What is your food-entity?

Yep. I did it just now. Coined a new word. Food +identity= Food- entity. So. I have just completed Interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Not what I expected of an award winning novel. No intellectual gymnastics. No complexities. Just simple ordinary stories in simple lucid prose. Rather good I must say. And in her work I found constant references to food -whether it is Mrs. Das munching on puffed rice in the Interpreter or Mrs. Sen using her boti (shaped like the prow of a ship) to gut and slice fish and vegetables. Lahiri uses food to convey her Indian-ness. Her characters derive their sense of self( as i suspect she does) their roots from the food they eat. Food that clearly separates them from their American counterparts. In the rice, puffed or otherwise, in the spices, in the egg curry, fish curry or curried chicken they find their identities separate and distinct. It is what they hold on to in a foreign land. 

I found it a novel point of view. To think that food somehow connects you to your roots, to your self, gives you  your identity is a possibility I've never taken into account perhaps because I've taken my identity for granted. That I'm a Indian- Bengali has never been in question but to those settled in far flung places around the globe food becomes a way of life. Of staying in touch with your roots. In Lahiri's world food is not not merely what you eat but who you are. 

I thought back to the time when I read Enid Blytons as a child. References to muffins, scones, tarts were unfamiliar, unknown. But for today's generation exposed to an explosion of cuisines from all over the globe nothing is unfamiliar. Mexican, thai , chinese, Italian, French, Lebanese, American, Japanese- you name it we eat it. But our daily diet still consists of dal chawal subzi. So food does not occupy us in the same way it does an expat. To them it is a taste of home. Even though they maybe American Indians born and brought up there. 

To most Indians food is a big deal. It is our medium of expressing ourselves. It is an affirmation of life itself. Every occasion -joyous or sad- ( wedding, birth, death, festival) is marked by food. 

But for some it is also a means of clinging to their roots and finding their identity. Their food- entity.