The Feels This Week: Appetite & Consumption
In this edition of ’The Feels This Week’ posts, I have a clear map of the journey of where my mind found inspiration and answers. This year, I’m finding myself growing not so much in terms of having new experiences but by being able to experience them in new ways.
River of Smoke – Ibis Trilogy Book 2 by Amitav Ghosh
I read Ibis Book 1 Sea of Poppies, fascinated but untrusting. It made me feel over-stuffed, like I had partaken of food that was too much for my tiny stomach. It was hard to trust when I rely so much on my ability to be drawn to consume only what is good for me. But framing my last post, helps me put this in context. I am reading to expand my capacity and this requires patience.
I’m reading the Ibis trilogy as part of a challenge for a book club. In this time, I’ve also had many feelings and detours about my involvement with book clubs, how I engage with people, what reading means to me (as opposed to others). And in the wee hours of a morning, on a racing train of thoughts, I found peace. I read for adventures like this. For ideas that feel like toys to my playful mind. For windows opening up where I assumed walls or vacuum.
I gave myself a break before Book 2 River of Smoke. About a month and seeking lighter reads. I felt disappointed by most of what I picked up in that time. Perhaps that says my capacity will not so easily shrink now and is dissatisfied by paltry bites.
This week I’ve been pushing myself to read. Trying different spaces to read in. A park gazebo while it pours and dogs and people mark their territory with noise and smells. A hospital waiting room loud with the sounds of anxiety singing as entitlement and toxic masculinity. All of it was echoed in the threads of this book set in the nineteenth century and spanning Hong Kong, China, Macau and the western coast of India.
I realised that this book is made heavier because it’s full of narration. There is very little dialogue or action ongoing in the present of the book. That makes it more like a history textbook than an immersive fiction novel that I could get lost in. No matter, that doesn’t make it a bad book. It just makes it a book that takes some learning to enjoy and opens windows to other learning.
If you pick up this series to read, I’d suggest that you spread it out across several months (regardless of how quick a reader you are). And also give yourself time to digest what you’re reading. There are so many erased histories that show up in this book that you’d enjoy it a lot more if you let yourself fall down wormholes based on a single word or a passing character.
Did the song Funky Town have anything to do with the word fanqui (meaning foreign, says the book)? What happened to all the biracial people who were neither white nor black but some combination of Cantonese, Iranian, Bihari, Turkish, Tamilian, Egyptian and others? What makes a plant more or less integral to a culture, an economy, a geography? How do ships maintain community and crime policing through months of being adrift? Just some of the journeys that my mind has been taken down with the Ibis trilogy.
The Potato Eaters & The Irish Famine
If you’re noticing an appetite metaphor being overstretched, please bear with me. The hunger and food associations are large in my mind right now. You know how when you’ve been hungry for a very long time and you gorge too soon, you might feel a bit sick? That was the start of the Ibis trilogy with ‘Sea of Poppies’ for me, packed with historical nuance, laced with delicate irony and presented in overwhelming rich detail. It contained so many ideas I’ve been seeking insight and validation on – colonisation, capitalism, race. And it brought in aspects that I hadn’t articulated which are still somehow important to me – maritime voyages and India’s East.
If you’ve ever experienced this feeling (and I hope you haven’t because it means enduring prolonged deprivation first), you might recognise that after awhile, the body learns to adjust to what it is being fed. It acclimatises to eating and begins to enjoy digestion. That is Ibis book 2 ‘River of Smoke’ for me. Very specifically, chapter 5 which talks about botany and international trade. I’ll leave it at that to keep this spoiler-free. If you choose to read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts.
It brings me to the next stop in this train of thoughts. The Ibis trilogy is a saga of how British colonialism treated the whole world like a capitalist company. Each colony was thought of as a division to be nurtured solely for profit motive, set against another when convenient to pushing the topline and coldly shutting down operations, ethics and humanity be damned if that suited. Sea of Poppies begins at the the American abolishment of slavery, inciting the British to reroute their maritime trade into an opium industry in Asia. River of Smoke got me thinking about the connections between botany, commerce and politics.
Years ago, I had come across Van Gogh’s ‘The Potato Eaters’. I did not like it when I first saw it. It decipted such a gloomy, miserable scene, painted in morose colours. It was such a contrast from the vibrant yellows and blues of his more popular Sunflowers or even Starry Nights.
Ibis made me think of famines, including (because I’m Indian and cannot forget this), the one caused by Churchill in Bengal because he hoarded food stocks for military rations. That famine was not caused by natural events but by political greed and racism.
I wondered if the Irish famine, another I’ve heard of, had similar origins. And somehow The Potato Eaters appeared side-by-side with this thought in my head, as if illustrating the history of a humanity-caused starvation.
I looked up the history of this painting and of the Irish famine. This article showed up titled Reframed: Famine Depicted Through Art History. The article calls The Potato Eaters the most famous depiction of famine in art history. It also reveals that in the 1800s food was a particularly politicized issue in Western Europe. Apparently, vegetables grown underground were considered undignified for a rich person to consume.
