You know when you’re scrolling down your Facebook feed and a cute little recipe video starts playing on its own, telling you all that you could be doing this with your infinite appetite for yummy goodness and very finite free time? What do most of us do when that happens? Apart from, of course, sharing it with someone ’cause god damn that looks de-LISH! We make a mental note to go out one of these days to get ourselves something decadent and yummy like what we saw in the video.
It does, however, have to be something that’s expertly prepared by a professional and that we wouldn’t have to lift a finger for… except when the cheque arrives.
We absolutely love food. We just don’t cook a lot of it.
Do you think our parents were all that excited when the first proper Italian restaurant they knew of had opened up? Unlikely. We, on the other hand, are mini-connoisseurs who will most likely spend a small fortune at the 15th best sushi place in the city and hashtag the living crap out of everything we order. We do the things we do because our generation loves food.
And this undying love for food makes a pretty big show of itself in the heavily-hashtagged content we post on social media, the many food shows we watch, the money we spend on eating out and exploring as many exciting new palates as we can. But mysteriously, not a lot of that love makes it back to our kitchens.
Once mom’s divine, thoughtful cooking is no longer at our beck and call, the truth about our culinary situation isn’t nearly as glamorous as we let on.
For everyday sustenance, most of us have a presumably lovely person in our employ that sees to it that we get everyday nutrition even though it isn’t Michelin starred food – i.e. roti-sabzi schwag. Either that, or we end up cobbling together a quick and easy meal somewhere between anda-bread and Maggi. And if we’re feeling particularly Masterchef-y… anda Maggi.
And what’s kind of sad is, most of us living this double life of ‘worshipping’ food yet having cooked practically nothing real, live it loud and proud. Nonchalant declarations like, ‘Lol. Mujhe toh chawal banana bhi nahi aata! #IHeartFoodTho’ are more commonplace than we realise.
We wouldn’t call ourselves metal-heads without ever having listened to Metallica, or Megadeth or Slayer. Why then, do we go around claiming to be ‘foodies’ without ever having cooked?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m promoting no agenda to convert everyone reading this into Sanjeev Kapoor ki bawarchi aulaads. Eat at all the best restaurants, and post hashtags till your stomach and data plans can take no more. But I simply fear that we’re at a point where love for food has become a trend that we feel constant subconscious pressure to publicly participate in. And this pressure’s leaving us with lesser and lesser leisurely time to actually make thoughtful food with our own hands.
It doesn’t have to be a dish out of Dinner by Heston. Even making a plate of dal-chawal that you truly love, is a joy that no foodie would want to miss out on.