Musings on My Culture: Food

I love potatoes. If chicken is the most versatile of meat, potatoes are surely that of veggies. Potatoes are where we get fries, vodka and so many dishes. As Nisai says, if you can mess up potatoes, you truly cannot cook.

During Covid days, on one of our rounds visiting VLTFs on duty, they were about to eat boiled baby potatoes for lunch. We were just about to join them when they took away the potatoes and scoured around for cake and somehow procured a Myanmar product dry cake that had seen better days. They said boiled potatoes were too humble, please eat cake. I told them I love potatoes. They thought I was trying to assuage. I do enjoy good cake but I am also very picky over bakery items which means I don't like most cakes. I 95% like potatoes.

But they made me eat cake.

Dry cake.

And they ate baby boiled potatoes.

This incident keeps coming back to me because I believe it is a good illustration of how we think of our culture. In this instance, food. I don’t know if it is a colonial hangover and maybe a tiny bit of safed pujari, but very often, we trash our Truth in favour of Beautiful Lies.

There are not many food I point blank say I won’t eat. But there exists the century egg. There is very little possibility of anyone offering me it insistently, but this one I don’t think I will be able to handle. Not even if I have an affidavit from God saying I won't die from it, not even then! Actually it is not even a fear of death that prevents me from it; just… the ick factor. I don’t know if I can say that in today’s world but that. Even so, the Chinese celebrate it, even though I am so sure a lot of foreigners would have told them this was icky. I am pretty sure they just kept celebrating it and now the world thinks very highly of it. One of the food on food adventurer’s bucket lists!

In Mizoram, my main problem is with sachek. Mostly because some people like to not clean the intestines or gut lining very much for the added umami flavor, apparently. A lot of places serve it with internal poop. So ya, little hard to swallow. That and the meat of animals I’ve ever had as a pet – dog, cat, duck, turtle, the usual.

I believe that when we learn to appreciate our own, (as we are learning to, I think!), our culture will be appreciated by others as well. Because it is very unlikely that anyone else will appreciate it for us. Or above us. Be more hygienic, definitely, but bring on the Mizo food. It might be nice if we don’t reduce Mizo cuisine to ‘plain boil’ while we’re at it, by the by. 

Next topic, for sure!