THE FISH, THE FOOD CART, THE OFFAL AND THE GUT’S MEMORIES

The old man and the fish

When I was a child, I travelled home from school on noisy, crowded buses, filled with raging passengers, impatient conductors and led by oblivious drivers. As you can imagine, these are spaces where fellow-feeling is rare. The other human is only either an obstacle or a competitor for that occasional empty seat. In a conflict-ridden microcosm of humanity, it can happen that sometimes the only possible connecting factor is collective animosity. 

I saw this, one evening. It was the usual crowded bus. Unusually, I had a seat. Somewhere along the way, everyone began to be conscious of a smell that travelled with us. It was soon established to be coming from somewhere within the bus. It was the smell of either dried fish or fish on the edge of decay. Whichever it was, it couldn’t be avoided. It was in the air. It was everywhere. There was a rumble of discontent, some arguing with the conductor, and eventually it was traced back to an old man who was carrying a bag of fish home.

Then there was a lot of noise. The conductor shouted at the man for presuming to bring atmosphere-redefining food onto the bus. There was a general glow of righteous indignation from everyone else. Then the old man was kicked off the bus. I have the clearest memory of seeing him go silently down the steps. A moment of defeat.

As a child, I had one thought. But it was his food.

Like every other middle-class Indian and like every other passenger on that bus, I had been taught to approach food as a sacred entity that must be held onto and eaten for dear life because life itself was so very perishable and food even more so. It is strange that this lesson did not translate to other people’s food. I don’t know if that is a genuine blindness or a temporary hysterical blindness, fed by a spectacularly unrighteous indignation.

A diet of meditation

Some time back, a friend told me about a new diet she was trying. The rules were mutable. She had to weigh her food before each meal. There were things to be given up, but they didn’t follow a pattern. Once, it was salt. Salt? I said. Why? There was no specific reason. That’s not a diet, I said. That’s a meditation.

Recently, I found myself in a state of being where I couldn’t eat almost anything. I lived on a diet of oats and buckwheat, bananas and the occasional boiled carrots, for the initial couple of weeks. I have never been a fan of porridge, and there are a thousand things I miss, all the time, every day. It’s not hunger. I did not go hungry. I ate five meals a day. I just felt a muting of the senses. 

There was, to me, only one way to do this. Because I can only do one thing at a time. When I sat in front of the oat porridge I had detested through my childhood, I couldn’t look away. Instead, I decided to meditate on it. That simply meant that I did nothing else, for twenty minutes, besides chew my food very very carefully, and swallow. I ate alone, I looked out of the window into the garden, but I didn’t really see anything. One day, I realised that it made no sense to add salt anymore. Nothing very drastic happened when I stopped using salt. I was eating to eat.

After a couple of weeks, I started adding more things. Not because I had recovered, precisely. I still struggled with what should be an almost invisible process – digestion. I just felt that I had done enough meditation.

During this time, I watched a lot of youtube videos about food. I didn’t look for food I was missing, food I had eaten or food that I was fantasising about. I was looking for something, though.

Findings

I found a video about the making of haggis. There are many recipes for haggis, but in this video it is made with lamb lungs and beef fat, processed together, cooked, spiced, mixed with oatmeal, stuffed into intestine and then cooked again. The most wonderful thing about the video is a montage of Scots, reading Robert Burns’ Address to a Haggis. How dramatically they sneered at the eaters of ragout, olio and fricassee. How joyously the earth shook under the tread of the eaters of haggis. 

Then I watched a long stretch of the cheapest food carts in India. What can you get for 20 Rs? A full meal, samosas, chaat. What can you get for 10? A full meal, samosas, chaat. I could concentrate up to 50 Rs. These were all things that were absolutely off my list of eatable things. Masses of spices went into everything from Maggi noodles to cheese sandwiches. Breakfasts; an elaborate array of everything from puris to bread-omelette. 

The making of cow-foot jelly in Mongolia. She puts them to boil, for an hour and a half, in a pressure cooker. In the meantime, she boils carrots – the slowest vegetable. When they’re almost cooked, she cuts them into tiny pieces, along with paprika, garlic. When the cows’ feet are boiled, she takes them out and cuts the meat and fat off the bone. They are very careful to remove every last piece of meat. The bones wiped clean, are finally tossed. Thin strips are collected, of what is almost pure gelatine. Collagen. They boil everything together – the vegetables and the meat, with salt, pepper, bay leaves. Then it is poured into a tray and refrigerated overnight. In the morning they have a solid jelly. It is cut into slices and served on a piece of bread.

