ODOC - Looking beyond the meat

ODOC - Meat of the matter

One District One Cuisine (ODOC) initiative of the Uttar Pradesh state government is in the news. 

My initial reaction was that Uttar Pradesh has since long accorded food the priority it warrants. Today too, besides taste and variety, it respects seasonality, celebrates harvests, and prioritizes home-cooking – per capita usage of food-delivery apps here is way lower compared to other states! Why mess with the food when there is a lot else in the state that can do with some change?

The sheer diversity of Khoya at Khoya Mandi Chunar (Mirzapur district)

I then took a step back and read about the initiative. First, the number of cuisines (208) way exceeds the number of districts (75) so why is it one district one cuisine to begin with. Secondly, at-least half-a-dozen districts have Samosa as their cuisine or one of the cuisines. Samosa which is consumed across the country in millions each day and even tops the food-delivery platform lists! Third, at-least half-a-dozen cuisines amused me by their sheer presence in the list – dairy-products, cakes, spices, mango products, pickles, and chutney! Fourth - this is apparently done to help the cuisines; do Pethas of Agra, Imartis of Jaunpur or Pedas of Mathura (all three have the GI tag) need promotion and support? Fifth, the list has both Red-peda and Laal-peda; was it prepared in some tearing hurry? Sixth, foods whose recipes are endemic to select places like the Christmas-cake at Allahabad or the Matri-omlet at Aligarh are missing. 

Exclusion of meat based cuisines  has been written about in detail and I will stay away from it. What strikes me is the audacity to fit the tropical-forest like diversity of our cuisines into lawn like data-sheets, the need for neat one-on-one connections in a world driven by messy complexities.

Let us take help of numbers. Uttar Pradesh is spread across 2,43,286 sq kms of which 9.01% is forest area (including 25 Wildlife Sanctuaries and 1 National Park). The people here, the population density is 829 people per sq km, speak a total of 101 languages (2011 census) and live in temperatures ranging from 3°C to 45°C. Home to 18 administrative divisions the state shares its borders with 8 other states, 1 UT and 1 neighbouring country. The rivers Ganga, Yamuna and their tributaries ensure that Uttar Pradesh is home to some of the most fertile lands in our country. To all this diversity let us add the diversity driven by location, caste, religion, access to resources, family-wealth, and income. All of this together manifests in richly diverse cuisines unaffected by district boundaries. 

Coming to districts let us take a quick look at one – Banaras. And for now, we will focus on our sweet-cravings and not discuss  chai or chaat or paan. Locals brave chaotic traffic and extreme weather regularly, if not daily, to savour these sweets which, courtesy the craft and skills of their makers, stand out for their textures, fragrances, appearances and tastes. Here we have Gulab-jamun - the size of a closed fist and uniform texture in each bite at Manduadih, Malaiyo (winters only!) which just disappears in the mouth and Kulfi (summers only!) at Chowkhamba, Rabdi (and Rabdi-bun) bearing sweetness of the milk at Sarnath, Jalebi fragrant with rose-water at Bansphatak, the juicy Laung-lata at Ravidas Gate, Laal-peda at Uday Pratap College – a one item shop which now has multiple branches, fresh and melt in the mouth Soan-papdi and Lassi topped with generous doses of rabdi and malai at Ramnagar, Kheermohan, Malai-gilori (and other sweets), Alu-jabeli, Palang-tod (winters only!), and Thandai at Thatheri Bazaar. There are other sweets too and Thatheri Bazaar is a food-haven within Banaras, a metaphor for quality food, from Alu-papad to Bael-murabba (woodapple!), but more on these some other day! 

For now we stay on diversity. If a non-exhaustive list of sweets in 1 of the 75 districts can be so rich, can a static excel-sheet listing one cuisine per district or a one-minute-reel which shows top-5 cuisines capture the rich, ancient, multi-layered food diversity of our land? Can we create more dynamic and immersive experiences like food-maps, food-atlases, food-dictionaries, food-libraries, food-wikipedias, food-festivals, food-walks and food-conversations that do justice to our cuisines?