In a place like Mumbai, home to Indians from across the country, people come together through professional and social connections to eat in places like Bombay Canteen, where the context of comfort (food I am familiar with) and difference (food that is unusual to me) sparks conversations between diners. Memories are shared and discussed, and people get to know each other a little better, all through sharing a meal. Building understanding of others helps us feel more at ease, more comfortable with each other. The excitement and anticipation of new food experiences can also cause feelings of anxiety: Will I like the food? Will I know how to eat it the right way? What if I do not like the taste? This can prevent some people from trying new things. Stimulating nostalgia can inspire people to explore cuisines that they may never have otherwise discovered.
This Thing Called Nostalgia
Nostalgia is hardwired into us. It is a complex emotion and a potent attractor because it makes us feel good about ourselves and others. Nostalgia can build feelings of belonging and affiliation with others to create stronger social connectedness. Entertaining nostalgic thoughts or telling nostalgic stories can reduce anxiety, increase feelings of being loved and protected, inspire generosity towards others, and help us deal with transitions. Feeling nostalgic generates positive memories and recollections of past times when we felt loved, comforted, protected, or connected with others, and the feeling is easily triggered by smells, sights, sounds, and tastes. As adults, we commonly look back to our childhoods with longing as a time when we were relatively carefree because adults looked after us, including preparing food for us, making food a particularly powerful stimulator of nostalgia. Nostalgia is strongly intertwined with whatever/wherever we consider as ‘home’.
[The coming year] will see nostalgic diners . . . ordering food [ghar-ka khana] that reminds them of their own[home food] more often than ever before.
Nostalgia for food can be individual and related to food that is specific to a home or more widely shared around the food of a community or region. It can also be more pan-Indian, generated by nationally available commercial food products refashioned into contemporary dishes. During my research, I ate Parle-G cheesecake, a play on the common childhood experience of eating these biscuits with milk; deep-fried 5 Star chocolate bars; and Bourbon biscuits in cake, ice-cream, and milkshakes. In the very contemporary Comorin restaurant in Gurugram, cheeni malai toast, an upgraded version of cream on toast sprinkled with sugar, a beloved childhood snack of many grown-up Indians, is one of the most-ordered items.
Urban Tension
If nostalgia is a significant factor influencing the trend toward regional food in restaurants and other commercial food products, then what is creating the impulse towards nostalgia? The answer is multifaceted, but urbanization plays a significant role.
The disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection to home. I longed for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from the throbbing Bombay metropolis.
People migrating into or between India’s metros face being distanced or even dislocated from their origins, moving away from extended families into more individualistic living situations: batching with friends, residing alone, or in smaller nuclear families. The opportunities of urban living are varied and exciting—work, money, and better educational and professional opportunities are usually the driving forces behind a move to a big city. Once there, one might also enjoy greater social freedom, meeting and mixing with people from a wider range of backgrounds. A big city affords more anonymity, and one can try new food without their grandmother knowing of it and reading eternal doom into the act or enjoy an alcoholic drink in a bar and not have to hide the fact: It can be an exciting and liberating process. On the other hand, moving to a metro can evoke uncertainties: ‘Where will I live?’ ‘Will I be safe?’‘What will I eat?’ ‘What sort of people will be around me?’The process can be destabilizing, at least for a time. It is an irony of human psychology that feeling stable helps us make changes. Nostalgia can help people feel connected to the roots of their identity; the sense of security engendered by feeling this connection can provide a stable foundation to be more able to cope with change.
Food stands in as a potent signifier of connection with a place ‘back there’.
We go to a restaurant; we find a dish that reminds us of home or a happy past situation; we eat it; it lifts our spirits; we are reminded of love or connection, or we feel self-assured; it soothes us in our urban disorientation. If we share this food with others, it can help build connectedness and cement social bonds, enhancing our sense of belonging. Life in the city begins to look good: We have satiated our appetite for physical and emotional nourishment.
According to writer Anoothi Vishal, the protracted pandemic lockdowns of 2020–21 spurred a ‘surge in interest in traditional foods and long-forgotten recipes that perhaps give us a sense of rootedness at a time when all certainties are crumbling away’.15 During this time, people around the world re-familiarized themselves with their kitchens, taking the time to cook from scratch—to which the international craze for baking sourdough bread attests—and favouring so-called ‘comfort food’. Indians were no different: Digging out old family recipes, ‘deriving pleasure in the simple things . . . going back to their roots, recalling their childhood favourites, re-creating these in their kitchens . . .And, most importantly, eating meals together as a family’,16i.e., seeking out the experience of connectedness and safety. If, as predicted, COVID-19 permanently changes our working lives with fewer people working from central-city-based offices, then India’s urbanization might slow down, and the turn towards nostalgia might dissipate, although it is unlikely to go away. In fact, nostalgia around food could heighten because in adjusting to the post-COVID world many of us will need to come to terms with a sense of loss of life as we knew it, and perhaps it might also ease the disfranchisement of a future with far less human contact in it.
As we willingly participate in the elimination of a broader range of interpersonal interactions from our lives in favour of virtual transactions, such as online meal delivery and food shopping (see Chapters 2 and 3), many of us will start to miss the seemingly trifling human interactions with restaurant staff, retail assistants, or the man who used to bring his fruit cart to our door each morning. Some people can engage with food in a purely transactional way, they do because it is necessary and take little pleasure in it (I can’t imagine how that is possible!), but for many of us, food is intertwined with our feelings, which is why nostalgia is so powerful.
This excerpt from Eating the Present, Tasting the Future by Charmaine O’Brien has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.