I learned to cook by watching my mom, who learned to cook by watching her older sister, who learned to cook by watching their mother — whom I’m sure learned to cook from her mother. I don’t have the metal spice container that my mom has or the kadai she sometimes cooks in. But when I pull out spices to toss into my wok, it certainly feels like I’m standing in a family tradition.
On my elaborate spice rack, I’ve got turmeric powder, cumin powder, cumin seeds, dried red chilies, red chili powder, coriander powder, dried bay leaves, fenugreek seeds, dried fenugreek leaves, asafoetida powder, black mustard seeds, black pepper powder, cloves, green cardamom, and anise.
I use most of these spices to cook famous paneer dishes, popular street foods like pav bhaji, and daily staples like dals and sabjis. I could describe all those meals as “traditional” Indian food. After all, they’re what I grew up on, what I learned watching my mom cook, and what I get at Indian restaurants and from party catering companies. The culture I consider myself a part of has passed these meals and the methods used to cook them
down to me. These foods embody “tradition.”
But the spices that seem to distinguish “traditional” Indian food aren’t of Indian origin. Cumin originated near Egypt. Fenugreek traces back to Iraq. Asafoetida is from near Iran. Mustard seeds seem to originate from North Africa and Europe. Anise comes from the Middle East, bay leaves come from around the Mediterranean, and cloves are native to islands in Indonesia. Garlic and ginger, essential additions to Indian cooking that I can’t call spices, come from Central Asia and the Austronesian peoples in Southeast Asia, respectively. Other popular spices are foreign, too: the best variant of nutmeg comes from Indonesia’s Bandanese islands, star anise comes from China and Vietnam, and saffron comes from the Mediterranean.
(Only turmeric, black pepper, and cardamom are native to India. And I don’t even use black pepper all that much.)
This is the first contradiction in the idea of “tradition.” Ingredients might “belong” to a tradition — in this case, a set of cooking practices — yet originate from thousands of miles away. The spices I use in my food are hardly the only thing that confuses me about my cooking tradition. The more I’ve learned about the history of globalization and its effects on what people eat today, the more I’ve come to believe that the idea of “traditional” food itself is a flawed concept.
Aloo, Tamatar, Mirch, aur Makka
My dad claims his potato sabji is a secret family recipe. I can’t tell if he’s joking or not, but I can say for sure that it conforms pretty neatly to what I know as a traditional Indian meal. I have to prepare a tadka (hot oil for spices) of mustard, and cumin seeds, after which I throw in onions, ginger-garlic paste, and fresh-cut green chilies. On top of that, I add turmeric and cumin powder and — well, the rest is a secret family recipe. (If it wasn’t before, it is now.) But I can tell you that it involves potatoes at the end. If I have tomatoes, that’s necessary, too.
The potato and the tomato are also defining markers of traditional Indian food. Nearly every Saturday breakfast of my childhood featured some Indian potato dish. Ubiquitous street foods such as bhel puri, pav bhaji, chaat, samosas — and, of course, my dad’s sabji — rely on it. And my Sunday lunches always included rasam, made of boiled tomatoes. The most popular masala and curry dishes also require tomatoes, so it’s a shame I still can’t cut them that well.
This is where the idea of “tradition” gets more interesting. “Traditional” Indian food rests on vegetables that come from the Americas.
The stereotype that defines Indian food — “spicy” — comes from a Mexican plant, the chili, that only reached Eurasia in the 1500s alongside tomatoes and potatoes. It’s the same with maize: snack foods made of corn, another popular sight on Indian streets, also originate in the Americas.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to India. Can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Northern European dishes without potatoes, or the world without corn? All of these plants, staples of the world’s “traditional” dishes, come from the Americas — meaning they only entered Eurasian cuisine in the 16th century.
History books claim that the “modern” world began only around 1500 after the discovery of the Americas. With modernity came the potato, tomato, maize, chilies, and five hundred years of globalization. How can the Indian foods I cook be traditional if the vegetables they rely on belong squarely to the modern era? The Western notion that cultural and economic globalization has replaced previously insular traditions with a worldly modernity leaves a bitter taste on my tongue: the food I cook tells me that globalization and modernity are my traditions.
Whose Globalization?
Power dynamics inevitably shaped what ingredients were adopted where, when, and how.
Most spices in the food I cook originated around Eurasia and reached India by way of the maritime and overland Silk Roads. Until the 1500s, there were no European empires involved. It’s certainly possible that the global exchanges of foods and spices across Eurasia and the Americas could have happened without European imperialism. But that’s not what happened.
In Northern and Western Europe, spices became a status symbol among populations whose diets had been fairly bland. Roman and Medieval European demand for spices had, by the 1400s, made Venetian and Eastern European merchants the gatekeepers to these edible objects of cultural and culinary fascination. Spices embodied wealth — and Western and Northern Europeans wanted them.
Hoping to one-up the European merchants sailing around Africa, Christopher Columbus headed west. In search of a more profitable route to those spices, he began a continent-wide genocide in the Americas and introduced to Eurasia the foods my family and I eat today.
Potatoes and maize were imported from the Americas to feed Europe’s growing working classes while Europeans committed genocide against the peoples who first cultivated these crops. And Europe’s growing stomach for colonial produce grew with their stomach for colonies. “By feeding rapidly growing populations, [potatoes] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950,” argues historian William McNeill.