Somewhere around the time of Mongolia, I started to understand what I was looking for. Do you have offal? The woman asks at the store. Yes, we have all kinds. We’ll take everything, she says. Stomach, kidneys, heart, liver, lung. Later, I watched her cook everything. Deftly stuffing intestines with meat, blood, heart, liver, herbs. Puddings and sausages, a whole feast of bits and bobs and tubes and parts. I was mesmerised by the deftness and grace with which she stuffed sausages and cut meat. Later, every version of everything is eaten by the whole family, with much appreciation.

The chef of the day says that these are traditional recipes, which should not be lost, because they are a heritage. They should not be lost because these are foods of survival. I thought to myself. I would’ve loved to be at that party, shared in that meal. But the most important thing about it, to me, was that this was a lesson in achieving food. A way of consuming everything. Unlike life, this teacher shows you how to do it with aplomb, with dignity, and without fear. Unlike many of the people I had seen growing up, she was not afraid of her food.

Memories of departure

There are moments when you temporarily take flight. You take a solo journey into the air. You are no longer, precisely, in the world. The time of porridges was like that for me. I still eat them, very often, but for a brief period, I was blinded to everything else. I had curiosity but no desire.

I had a much less intense and smaller departure when I was a child. I think that this happens to all children for whom food is not an occasional event. I looked at a bone on my empty plate. Bone, I said to myself. Leg. Muscle. Body. Head. Stomach, kidneys, heart, liver, lung. It was the first time I realised that my food was not a thing. It was a being. If it happens to most kids, there is a choice to be made, for all of them. Some turn vegetarian, eventually vegan, for a period. Some stay vegetarian all their lives. Some don’t.

I took a little time. I didn’t turn vegetarian, or call myself one. I just couldn’t eat meat, not even fish, which I’d loved. I don’t remember how long this lasted. Maybe a week. Maybe two weeks, two months, or half a year. All meat became an imaginative exercise. I kept feeling my own legs, bones, muscle. After awhile, I could eat meat again, with a lot of appetite and relish, but the act of eating it had changed for me. It didn’t haunt me, but it stayed with me. What is seen cannot be unseen.

Choices

It’s an understatement so vast that you could more or less classify it as a lie, to say there are two paths to choose from, at the moment of return. There is actually a mass, a web, a labyrinth, to navigate, when you recognise that a sentient being had to die to arrive on your plate. You could:

1. Hierarchise life. Tell yourself that some beings are more worthy of life than others. 
2. Categorise life. Tell yourself that some beings are sentient and others are not.
3. Forget. This is probably the hardest thing to do.
4. Ask religion for guidance. Tell yourself that some beings are sacred, some are not. Some combinations of food are allowable and some are not. Some animals are taboo, others are acceptable, within the realm of your body.
5. Create a moral hierarchy. Tell yourself that it is both morally acceptable and good to consume and aid the death of some living beings, and that it is immoral to consume others. And then sit in judgment, because why not?
6. Make idiosyncratic choices. Choose some lives, not others, without moral guidance, but going by the feeling at the moment. 

I made idiosyncratic choices. I could bear some things and not others. In a space of abundance, you have access to closeness. You can grow your own food, and participate in the life and the death of the beings that arrive on your plate. You can be conscious of how much has to die for something to be grown. You can be conscious of how much has to die for the space you take in this world to be taken. 

In a time of absolute necessity, you eat anything. I turned up my nose at processed foods, especially meats, for years. But in a time of necessity, I ate the cheapest food that offered the closest resemblance to a complete meal. I didn’t turn up my nose at it while I was eating it, because at that time you don’t. I don’t look back in revulsion, though when I tried to eat the same meal a year later, I couldn’t. I look back in interest, at how your tastebuds and your sensibilities can adapt.

The most useful choice, I have found, over the years, is to not forget. Something – many things – had to die for my being able to eat, on every occasion, every day, even the days when I lived on oats and buckwheat. Sensitivity is a double-edged sword, and sometimes it has the potential to become a weapon and be used for an act of violence. Possibly, the closest thing to a two-way choice-path, is choosing between remembering and forgetting. 

To not cut yourself and someone else, maybe the best thing to do with a double-edged sword is accommodate it. Sit down to a meal with it sheathed at the side of your hip. Know what you are doing, and that something had to die for you to be able to eat, today, everyday, every time.

The hierarchy of life

The tendency to categorise lives into worthy and unworthy goes well beyond food. But within the realm of food itself, it’s not entirely honest. Sentient living largely means recognisably sentient. Plants don’t run up to us wagging their tails, so their sentience is devalued or denied. It’s especially hard for most people to love insects, which are so numerous and so much a threat to us, in spite of their relative lack of size. 

