network after 1993 produces most of the new celebrity chefs, who are, by the way, often men. The older chefs are often women, they often travel somewhere. You know, Julia Child being a dramatic example, who also eventually ends up with a television program.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm. Yeah.

Krishnendu: on on PBS, etc. But that that kind of is one phase of it. Post 1993, you largely have the celebrity male chef culture that Food Network and others including, by the way, lots of this programming is coming out of East Asia like Iron Chef Japan, which becomes Iron Chef USA. And I was teaching at the Culinary Institute at that point of time for almost a decade in Hyde Park.

Neha Lamba Grover: Okay.

Krishnendu: And for my students, the most ex two most exciting things to happen was Iron Chef Japan coming to the US and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, that is 2001. Okay. So here then was this kind of at least two modes of becoming an artist, a celebrity, whose opinion matters. One in some ways a televisual performance, the other is by writing. I mean, if you Anthony Bourdain is a very upper class, his mom was New York New Yorker associated.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: Journalist, and he in fact finds his voice eventually, a bit like in some ways earlier generation of writers had written about travel and tour, and he goes into the kitchen, he writes his kitchen confidential. So sociologists argue there's a sociol sociologist Gary Allen Fine. He says there's before kitchen confidential and after kitchen confidential. And that's 2001 is the birth post-2001. Is the birth of the celebrity chef. And associated with it are each of these restaurants that you have named are often highly over-identified with the name of the restaurant rather than even the person who's cooking there or the kind of food. So it acquires a kind of a celebrity edge. In that sense, it's new. But as I said, we have seen this before. That's how Renaissance artists were made.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: We think Michelangelo, right? But Michelangelo or any of those artists become artists because there's someone who's boosting them. And the guy who was boosting them was Vasari in his little book that is still in print. It is the long one of the longest running books in print in Western history. It is about artists. And you have this claim to artistry and an aesthetic form. And associated with it, by the way, the downside of that, it is often very antagonistic to. Of home cooking, which is kind of very modest home cooking. and so I I, for instance, find most Indian restaurant cooking way overly baroque, way overly spiced for my palate. You know, my home cooking is nothing like that. But you have this kind of the it's almost kind of a baroque characteristic of male celebrity cooking, which I have called bazaar masculinity. That's important,

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: important part of what this new cuisine is about and strongly associated with male especially male culinary figures.

Neha Lamba Grover: And so you've talked about your home cooking. You've also written about cooking with your son, putting things on the permanent list and temporary list. And how do you see that when you are thinking about how cuisine is evolving as in your professional sort of like when you see, when you study that and then you think of the bigger picture that you're studying, how do you put that content?

Krishnendu: Yeah. I'm I'm very lucky. I'm one of the few people who can do his job, serious job, and everyday cooking and it's almost the same work. No. I cook almost every day. And now I cook and I've done it. I was a single father because my son's mother got quite sick quite early on. And so I raised him almost single handedly since he was about five years old.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: And at least since he was 10 years old. So I've I've cooked very unlike Indian men. In fact, this is something I was forced to learn, which in fact became my good fortune that I could I learn how to cook. And today I cook and almost cook every day now from the New York Times, because New York Times has some of the most robust cooking platforms that they have built. And what what it becomes is this question of techniques, ingredients, and a degree of improvisation and a degree of tradition. It's a very New York style, I would say Mediterranean meets Asian, meets New York City kind of a cuisine. That's mostly my cooking. And we sit down and talk about our my cooking and our eating. And in some ways, it's like reading a book or reading an article. My only criteria is whoever eats at my table has to have a point of view, including my son. He can say, Dad, this was this this mapu tofu you made.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: With fake meat for my vegetarian friend is good, but it has too many chilies, or it has doesn't have enough Sichuan chilies, or some kind of commentary, or this is good and this is why it's good. So, in some ways, part of this becomes this conversation about taste. And as I said, I think this takes me back to my first point, which is about language and taste, this palatal thing, right?

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: What is on your palate, you won't know until you start talking about it. And you wrestle and you struggle to give words to what in some ways leaves you speechless because you cannot talk with your mouth full. And that's the kind of the what we wrestle on both sides of it is the is the care work, is the labor that goes into it. But it is it is not only labor, not only care work, but it's also an aesthetic achievement. That's what I find beautiful. Okay. I some of my friends say, Why do you put these beautiful kind of herbs and then say grilled chicken on top of it and you use all that herbs to make this grilled chicken look beautiful? And that's kind of the aesthetic aspiration of presenting a kind of a bit because I'm surrounded by restaurant culture, because I've taught for a decade at the Culinary Institute, and because I cook from the New York Times today. So there's this kind of not only an ethical and a caregiving relationship. but also an aesthetic relationship. And of course, food is one of the last things you you make at home. I don't make anything at home other than I write, I write articles, I write books, I do not make music, I just listen to music. I do not play organized sports. I just play a little bit of disorganized soccer, but I watch soccer. The I don't sew my clothes. I don't I I'm not a cobbler. The only thing I do in my household is cook food. and write. And and and I'm one of the few lucky people who kind of there's the confluence between my thinking, my doing, and my writing, which makes it a lot of fun. And and and a and a and a life of a certain kind of privilege that's not open to all of everyone.