As colonists do, they claim to bring modernity to backwards people — and, to the British, the potato was modern enough to push on tradition-locked Indians. They brought the potato to India in the 1800s in an effort to promote “modern,” “scientific” agriculture; they introduced the tomato in a similar way. When Indians adopted both vegetables en masse just two hundred years ago, what was once hailed as modern became what I know as traditional.
I could argue that potatoes, for example, are modern because they’re comparatively new to most cuisines. The biggest argument in my favor is that modern European imperialism introduced the potato to Eurasia. But I could also argue that potatoes belong to certain groups’ traditions because they appear everywhere within those groups’ cuisines.
I could also take a tangential route and argue that, because Indians already used spices from around Eurasia well before 1500, we ought to push the beginning of “modernity” far, far before Columbus; then all Indian food could be modern. The fact that all of these can be true at once suggests that bifurcating the world into tradition and modernity is an exercise in futility — not least because such a division conforms to the imperial European notion that globalization and modernity are synonymous.
Where Food Belongs
White friends of mine love chicken tikka masala. While they usually don’t know too much about Indian food, they know chicken tikka masala is Indian and they know that it’s the best.
Chicken tikka masala, one of the most popular Indian-identified meals, consists of yogurt-marinated chicken roasted in an oven and a masala made of tomatoes and cream, not to mention all the other spices involved. Unofficially — no other food seems to put up a contest — chicken tikka masala is considered to be England’s national dish. (Traditional British food isn’t all potatoes.)
Nobody knows where exactly the dish originated, but the best rumor available is that, in the 1970s, a Bangladeshi chef in Glasgow, Scotland, served a customer chicken tikka in the tomato-cream masala, birthing the dish in the process. If the rumor is true, it means that England’s national dish was made in Scotland.
Chicken tikka masala is wildly popular in India, too, and it’s featured at nearly every North Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to. Food historians might consider it a fusion dish, and that’s true enough.
But is it Indian food? I’d argue that categorizing it as “British” or “Indian” or “Bangladeshi” or “Scottish” erases the dish’s history and everything that had to happen, globally, for someone to think up such a dish. Mixing chicken tikka with a tomato-cream gravy blurs any lines separating tradition and modernity.
Locking Up Tradition
There’s an easy line drawn between a bloody European quest for spices abroad and the fact that English people claim chicken tikka masala as their national dish: both satisfy an imperial-style craving to own what comes from “elsewhere.”
Chinese and Arab and Persian and Indian and Austronesian merchants had traded with the Bandanese for their variant of nutmeg for centuries. But the Dutch couldn’t accept middlemen; the Dutch East India company ethnically cleansed the Bandanese islands and enslaved its remaining population to secure exclusive control over what was then the world’s most valuable spice.
Meanwhile, Europe colonized the Americas and exported potatoes and maize and tomatoes to the world. Europe concurrently owned, bought, and sold West African slaves to grease the wheels of globalization. Some time later, Europe colonized the African continent to get at its abundant raw materials and spread “modernity.”
This perverted motive to own what’s “elsewhere,” taken to its logical conclusion, hints at a scary future for global food production. In the 1990s, the United States granted RiceTec, a U.S. rice seed genetics company, a patent over “basmati rice” strains, which grow indigenously across India. International patent law would have made it illegal for Indian rice farmers to grow the rice that they’ve cultivated for decades, that their lands have let thrive for centuries, lest they pay RiceTec for a basmati rice license. To secure nutmeg, the Dutch ruined the lives and livelihoods of the Bandanese; a U.S. company threatened to ruin the lives and livelihoods of Indians to secure basmati rice.
While the Indian government successfully fought off the basmati rice patent challenge, it wasn’t the only challenge that came its way. Corporations have claimed patents on neem, tamarind, and turmeric — all of which are plants and roots that grow naturally in India. Globally, three corporations exercise legal control over half of the world’s seed market through patents on the seeds’ genomes, threatening local biodiversity across much of the developing world.
To say that a substance belongs to a person or corporation as their exclusive property is a plausible end result of unchecked imperial European efforts to lay claim to what comes from “elsewhere.” Just as chicken tikka masala is the unofficial dish of England, patents on the naturally growing plant species that fill our stomachs are an unofficial perpetuation of European empire. The West still wants spices.
Disowning Tradition
In pursuit of the exotic, European empires changed the world’s agricultural practices, created the global food supply chain we know today, and made certain foodstuffs ubiquitous on all continents. They also redefined “tradition” to contain anything that came before a globalizing imperial Europe brought “modernity.” Yet even that definition wasn’t consistent — most “traditional” foods across Europe rely on quite “modern” ingredients, by Europe’s own standards. When seemingly everyone can lay claim to peppers and potatoes, when chicken tikka masala is beloved across continents, a food’s origin has no bearing on whether or not it’s “traditional.”
What may look like an insular tradition from the outside (often, from the eye of the imperial European observer) is likely a process of evolution inside. Just as plants can evolve over generations without necessarily changing their outward appearances, nothing in religions or governments or cultures or cuisines stays put. Change is the only constant in a world where people learn and borrow from one another.
Though European imperialism gave India the potato and the tomato, that doesn’t mean imperialism was a good thing. Far from it. The history of the spice trade before 1500 hints that good foods would have eventually made their way across the world without empires, anyway. It also hints that at least in India — and definitely across Eurasia — there was hardly anywhere where tradition was “insular.” Even if the way I cook meals follows a particular Indian tradition passed down over generations, the common foods piled onto peoples’ plates around the world are the tasty proof that there has always been more that connects our traditions than separates them.