First History Lessons: Food and Eating

Snip-snipetty snip, we cut the paddy today
Bhai puffed rice from Jhingasail is nice,
And when it’s made of Bansphul, cooked rice,
Grains of Lahi, toast them flat,
Mix some curd with Telesomat,
Make your flour of Gandha kasturi
Sweet cakes of this flour —so tasty!
Put them in your kinsmens’ hands.

Many of the paddy farmers in Barisal district of Bangladesh sing a particular song when harvesting their crop. The names of various kinds of rice are mentioned in it, and also the best way to eat each of them—as a plate of cooked rice, as puffed rice, with some curd, or made into a dessert, for instance. You cannot even count the varieties of rice grown across India and Bangladesh. Depending on the season and weather conditions, you get rice with distinct tastes, flavours, and qualities. We hear of this sheer variety in literature and social practices. Sadly, however, this diversity is decreasing day by day. The greed for extra production has led to an increase in the cultivation of hybrid varieties of paddy. But growing this sort of rice eventually does more harm than good—it needs more water, it needs chemical fertilisers and pesticides, it degrades the soil. And all varieties of rice are not good for our health either. But what gives us hope is that even if it is quite late, the government and some knowledgeable people are waking up to these problems. Work has begun in various regions on preserving environment-friendly varieties of paddy.

First things first

The French, I know, eat frogs (they’re not too bad)
Burma’s ngapi stinks so much, oh gad!
Madras curry is hot, it makes your throat burn
In Japan they eat grasshoppers just for fun
The Chinese pop cockroaches in their mouth
What do people eat in the north and south?
— Sukumar Ray, Khai Khai

Ngapi is made by fermenting shrimps or other fish, salting it, pounding it to a paste, and drying it. It’s a favourite of the people of Burma (Myanmar). And yet this same ngapi smells awful to people from other places. Leela Majumdar’s book The Red Notebook (Kheror Khata) talks of an amusing incident about ngapi. Her father Pramadaranjan Ray was a land-surveyor by profession. Between 1899 and 1922, he travelled through remote forests and mountain areas to conduct his surveys. This work took him to Burma, where he had to stay for a long time. In the course of duty, he arrived one day at a village where ngapi was being prepared. He could barely breathe because of the smell. He and his team had no choice but to set up their camp upwind of the village, so that the smell was carried away in the opposite direction.

Like many others at that time, Pramadaranjan also took his cook along when travelling on work. His name was Shashi. When the camp was set up Shashi made arrangements to fry some luchis (similar to puris) in ghee for everyone. A little later the village headman arrived and pleaded, ‘What are you cooking, sahib, we cannot tolerate this horrible smell. Please move your oven somewhere else.’ There’s a saying in Sanskrit about food, ghranena ardham bhojanam—the aroma is half the consumption. When you cannot even stomach the smell of a particular food, would you ever want to set eyes on it? This is what Leela Majumdar wrote in The Red Notebook: ‘Sometimes it seems to me there’s no such thing as tasty or unappetising food, it’s all a matter of habit.’