One of my favourite activities is to people-watch, that too, at cafés and eateries. We are what we eat, after all, but over the years, I believe I’d add “and how we eat” to that sentence.

Through all my travels – and there are many more to be done! – I’ve come to appreciate, cherish and treasure the plethora of sensuality that is Indian cuisine. Growing up in a home that thought as much as it lived, food was not just a fact of life – it was something to be learnt, discovered, achieved with skill and appreciated with gratitude. Even simple meals were a celebration in themselves – with all the trappings of a well-laid table to good conversation. Many a meal has lingered past the one-hour mark with discussions about spices and recipes and culinary influences. Therefore, to me, watching and digesting food are not just physical activities.

Obviously, when I headed to Italy, then, I was quite keen on the cuisine and their culinary ideas. After all, it is one of the oldest formal cuisines in the Western world and no, it did not disappoint me. Northern Italy is more Germanic than Neapolitan or Tuscan. Turin, the seat of the Duchy of Savoy, Milan, Como – all Alpine. It follows then, that so it the food. The infamy of long-drawn Italian meals is a delight to the observer – meals can last for up to three hours! To this day, it is perfectly acceptable to begin meals with an aperitif, moving on to anti-pasti. If you are Italian, you’ll most definitely do justice to anything that follows. If, however, you are not, this is the time to loosen your belt a couple of notches – trust me – you’ll need the extra space. Pasta and the main course follow. Then of course, there is the dolce - dessert – and coffee. Bitter, strong, fresh and knock-your-socks-off caffeinated! All this must be accompanied by voluble and animated conversation that runs the entire gamut of topics – not to forget frantic gesticulation! I have a theory for this – this physical activity keeps the calories in check and makes room for the grande finale – il gelato – the ice cream. There’s one thing Italy will always win the crown for – their ice creams. If you’re every lucky enough to find yourself in La Italia, treat yourself to a couple of slurps of heaven – it goes by the name of rum-and-raisin gelato.

Italians consider meals an occasion that borders on the sacred. It’s not just the food, it’s the whole act of being together that counts.

Back home, in India, although I grew up in a liberal household, I was quite aware that mealtimes are distinctly different for others. To an average Indian, food is sacred – religiously so. The most common form of charity in India – from the Jains to the Muslims, to super-orthodox Namboodripads to bhadralok Kolkata – is to feed. Pleasure does not carry respectable connotations in traditional Indian ethos and consequently – food is not a sensual treat. It is a religious duty – of the wife, mother, sister; a communal ritual – at the gurudwara, the iftaar, and the shaadi. It is a business – for the millions of Ududpi joints and the Dhabas that dot the unending lengths of India’s roadways. It is a much-treasured secret – like grand-mother’s recipe for fiery mango pickles and sago poppadums. But very rarely is it pure pleasure.  Yet – Indian food is unique in its integral structure – insofar as no other genre of cuisines is so precisely attuned to nurture and accentuate human life as Indian cuisines. The simplest of daal-chawal is a complex combination of proteins for strength, slow-releasing carbohydrates for energy, mustard seeds, asafetida and cumin as anti-histamines, digestives and coolants, not to forget the ubiquitous dollop of ghee to keep the softer tissues protected. Millennium of thought, experimentation and ideation has attuned food in every part of the vast geography of India to suit its inhabitants to the T(ea). We don’t share plates – jhootan – is a concept hard to explain to a non-Indian. Yet it makes scientific sense, as any modern-day medical practitioner will vouch for. To us, traditionally, using forks and knives is akin to committing sacrilege – food being sacred deserves utmost respect. Forks and knives are implements – ergo weapons. To use them to eat is therefore, an abomination, a sin. But that ensured extreme attention to hygiene – with clean, washed hands and only a select-few cooking and serving. Indians take food seriously.

Tanzanians do not. Food here is a luxury. If you eat twice a day, you are rich indeed! Zanzibar, the traditional seat of the Omani Sultanate, was one of the world’s largest wholesale spice markets for centuries. Cinnamon, star anise, clove, pepper, cumin and coriander, tamarind and bay leaf – all have a distinct and indelible presence in the history of this country. Yet curiously enough, Tanzania – the ungainly marriage of Tanganyika and Zanzibar in the mid-1960s – does not claim culinary expertise in tickling the taste buds. On the contrary, chipsi-mayai (eggs-and-chips) is rampart, washed down with warm Coca Cola spiked with Konyagi – the local sugarcane gin. The tragedy of Africa is nowhere as starkly manifest as in the lack of a distinct and indigenous culinary identity in Tanzania. Coastal areas of the country that have had Arab and subsequently, Muslim presence, for a while, manage a small variety of roast meats, lightly spiced. But the further inland one goes, the greater is the blurring of the food’s identity. It is indeed a loss of monumental proportions if a country, a nation, a people, cannot claim tastes and flavours as their own. Eggs-and-chips, black tea, Coca Cola, dry sponge cakes – all legacies of the Colonists. Chapatis, Lamb Curries and Pilau gifted by the trading Arabs and Indians. But what remains then of the Bantu, the Kihehe and the Hehe? These are the people who have lived amongst the unmodified genetic ancestors of the Indian mango trees and the Chettinaad tamarind trees for more generations than the concept of India has existed. Yet – tamarind does not manifest itself as tangy chutney or even flavouring in gravies – but a mere dried fruit for school-children to suck on, on their way home during dusty, hot afternoons.  Coconut is not a condiment – just a raw commodity to be traded off to distant shores. Meals are cooked in the open over charcoal fires, in large dented aluminum pots. Much daily news and gossip is traded while tapioca is deep fried. Breakfast is had when the tea is brewed – depending on how far the lady of the house has had to walk to fetch potable water. A funeral, a wedding, a christening are all to be remembered and commemorated for generations to come, by the number of days the food lasted and the amount of alcohol that was consumed. Eating is communal, enjoyed and celebrated because that occasion is a ticket to another few days of survival, for who knows when the next meal will be!

While  Italy serves it’s coffee shots with grappa at seven in the morning, South India’s filter coffee is a daily rite of passage for half a billion people and although kahawa originated in this ancient continent, Africa does not need a caffeinated boost to get through its day.  And while you nurse your morning cuppa, I bid you buono apetito!