Last year, someone told me, our lives are not important. We’re like ants, and we’re very likely to be crushed. I thought, immediately, of a game I played when I was a child – Trap the Ant. You either used a construction made out of your pen, notebook and textbook, or your hands, to trap a passing ant. In complete defiance of the hierarchy of worthy life, the ant always tried to escape. It didn’t, ever, freeze in its tracks and say oh great sentient being, take my unworthy life. The ant’s life is very important, I thought to myself. To the ant. 

The map of living, the map of eating, the map of how to navigate the world, as I can recognise in myself, is a lot about personhood, and also a lot about whimsy. Why did you kill these ants? Why did you let these ants go? Because they’d found this amazing store of food and they looked so triumphant in their march. Why can you eat a goat and not a chicken? Because I like to see goats running around but I look away when I see a chicken in a coop. There is no moral hierarchy in this choice. The chicken’s life is not of greater value than that of a goat. I just can’t bear to look at a coop.

Recovering, recovery

Lately, I have been trying to eat things that I am sensitive to, that I am allergic to, in small quantities. There are consequences, as there are for everything. But I tell myself that it is worth it.

Lately, I have been thinking about the old man getting off the bus with his bag of fish. I see it over and over again in my mind. Public buses are not a space for collective action, in general. Crowded public buses are spaces of eternal individual conflict, vicious nudging, shoving, battling for seats, falling over at traffic signals and stops, abuse. This might seem like a moment of collective action – kicking an old man and his food off the bus. It definitely generated a temporary ceasefire in other hostilities. What it actually was, though, was a moment of defeat. A loss for humanity. They say that you don’t have to win everything, but there are occasions when you simply must not lose. 

The humane action, the true collective action, at the moment when the first whiff of fish arose, would’ve been for the bus passengers, driver and conductor to shut the fuck up. This is not hard to do.

I think about this while I gird my loins to eat one more new thing. Food is sacred – this was one childhood lesson that was absolutely true. But if food is sacred then everyone’s food is sacred, and the real heretic is the person who pulls their double-edged sword out at the moment when they should shut the fuck up.

All those idiosyncratic choices

Around the time when the list of things I could eat started shrinking drastically, a lot of food carts had come up on the streets, as restaurants became increasingly unaffordable and unreliable. In the evenings, I watched the crowds gather, and sellers of other things like lit balloons and toys gravitated towards them. It looked like a carnival and I wanted, so badly, to join in, but there was nothing there on my list.

A small restaurant serving Italian food came up on the same street, on the eve of a new wave of curfews. They put chairs and tables out on the street. I love restaurants and cafes that put their chairs and tables out on the street, I love new restaurants with their briefly enthusiastic staff. I watched this one turn more and more desolate, as the streets emptied out. One day, a few of the employees blocked my path when I passed by. I knew what they were doing – making an offer – discounts, freebies. I said an automatic no, because at this time I couldn’t even be faced with images of food I couldn’t eat.

Very close to the street where I live, there is a park. Outside the park, at its corner, is a woman with a cart selling ready-to-eat meals. The kind of cart that would or could be in a youtube video. She is unusually popular – people turn up on bikes around lunchtime, sit at the park wall, under the trees, and the smell of fish frying fills the air. Watching the crowds wane, and one day seeing her sitting alone under the trees, with her husband, eating lunch, I wanted, again, to try, to have this meal that I couldn’t eat.

Somewhere along the way, during this time of meditating about food, I saw so clearly how the other part of sacredness is connection. I have never been patient with illness and I have been especially impatient with this one. Being allergic to almost everything is not just expensive. It takes something from you. I think about all the idiosyncratic choices I might have made, in this time. To sit at the restaurant. To try the fish fry at the cart. I get the feeling that by losing the ability to make those choices at all, I lost a bit of humanity.

The feast of offal. The occasional overspiced meal. The not-necessarily-good meal in a nice spot. The shared meal. All these things have circled through my mind, in the times when I had nothing to do but think, which was a lot. I have been in a hurry to recover, to get back to a level that I think of as functioning. I want, more than anything, to make those choices that might seem like pure whimsy but also kept me connected to the world.

The most humane thing, I told myself, the most useful thing I could do for the world now, is to regain the ability to eat – foods of scarcity, foods of survival, foods of connection, foods of random desire, because really, all of these things form part of that whole of sacredness.

Author: Priyadarshini John