Writing Initiatives

Eating food that is not prepared at home is a significant kind of eating that has risen with the growth of restaurants and cafés (Bhatia, 2022). While family meals are an interesting situation allowing us to study the relationship between food content and social setting, equally important are other situations of eating such as snacking, eating alone, eating away from home, and eating informally. Food eaten in the privacy of the home has received much attention and animated a long and rich tradition of analysis on the axes of class, caste, race, gender, and sexuality (Malhotra, Simi et.al., 2021). But it is interesting also to see how food reconfigures public space. In that vein, it  remains to be answered whether public edibility brings with it feelings of release and autonomy. This essay will closely analyse Salman Rushdie’s non-fictional work ‘On Leavened Bread’ to trace the ethos determining contemporary eating-feeding relations. I conclude by maintaining that in urban public alimentary culture there is a disavowal of nostalgic culinary identity.

Rushdie’s writings, taking up themes of exile, alienation, and cultural identity, are crucial to the corpus of Indian Writing in English. The particular prose narrative ‘On Leavened Bread’, when looked at specifically through the lens of food and taste, tells a story of new dietary belongings and affiliations, in the context of a porous and globalised world. Here, the representation of food is not about any given predisposition or inclination to local food peculiarities such as chutney and spices which otherwise abound in Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre. In this piece, it is the globally standard leavened bread that captures the Indian-born British-American novelist’s imagination.

In the text, Rushdie confesses his love for leavened bread. He begins the narrative by furnishing his disdain for the “real”, local breads such as phulka and chapati. He finds them completely bland. He is equally critical of the leavened breads he finds in Mumbai which, as he tells his readers, are “dry” and “crumbling”. Rushdie’s search comes to another disappointing halt when the breads he finds in Karachi also prove below par. It is only when he reaches Britain that he finds his model leavened bread. Very slowly and subtly, Rushdie unravels this scene of finally finding the ideal bread and the experience of tasting it. The piece captures his encounter with restaurants and bakeries in London, a space where learned values and practices are contested, where he chooses to act on his desire to consume leavened bread, departing from the secure flavours of home.