Tag: india

Swipe Right on Bananas this Quarantine Season (there’s recipes!)｜Wine and Wasabi™

Bananas are cheap and easily available even during the lockdown. They can be had raw or cooked. They are easy to work with and are brilliant fresh or frozen, ripe or rotten. Learn how to make the best use of them, using as few ingredients as possible and as little time as possible, while still managing to make something interesting out of it.

This is the first of a series we’ve planned that feature one versatile, inexpensive ingredient and provide short, quick and simple recipes (with stories, always stories around it) featuring it as the main ingredient, that we think will hopefully help you get more creative in the kitchen and help you beat the lockdown blues. Scroll down if you wish to skip straight to the recipes!

I remember clearly how much I hated bananas. If I took one to school I’d remind the banana how much I hated it after every bite. Friends found it amusing but it was a very serious affair. The issue was on my end so I had to let the fruit in question know respectfully that it tasted like ass.

Perhaps it was the sickly sweet smell that wafted through the air if they were kept on the table, not strong enough to demand immediate attention but there to distract you if you were just close enough. Or it could have been the colour, yellow wasn’t among my favourites, and this yellow went through far too many changes in intensity for me to be enamoured. It was an imposter, this fruit. So many other nicer fruits were always a dull or bright version of their outsides but this one was white, even as it pretended to be otherwise. Could a kid really be expected to trust a banana?

Continue reading “Swipe Right on Bananas this Quarantine Season (there’s recipes!)｜Wine and Wasabi™”

The Way Out of these Elections is Through Our Stomachs｜Wine and Wasabi™

Food is often overlooked by the average voter when thinking of politics but it is often used by politicians as an insidiously powerful tool to further their agendas. The election season we are in now is no different.

Food is often overlooked by the average voter when thinking of politics but it is actually used by politicians as an insidiously powerful tool to further their agendas.

The election season we are in now is no different. The present government continues to use food to both galvanise and alienate voters with the obvious intent of remaining in power for another term and rewrite India in their own image, for good (pardon the dramatics, these are trying times).

So many of the things we consume have been catalysts for major administrative changes in Indian polity over the years. The 1857 Uprisings and the controversial ‘Chapati Movement’ before it (when something as simple as our round chapatis being distributed from hand to hand in the country set the ball rolling for the freedom struggle) are pertinent examples of the power of food to instigate unrest or disturb the status quo.

“A chowkidar–an Indian village watchman. All Indian villages had one, and it was these men, running between their homes and the nearest neighbouring settlement with chapatis, who so effectively raised panic among the ruling British.”
– Smithsonian

This election and India’s current state of affairs going back especially to the last five years seem to be moving in an eerily similar space. Only instead of a united movement against a government clearly not suited to lead in these changing and fragile times, opposing forces have still ended up standing against each other.

There’s no simpler way to say this: this is an clearly election fuelled by divisions of caste and creed. Those vying to (re)gain power get this very well and are making unflinching use of it for electoral gain.

Continue reading “The Way Out of these Elections is Through Our Stomachs｜Wine and Wasabi™”