AT A MARKET GARBAGE DUMP: The poor scrounge for something not-so-rotten to fix their daily need of food for sustenance to live! The countries urban metros are full of obse consumers who think nothing of wasting or dumping food…

By Tara Narayan

I SEE it all around me, so much food going waste on tables and in homes, and eateries and restaurants. The rich stuff their refrigerators with food and live off it for days on end, heating it up in their fancy microwaves, little realizing that food heated up at such temperatures results in dead food or nuclearized food in this case offering no nutrition values …pasta, biryani, curries, meats, confectionaries, cheeses, butters, etcetera. How many times may one heat them up in a microwave, I have a friend who keeps heating up a cup of tea half-a-dozen times to drink it hot! Madness.
One may tell the folk who come and go doing our domestic jobs to take leftover food but you know some of these smart humble folk don’t want the food we highly Westernized people eat…except perhaps for the odd slice of birthday cake they eat reluctantly! You’d think that with the price hikes it would be more cost effective to do simple nutritious meals at home but for the working class it’s easier sometimes to invest in half do at home, half buy home from an eatery on the way home or order home courtesy Swiggy and Zomato – the ever faithful delivery people, even though sometimes between phone order call and delivery one may not even know from where the food we have ordered comes from…oftentimes the fancy “cloud kitchen” is a small, sleazy, dirty kitchen hole somewhere! Do our FDA higher ups ever check out these “cloud kitchens” of the many home food delivery services good, bad and ugly? Most of them delivery in some deadly plasticware which contributes to the horrendous killer garbage we are a party to so nonchalantly, laughing off the seriousness constantly. No will to ban plastics in the food industry from bottom to top (although at the top with the five-star hospitality kitchen deliveries it is not so bad, I know the Marriott and Taj kitchens are scrupulously eco-friendly in all they ways it is possible…
Sometimes I wonder why there are no felicitations for those food businesses which do real conscientious and conscious eco-friendly food services upper crust and lower crust! I mean is there anyone even offering a 5% discount on billing if a customer takes his/her own dibba while buying food from out? As in you help us make a saving, we pass it on to you, you patronize us more! Conscientious foodies who buy food home all the time make a note of this and are happy to take their own choice of dibba to recycle or they buy from those whose whose packaging is eco-friendly. I remember while growing up street side snacks always came wrapped in banana leaves or jackfruit leaves or other leaves very ingeniously pinned up into containers with itsy bitsy twigs!

DISCOVER CAFÉ BANGALORE IN PANAJI!

RECENTLY, my friend Nina Figueiredo introduced me to the newly opened small south India food outlet called Café Bangalore (down Menezes Braganca Road, somewhat opposite Govinda building down town Panaji), she had actually bought me some “set dosa” or rice batter pancakes as she called them. I found these flavorful (more so than those made totally of rice flour, udid dal-rice combo usually gives better flavour) and asked her where she got them from. Café Bangalore! Hell’s bells, another new foodie outlet in Panaji, I exclaimed and she grinned, “But this one is a small standing room only cafeteria, you find too many women here…usually I see men crowding the place for morning breakfast!”
I had to see this place especially since south Indian breakfasts are rated more health-conscious than other Indian breakfasts! Who says? Nina F says and so do I, considering idly/dosa batters are basically fermented and have probiotic values…anyway, no arguments here, I read Café Bangalore’s menu and fell for it. After I’m an idli-medhuvada addict providing I can find the quality version! The Café Bangalore menu listed up right there at the café read “idly” (double idly, Rs40), “uddin vada” (the savoury methuvada, hard to find good version, single Rs30)… “pody idly,” “rava idly,” “upma,” “kesarbath,” “poori saagu,” buns, mirchi bhajji, curd vada, kaali dosa – this is what south Indian food lovers generally know as “set dosa.”
I particularly liked the set dosa or kaali dosa, very flavorful three discs to a helping with very generous chutney and sambar portions or the flavorful “saggu” if you ask! The dosa range too is here – plain, ghee masala, onion or “open butter masala dosa” and the familiar mouth-watering rice range from lemon rice to bisi bele bath to pongal to tomato bath and veg pulao. What’s chow chow bhat? Must find out, I’ve been looking for the translucently green sour chow chow pear-styled veggie for some time now in the market and can’t find it.
Apparently chow chow should be sliced and boiled and heart in trouble patients drink the water for good things to happen. But to stay with this Café Bangalore, the south Indian filter coffee is the best part of it and I think I can around here on a rainy dawn (they open at 7.30am I’m told) just to linger over my favourite coffee! Sorry, there’s really no place here to sit or squat, very tight place, crowding over now since its fame is spreading…I don’t know how owner Ajay Chandrashekar is going to sustain it when his fare gets too popular!
At the moment everything is quality conscious and the chutneys, sambar and saagu accompaniments are wholesomely delicious and long may they remain so, and my usual wish, may they never become so spiced up with red chilli that I don’t feel like touching them ever again! Remember originally there were chillies in India, chilli peppers were brought all the way from the New World of America to India by the Portuguese colonizers of Europe, and we Indians think we have patent rights on chillies! They’re native to Mexico I think but they may as well be native to Goa and India now…anyway, before the chillies came we only had black pepper and south Indian dishes featured black pepper to spice up a recipe – back pepper is the “black gold” which the adventuring Arabs and European traders came for in the beginning before they eyed the wealth of their future colonies for riches in the name of their religion! Religion has been such a good excuse to convert or kill and from the looks of this religious chauvinisms and terrorism hasn’t ended in our contemporary world.
This is to say if it’s south Indian please use a bit of black pepper please in ven pongal, avial, the various stews and saagu…then there is pepper/tomato/lemon/pineapple rasam which I was looking for one rain evening at one of the Fidalgo enclave of restaurants, especially at Sweet Basil where the menu has undergone a change and now they offering more veggie stew with the appam and have added such things as …for some reason I’ve taken a fancy to while away time at the Fidalgo lobby to catch up with the news with the newspapers here or the large live screen put up here, they should screen classical old films too with prior intimation to their in house guests! I can always pretend I have a guest staying there and go watch…(sigh)…not likely really. Still the monsoon rains are great time to catch up with some films of old if there’s time left over from domestic chores and health issues catching up in the autumn turning into winter years of life prematurely or so to speak.
This is to say if you’ve got a yen for south Indian Tamilian fare go check out chow chow bhat and kaali dosa at Café Bangalore in Panaji now! Better to buy and eat in peace somewhere else instead of standing and eating, I can never stand and eat. It’s insulting food and I’m reminded of a grandmother who respected food so much when she finished her stainless thali was polished clean, we laughed that it didn’t need to be washed! She would pour buttermilk in the thali after a meal, swish it in the thali and drink up…while we children said “Yuk!”
And now I copy her and do the same thing at home and remember her with tears in my eyes, she came from another place altogether and no matter how rich her sons got, she made sure all daughters-in-law wasted no food, only what could be eaten was made, no leftovers please if you didn’t want to hear any sharp words from her. My foi,l who was one of the daughters-in-law, may mutter under her breath about the “boodi” but dared not say a word back in self-defence, those days have gone. Let us bring back respect for food, please!