Decolonising our palette
Food is not just food, it is who we are.
Over the four years that I’ve been away at university, I’ve had to construct new traditions for myself to stay connected to my culture and my family. One of my favourites is one I share with my mother. Every summer, I, somehow, end up on a flight back to Pakistan that will land early in the morning. And every summer my mother will pick me up from the airport and take me to have halwa puri for breakfast as my “first meal back home.”
For those who don’t know, halwa puri is a traditional breakfast, served in both Indian and Pakistani households, consumed to celebrate festivities, religious events, or simply the arrival of the weekend. The significance of the dish isn’t just the food itself, but rather of the ritual of sharing it with others. Usually halwa puri is served in large portions, often shared among small groups of people.
I have it every Eid, whenever my relatives come to visit, and sometimes on my birthday. Now, my mother and I use it to celebrate my homecoming.
Many dishes around the world are similar; significant both in their ingredients and their rituals—the cooking, the presentation, and its consumption. And while we’ve reached a point where it is acceptable to eat other cuisines, we have yet to embrace their rituals. How can we claim to decolonise the food we eat, when we keep divorcing it from its context—when we keep rejecting the culture surrounding it?
Food is not just food. It is culture. It is tradition. Passed down from generation to generation, stories in the shape of fruit, meat, and vegetables. It is an interactive history, allowing you to mold it further.
As important as the ingredients are in the process of preparing food, the people present in the kitchen, the dishes used, who you eat it with, and even when you eat, matters.
Let me be entirely clear, there is nothing wrong with altering a recipe, or swapping ingredients as needed. Protecting culture doesn’t mean isolating it from people who can’t experience it exactly as is. But, there is a specific disrespect that comes with disregarding the way a meal must be experienced for the sake of conforming to the standards put in place by colonisers and their institutions.
In many countries across the world—particularly in Asia and Africa—it is typical to eat food with your hands. Like nsima, or palov. All classified by UNESCO as artifacts of cultural heritage and all traditionally eaten by hands. Yet most restaurants, when adapting the cuisines, style dishes to be eaten with a knife and fork instead, and many people consider it odd to eat with their hands in public.
On social media, discussions of food etiquette loom around us—often determining that it is proper to eat with utensils, rather than using your hands directly. While this may not be inherently bad, it does push forward a specific narrative: that there is a polite and impolite way to eat. It echoes the way colonisers diminish and destroy the cultures of the colonised, by painting them as “savages” and “uncivilised,” rather than appreciating their beauty.
There are other ways we divorce food from its traditions, too. Many dishes come in large servings to foster a sense of community, yet fine dining restaurants enforce minimalist single servings. Traditional dishes meant to foster health and strength in those who eat them are discarded for containing “too many calories,” replaced with protein powders and the diets of the day. Our dishes, once made with love, joy, and effort, are now disregarded as nothing but sustenance.
It is clear that for many, our food is only appetising when it can be capitalised upon. Worth eating but never worth properly having. When people talk about decolonising their palette or expanding the culinary worldview, their attempts—no matter how genuine—fall short as long as food, like the rest of our cultures, is only seen as valuable in its marketability rather than its inherent wonder. Even today, we cannot bring ourselves to try what the world offers without first forcing it to fit into Western conventions.
If you truly want to decolonise your palette, try a home cooked meal. Go over to a friend’s house and eat a cultural dish, the way their parents make it. Sit around a table and talk, get messy, have fun. Help someone cook a meal they haven’t had since childhood. Try that dish that was tainted to look “too spicy,” or “too sour,” or “too sweet,” or simply, “too much.” Swap out your take out for the family-owned restaurants, and say hello to the owners, the chefs, and their staff. Ask them about their food, their history, their culture.
Food is not just food. It is the love and the community we carry with us from our homelands, even as we leave the physical lands behind. It is our backward glances and daydreams come to life. Our food isn’t meant to be capitalised on or treated as a trend, but meant to be shared with respect and regard to anyone wanting to experience it.
Do your due diligence, and take the experience, not just the fare.
