Eating and Belonging: a Conversation

So, I met this girl… on the internet.

No, that doesn’t really capture it. To begin with, she’s a woman, not a girl. A really, really smart one.

More to the point, we met quite by accident, not on JDate or ashleymadison.com. It seems we both live in, and blog about Pondicherry. And we are both a little food-obsessed. So we started corresponding about these things.

Deepa Reddy is a cultural anthropologist by profession, an artist by natural talent and temperament, and a cook by passion. Her blog, Pâticheri, is a thing of beauty, thoughtfulness, and deliciousness. During one of our exchanges — about the semiotics of baking or some such thing — she suggested that it might be fun to take our “ethnographic free-play” public, to post our back-and-forth on our blogs in real-time. With you, Dear Reader, adding your own “deep play” (I promise, that will be my one-and-only cultural anthropology joke) in the comments, this might just be an interesting experiment.

After loosely settling on a topic — national identity and all-things-food — we have decided to let it rip. Let the wild rumpus begin!

MBJ

The Conversation Thread
1. So American! (Deepa) 15 July 2012
2. You Are Having One American Nature Only, I Am Telling (MBJ) 16 July 2012
3. Cosmopolitan Comforts (Deepa) 20 July 2012
4. No Accounting for Taste (MBJ) 24 July 2012
5. What a Mess! (Deepa) 10 August 2012
6. Tell Me What You Eat and I Will Tell You Who You Are (MBJ) 21 August 2012
Reader Comments…

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The Sweet Smell of Home

I am often asked if return to the U.S. from India, where I live half of each year, is a “culture shock.” I feel quite at home in both places; so while the differences are in many ways quite stark, there really is no major adjustment. My acclimation process consists principally of two things: getting my biological clock set to local time and losing the acrid smell of Indian spice from my skin and sweat.

Turmeric, fenugreek, and cumin are, of course, staple spices in Indian cooking from nearly all regions of the subcontinent, and onions and garlic are pervasive aromatic vegetables. One hardly needs to ride a 40-degree Bombay commuter train to know that, whatever these things may do to enhance the cuisine, they turns us all into skunks.

Fortunately, both the jet lag and the redolence of Indian cooking fade within a couple days in California.