Why do most Indians still hide eating habits from their loved ones?

There are several sociological, religious and political considerations that dictate a better part of what we eat and what we hide about what we eat

My earliest memories of travelling to my hometown during the summer vacations as a child involved the sweet nostalgia of overnight passenger trains, stopping at railway stations for those greasy pakoras and the endless banter of co-passengers that shuttled between intense political analyses to caricatures. But there is another, deeper, more subtle memory that surfaces—of my Muslim mother consciously packing vegetarian tiffin boxes for dinner on the train.

“Why can’t we ever eat chicken lollipops, kebabs and biryani on the train? It doesn’t have to be hot,” I’d always ask, exasperated.

“Because it turns bad if we don’t heat it,” she’d say, and pack the usual aloo parathas.

However, only later would I find out the real reason—she didn’t want to inconvenience the predominantly non-Muslim passengers on our Jaipur-bound train. What would happen if she did? Is it that big of a deal? Maybe. But if I was in her place in the India of 2022, I would, too, play it safe and pack those aloo parathas. This is not a far-fetched assumption. In the recent Amazon Prime series, Pataal Lok, a Muslim man travelling in a passenger train opens his chicken lunch and subsequently gets lynched because his co-passenger accuses him of eating beef.

Layered complexity

Why is food, the simplest and most nourishing aspect of human existence, so laden with religious, sociological and political dimensions in India? And has it always been this way? Have we always hidden what we eat from others for a variety of reasons?

Meher Varma, anthropologist and podcast host of Bad Table Manners who dedicated its fifth episode to the culinary history of India’s oppressed castes, told The Established that the roots of Indians leading a double life when it comes to hiding their food preferences can be rooted in India’s caste-based notions of pollution and purity.

“So when the neighbour asks what has been cooked, they often describe it in coded ways or even try to conceal the smell of beef being cooked,” she said. “There have been restrictions for what one can eat publicly, particularly if you don’t belong to the privileged class and castes.”

Varma adds the emergence of veganism can be understood distinctly from castes. In one episode of the Netflix anthology Easy, a woman hides her dietary preferences from her “woke” girlfriend who is vegan and is a climate justice warrior.

“So even when new-age cafés talk about ‘clean’ eating, there is scepticism towards meat, as if it is not clean in the first place. It’s the same as eating very Instagram-friendly food in aesthetic cutlery but we’ll stuff our faces with processed food at home—this comes from the pressure that what you are seen eating is what you are, and what you are, tells us something about where you come from.”

Hidden in plain sight

The idea of concealing one’s eating habits depending on the socio-political mores of the time has always existed in India, across the ages. Sonal Ved, food writer and author of Whose Samosa is it Anyway? The Story of where 'Indian' Food Really Came fromrecounts her recent travel to Malvan along the coast of Maharashtra where she wanted to try the vegetarian version of rava fish—fried fish coated in semolina.

“The cook brought out a plate of raw bananas, deep fried in the same spices and seasoning and I wasn’t surprised when I read about fellow food writer Anoothi Vishal’s story about her grandfather and his love for a dish called ‘Kele ki machhli’ that he enjoyed after he abandoned eating meat,” she says. “It was a dish where raw bananas were made to look like fish in a curry. Similarly, traditional Indian cuisine has several recipes where vegetarian food is disguised as meat.”

She explains that the idea of concealing meat can roughly be traced to Mughal courtrooms where Hindus (mainly Kayasthas from Lucknow) mingled with them and the cooks had no choice but to come up with entertaining recipes where their food looked exactly like meat. “They often used ingredients like raw plantain, jackfruit and gourd to make everything from koftas and kebabs. Similarly, in Bengali cuisine, there is a dish called dhoka’r dalna which literally comes from the word ‘dhoka’ (to fool someone). It’s prepared as a part of ‘niramish,’ a repertoire of vegetarian recipes made with lentils and looks like fat chunks of meat in a curry,” Ved adds.

In the case of Suroosh, a 32-year-old software developer, his mother “nearly suffers an aneurysm” at the sight of meat. For him, consuming meat assumes many meanings on his father’s side of the family–memories of eating ground-cooked mutton, laced with spices as varied as cassia seeds and nutmeg, prepared by his grandmother.

“She knows that I loved my paternal grandmother’s mutton, but likes to pretend otherwise,” he says. “I can’t stop eating meat but I cannot rub it in her face either.”

The question of religion

The way Dr Kurush F. Dalal, archaeologist and culinary anthropologist sees it, religious strictures associated with food must be understood from the lenses of history and modern science, too.

“Human beings don’t thrive in an environment of being told what not to do, and the only way to convince them to not do something which is not good for them is to bring a religious angle,” he says. “This is the reason why Abrahamic religions banned pork because it cannot be bled to death—this is so because blood is the first element to turn toxic in heat.”

He says that the distinction between what can be eaten, or eaten in secret, has various nuances across cultures. He cites the example of certain Kayastha women who will cook meat but will not consume it. “After all, there is no great pleasure in telling everyone what you are eating, particularly if they are your loved ones and you simply don’t want to hurt them. This is not hypocrisy; you are just trying not to hurt your loved ones because you won’t derive any vicarious pleasure out of it.”