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EVERY SINGLE DAY, there’s a man on social media acting like he was one to have created the first wheel. A few weeks ago, Zerodha’s co-founder Nikhil Kamath declared his personal experiences as facts based on the famously well-researched evidence: “most I met said”. He had learned that many Singaporeans either don’t have kitchens or never cook at home. He posited replicating this trend of food consumption from the world’s most expensive city on our own unwieldy, giant country would help boost “investing/opening restaurants” and be a “massive opportunity”. He believes that India coming in last at consuming non-home-cooked meals compared to other countries is terrible for the economy; not any of the numerous glaringly obvious factors.
Interestingly, this claim by Kamath hasn’t been lauded alone. Celebrity nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar retorted by saying “Do not listen to rich boys, eating at home is a healthy practice. One that can prevent many diseases, lead to sharing between communities, and deepen [the] bond[s] of love and security,” she wrote on her social media pages. “Learn to cook. Practice it often. Irrespective of gender, age or income,” she urges in conclusion. We’ve roped in three different people with practices in and around food to weigh in on this ongoing, never-ending and still polarising conversation in the Indian context.
Anisha Oommen, the founder of Goya Media, acknowledges that cooking “healthy, nutritious and quick meals” for oneself or family is an uphill task, especially with increasing workloads. She offers up a perspective that might encourage a return back into our kitchens. “We’re realising that we won’t be able to taste many of our favourite dishes from childhood with the passing of the previous generation. And those recipes will be lost forever,” she says. We might not see this as a loss, but Oommen reminds us that “recipes are also a kind of technology”. These family recipes – passed down from generation to generation – are encoded with information for “climate resilience, living with seasons, sustainability as well as packed with indigenous knowledge”.
Oommen argues that “all of these secrets” are embedded within “the technology referred to as a recipe”. For her, cooking food at home doesn’t just help connect us to our past and clarify our present but is also “a key to the future, which we need to recognise”. Through Goya Media’s ongoing series #1000Kitchens, Oommen and her team religiously document family recipes. “We call these recipes ‘heirlooms’ because we want to recognise them as intangible cultural artefacts too,” she states.
Writer-photographer Aysha Tanya, the daughter-half of the very popular mother-daughter-run blog The Malabar Tea Room and author of The Family Table epitomises this practice of keeping family recipes alive. Through the blog, she “chronicles her adventures” of cooking alongside her mother. “I love cooking with my mother. I learn so much from her. I’m a careful and patient cook, whereas after close to half a century of cooking, her patience is a little shorter than mine! She’s a very fuss-free cook and her food is delicious,” she says of the experience. “I try to remember that cooking doesn’t have to be precious and tedious in order for the food to be delicious. How much you suffer in the kitchen is not a direct correlation to the deliciousness of the food,” she highlights as one of the many takeaways.
While she finds cooking to be a way of gaining “a tiny insight to what another place might be like”, “its sunshine and warmth”, “the family gatherings”. Tanya finds “kitchen-travel” through cooking and eating to be far “more exciting than armchair travel”. But she does offer up a few hacks for days, boarding even this bus might seem tough. “Buy one of those small mechanical choppers. I find when I’m lazy to cook, it’s usually because I’m lazy to chop and prep. Having a nifty little chopper makes life music easier,” she says. “I also love having around things like harissa, Thai curry pastes, masala powders, that are a combination of several ingredients, really useful. It’s an easy way to add a lot of flavour into your food, be it roast chicken, a soup, a stir-fry, curry or a pulao,” she adds.
Chef and Nutrition & Lifestyle coach Nayantara Menon Bagla points out that “nutrition isn’t a problem just for the elite of the elite”. She notes that across the population in this country, there are alarming rates of “malnutrition, obesity and other metabolic diseases” and that Kamath’s comparison to Singapore doesn’t work. “It isn’t a fair comparison if we look at the markers too,” she adds.
Bagla points out that, even hypothetically, “only a minuscule population of even a city like Bengaluru entirely” lives off non-home-cooked meals. “And this is a rampant problem already,” she declares. “Unlike a country like Singapore, India has a massive problem with regulation, especially around food, and hence if people were to move towards eating non-home-cooked meals, the already-tardy regulatory bodies wouldn’t be able to keep up with the ensuing chaos,” she explains.
She adds, “Cooking food at home in the Indian context is one of the few ways to exercise control over what is going into your system”. She doesn’t subscribe to the belief “that all home-cooked food is healthy and nutritious either” but underlines the fact that home-cooking “is the way to control, moderate and balance one’s diet, which proves to be a healthier decision in the long run”.
