Episode 9 - Bad Table Manners

How Indian Food Became Frustratingly Hip

 Thanks to the cool-ification of Indian food, traditional ingredients from the subcontinent, like turmeric and ghee, are now repackaged and resold in Western and Westernized markets as if they were “new” discoveries. Cleaned up, minimalistic design labels are often employed to give the familiar and unfamiliar look, and conceal what one can argue is a recolonization of the Global South by the Global North. The U.S.-based academic Rumya Putcha tells us why this hipster Indian food is problematic, while Vidya Balachander, current South Asia editor at Whetstone, helps us unpack the idea of the global supermarket.

In this episode, Meher talks to:

• Rumya Putcha is an anthropologist and professor at the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia

• Vidya Balachander is a food writer and the current South Asia editor at Whetstone

Episode highlights:

More than Mistranslation:

• Rumya talks about the frustration her students feel about the cool-ification of Indian culture, which comes from the co-optation of foods and ingredients that once made them feel excluded from white American culture. The frustration is rooted, too, she says, in the white sense of “discovery” and capitalization of these ingredients.

• Lack of geographic acknowledgment of ingredients, such as ghee and turmeric, also leads to a flattening and facile understanding of Indian ingredients. It’s a type of Orientalism, Rumya says, that doesn’t require geographic specificity.

The Logic of Cool-ification:

• Why turmeric? Meher asks. Why ghee? Why do certain South Asian ingredients become more popular than others?

• Rumya thinks that these trends are shaped by top-down, distribution-buyer practices and marketing. 

Aesthetics of Otherness:

• Meher and Rumya discuss the ways in which whiteness commodifies wellness culture, treating it as a vacation of sorts from an everyday life that remains firmly entrenched in Western values. 

• Supermarkets, for example, especially markets that brand themselves as concerned with wellness, present food commodities as high-end and exotic, which enables them to demand higher prices.

• Rumya comments on the marketing of foods deemed “Other,” stating that these foods are often presented as both new and old at the same time. There’s a Fountain of Youth narrative common in these marketing tactics, she says, positing that if you eat food that has been eaten for a very long time, it will benefit your body and health. 

Going Beyond Outrage:

• Conversations about cultural appropriation haven’t advanced beyond outrage, Vidya says, to thinking about how accountability can be structured in a meaningful way. Outrage is important, she adds, but it serves a limited purpose as an endless cycle.

• How can giving due credit in the wake of cultural appropriation work? she asks. “That accountability needs to have a concrete shape, and I don’t think we’ve progressed to that conversation.”

No Easy Answer

• Meher proposes that there is no easy answer when it comes to dealing with cultural appropriation in a globalized world. She suggests that one form of recourse involves cultivating an awareness about ingredients like turmeric and ghee, and understanding their histories and cultural relevance long before they were commodified and commercialized by Western markets. 

• Hyper access can sometimes come at the cost of denying the less powerful access to them, she says.