Neha Lamba Grover: No, that's fair. at the same, so listening to you talk, was thinking about how personal this is, this experience to you. I was thinking about whether this will become authentic for your son when he's much older. That is authentic cooking, his definition of authentic as you relate it to your grandmother. But at the same time, I'm also reminded of the fact that you've also said cooking is food is not, no, taste is not. personal, it's social and political. You phrase, you you coined the phrase gastro politics. How is food political? I mean, I kind of, you've covered it in multiple ways earlier, but just to, yeah.

Krishnendu: Yeah. Yeah. Think about of course very high scale. You you talked about the elections and the question Hindu nationalism's association with over defining Hindus as if everyone is a vegetarian, which is not true. At the highest level, it's obvious if especially if you're coming from India today, where there's a lot of a shrill argument about diet. But I would say I'm more interested, in fact, in the quotidian everyday aspect of it, things like who does the cooking cooking, who does the cleaning.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: You know, so there's a clear sense about it where I love going to grocery stores. I live in Manhattan, kind of I live in on on on the Washington Square Park. I like people, my friends mock me that I can go grocery shopping three times a day. Okay. Well, I'll go to the fish store. That's rare anymore with an urban kind of a with someone in this kind of a context. But that's my life and that's my world. And I and it's who does the grocery and in some ways who does the cooking, who does the cleaning. It's a question of labor. It's a question of work. And it's a question of in some ways, it is the gift of my labor to my son. And I hope he recognizes it and I think he does. He expresses it. And not only with me, I want him to go out there, out there into the world. And when he sets up his own household, to be aware of it takes work, it takes effort, it takes a kind of an aesthetic investment.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: I want to find a recipe, I want to make it work, and sometimes it doesn't work. All these things are in some ways political because politics is about this question of labor and care and degrees of inequality and burdens of it that different people carry by gender, by race, by class. Okay. And to be able to acknowledge it, to be able to recognize it and to be able to work around it for me. is kind of the real pleasure of doing the gastropolitics of food.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah, I know you talked about privilege and I was thinking that when I was struggling with the full day of work trying to get the different done before I went into work for the kids at the same time trying to make sure they retain their familiarity with Indian food coming home to cook. I did not want them to have a point of view. I was literally on the other way. was like, just and eat, you know, and do not complain. And my kids started calling it a duel. Yeah.

Krishnendu: Shut up and eat. So that's that's totally relevant. That's totally important and relevant. Being able to recognize these moments, right? Somebody is stressed thin, working very hard. You shut up and eat, unless you want to show up for the work, and then you can have all the points of view in the world, right? You do the work and then you do. You're totally correct on that. And that's exactly what I mean by kind of a domestic gastropolitic: being aware of the burden of work. Food.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah.

Krishnendu: Fruit doesn't just manifest itself by itself, right? Someone has to do the

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. And hospitality is such a big thing in South Asian cultures, But the burden of that, it's the women who have to get up and not just cook, but anticipate every need all the time. Yeah.

Krishnendu: Totally. Hospitality in some ways, the other side of hospitality always is hostility. So someone, someone is resentful if you are doing the hospitality on their back, you know, on on women's work or or even women, domestic women, those who are doing domestic labor, right? How many guests show up and then suddenly you say, you tell Rani, Rani, you have to make now six more chapatis, okay?

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah, and so much labor. Yeah.

Krishnendu: Now or four more dosas, okay. So someone has to do that work. Hospitality is easy to show off if you're not doing any of the work. And that I would say is also gastropolitics. Hospitality on on on the back of whose labor.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. And, you know, this, the reason why I named my podcast, No Forks Given is a little bit of a nod to the fact that South Asian cultures are familiar with eating with their hands. was just looking at the coverage that Zoran Mamdani was getting about eating with biryani with his hand. And I thought, it's such a big deal. Right. So No Forks Given rather than just say, so

Krishnendu: Okay, good. Yes. That's beautiful.

Neha Lamba Grover: What do you have? mean, can you talk a little bit about eating with the hands and are there rules around it for people who are uninitiated? is there etiquette associated with eating with your hand? Yeah.