Contrast that with the notions of purity and spiritual supremacy of vegetarianism in current day India. Earlier, I have examined the idea that the food we eat speaks of our economic class legacies. That people eat what they can afford and to judge them for this on moral merit is reprehensible. What about now when some of the descendents of those impoverished and exploited groups can afford vegetarian food? That question ignores how intergenerational trauma and exploitation embeds itself in cultures and becomes a part of our inherited identity.
The Ibis trilogy also looks at the bastard origins of many people and cultures worldover, due to the maritime trade. Of people formed by unions of transaction, loneliness and power between those who do not speak the same language, do not belong to the same class. What can be more brutally human than this? We all must consume and often, we are devouring each other, identity, history and culture as a whole.
Devdutt Pattanaik on The Seen And The Unseen Podcast with Amit Varma
I’m coming to think of the podcasts that I listen to, as books. I struggle with the audio medium for reasons all my own. But some podcasts really call to me and I realise it’s because they’re closest to books. Of course, I’d listen to them when I’m cooking. The familiar intellectual engagement keeps my nervous hands steady as they chop, peel and stir. And the grounding of food helps my anxious mind from spiralling.
99 percent Invisible is a clean, airy treatise on urban design. Khaandaan – The Bollywood Podcast is a comfort trip down nostalgia lane. Brown History Podcast and The Guilty Feminist appeal to my political tastes in different styles. Sentimental Garbage, Filmi Ladies and Book Chat fulfil my pop culture appetite in ways that Buzzfeed never did. And the podcast version of the Ibis trilogy for me has to be Amit Varma’s The Seen And The Unseen.
I’m yet to hear an episode of this podcast that I did not enjoy. Each one is several hours long and often broken into multiple episodes to fit the platform standards. So it’s a banquet to be partaken of, only rarely. In this installment I listened to 12 hours of conversation about mythologies across cultures, identity politics, growing up in Mumbai. But an idea that stood out for me was Devdutt Pattanaik’s premise that the entire Mahabharata was about consumption.
He would go on to explain the saga’s various events in terms of who consumed what and the consequences of these spanning multiple lifetimes (which forms the basis of the law of karma). It struck me when Devdutt Pattanaik spoke of vegetarians consuming that which cannot scream and thus being deprived of the ability to protest hurt in their next births. Amit Varma added an idea that he elaborates across his different episodes, of species genocide by vegetarians. If we are culpable for the destruction of what we eat, a meat-eater is only responsible for the death of one life while a vegetarian causes the destruction of multiple species (insects, bacteria, small organisms in addition to the plants themselves).
I generally avoid being ensnared in social moralities of food by choosing to eat alone and being flexible. I delight in breaking people’s cultural stereotyping of me.
“You’re South Indian so you must be vegetarian.” No, not all South Indians are vegetarians.
“Modern (unsanskari) women drink a lot.” No, I don’t enjoy alcohol.
“You must be wanting heavy meat every day, if you don’t go to temples.” No, I prefer a daily vegetarian diet and only eat non-vegetarian food on occasion.
But what of all the ways in which I consume other people’s self-esteem, their perceived place in the world? Even winning in the kind of mono-victory model of a single champion means consuming solo what could have been shared by all. We live in a world of dieting and starvation while famines are caused by food stocks rotting in warehouses of the powerful. Extend that metaphor to our spiritual self, our political self and our very identity. The mind boggles and the stomach, the greedy soul-traitor stomach, it still rumbles.
The Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi
Last week, I completed one of the sweet books of this year’s reading journey – The Chibineko Kitchen. It made me realise that I haven’t written a post about Food Fiction though it’s such an important aspect of my life and my reading journey. So my next post will be that.
For this post, a summary of my Goodreads review: It’s easy to compare this book to the more popular Before the Coffee Gets Cold. But I found that too slow-moving and boring where this one felt delightfully restrained and sublime. The Chibineko Kitchen is as much a character in this book as the people who come to it seeking solace.
It also faces the much more complicated matter of grief, the unmoorings of faith and identity when someone dies and bereavement rituals. Every meal discussed in the book is a ‘rememberance meal’, a ritual practiced to help people cope with missing someone. Each meal is also unique in its ingredients, history and context to the person requesting it. You realise that it’s also special to the hands that prepare and serve it.
This is the second book this year that I’m reading about grief. Maybe that is part of why this book and ‘The Collected Regrets of Clover’ spoke so much to me.
I am grieving the end of my life plan that I drew up when I was 17. I am recovering from a painful midlife crisis, double COVID and mental illness. And in all of this, I am healing from wounds accumulated over many decimations, dehumanisations and deaths. I am grieving the loss of who I used to be.
This meets with no sympathy. I am realising that I do not inspire empathy in anybody and even bare kindess, only rarely. Awe usually brought about by superficialities like appearance or as a result of other people’s projections seems to replace people’s desire to show me any empathy.
I’ve spent the last week in the hospital for a loved one. Age, recovery from mental illness and some of these ideas are giving me structures to navigate life as it shows up for me. We consume, we are consumed. Such is the cycle of life. It feels right to close a post about appetite & consumption with a rumination on gentle grief. Death after all, is the close of your consumption.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
If you liked this post, you may like my other posts about Food, which are not recipes or restaurant reviews. Here are two of my picks:
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