Krishnendu: Yeah. Absolutely. Very subtle etiquette. It's just because you're eating with the hands doesn't mean there are no rules. My grandmothers would kind of really punish me if I ever use my left hand, because there's a very left and right-centered orientation in South Asian culture where you use the right hand, doesn't matter if you're left-handed or not. You use the right hand, and in some ways it's about partly purity and pollution and the separation of it. And it's but that of course is it's also not only that.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: In some ways, we eat our food with our hand texturally and in terms of temperature. That's why those people who eat food with their hands rarely burn their mouth because they are usually not putting something that hot in their mouth, partly because they've already tried it with their hands. And I see this vast and I have written about it in some ways the work around the Indian Ocean world. I would say it's not just, of course, Indian, but it is in fact common to the Indian Ocean world, you know. From East Africa to South Asia to almost Southeast Asia. And you will have chopsticks on from the South China Sea northwards. And you will have the fork from the Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean onwards. Okay. So in some ways, these are very different regimes of taste and how we taste things. And so, in some ways, eating with your hands is a particular style. And I think the parts of India I come from and the two grandmothers I invoke.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: We also came from a squatting culture. We never my both my grandmothers never sat at a table to eat dinner. They sat they squatted on the f they sat on the floor on on on on beautiful things, you know, mattresses or dhuris, etc. And it was a w a a wholly bodied, embodied way of eating, with their hands and in fact the motion in which you raise kind of you you pull the rice and the dal and and so that it's not all over your hand. It's not doesn't look messy.

Neha Lamba Grover: Mm-hmm.

Krishnendu: It's it's clean and crisp. So there are rules of etiquette and the rules of etiquette change like everything else in India, given the various languages and various dialects. but it's an important part of the aesthetics of eating in South Asia and also part of the larger Indian Ocean.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. So as the director of the food studies PhD program, what questions are your students currently answering? What are they doing research?

Krishnendu: Yeah, one of my students, yeah, one of my students, Ran Me, she's working on pigs in China, which is of course like India and China have the largest section of upward mobile population. China has brought almost 500 million people out of relative poverty to affluence. India has done that to almost 200 million people over the last two decades, three decades around it. With that increase, what we have is increase in consumption of protein, especially animal protein. Protein and dairy products. In China, it's pork. In India, it's dairy and sweets. And so she's looking at this 500% increase in pork production and consumption. What are the challenges? Given the fact that, in some ways, the hunger for pork is going up, but so also the ecological constraints around it. And especially we will probably have the next pandemic related largely to poultry production. And pork production. And we have seen through human history, you have all these diseases jumping species. So she's looking at this whole question of pork production, surveillance, biomedical surveillance, and the challenges and the potentialities. But the Chinese population has come to expect cheap pork. so that's one of one of their work. Another of my students, maybe another example, Natasha Bernstein Bunzel, she's working on Venezuelan refugees in Colombia and their food practices and their nostalgic memory of food at home, which is Venezuela, and how that shapes their expectations of food in Colombia. So there these are some of the work. These another Sofia is working on on agricultural workers in American farms and and

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah.

Krishnendu: so these are some of the works that are happening. And it's kind of exciting to see young people do this very exciting, intense work where, in some ways, for a long time people had to justify their interest in food. Now, at least for some of this, it's a legitimate domain of work, and it's a lot of fun directing it.

Neha Lamba Grover: I still think, do you think that the work done on South Asian food is still very little? mean, you're there, But apart from the work that you've done, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: I think it's changing. I think we I think it's early, but lots of people are coming. you will see. I I'm I've been in so many dissertation defense globally. And of course, remember when I see a dissertation, it's almost three, four years before it turns into a book. So there's like I've been in a dozen dissertation defense from Australia to India in the IITs. A lot of interesting work on Indian food is happening in the social sciences in the IITs.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. thanks.

Krishnendu: But you will see some of those and then you're beginning to see, like India, on on Dalit food cuisine, like d on Dalit cuisines, for instance, it's a really opening up that I had never seen before when I was much younger. So yes, a lot of work is happening, and we will see more of it over the next few years.

Neha Lamba Grover: So final question, Dr. Ray, if you could change one thing about how Americans think about food, not what they eat, but what they think, what would it be?

Krishnendu: I would say maybe where I started, think about the people who do the work that go behind making food. And immigrants do it. And the American food system would not work without immigrants, from the farm to the restaurant. Okay. And that's worth something. Yeah, paying attention to the people who do the work of feeding everyone in the United States, which is about 330 million people, but also then everyone.

Neha Lamba Grover: Yeah. Yeah.

Krishnendu: L C.

Neha Lamba Grover: Perfect. Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure chatting with you. could go on and on, but I promise to release you by five o'clock. So yeah.

Krishnendu: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Take care.