The other day, I had my annual Hamlet moment. It happened as I walked past a spot that used to be crowded with snack hawkers. Now there were perhaps just two vendors, with few customers in sight. It seemed as sad as a Shakespearean tragedy. But the moment I dug in my pockets for loose change, I felt the stirrings of comorbidity.
I kept walking, but repining I reverted, then changed my mind for the umpteenth time. Seeing a couple of youths enjoying, masks down, I gave in to my inherent herd mentality, praying for herd immunity, and... Shabash !
I forget exactly what it was — possibly a spicy liver roll. But after the exquisitely brief pleasure of having fast-food (it took me under seven minutes to gobble it down) again after seven long months, I worried for seven days that I might get Covid-19. I heard the clock of death ticklike Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale heart through the next 19 nights, had nightmares about eating 19 barbequed pangolins or 2kg of bat fritters in a Wuhan-style restaurant, though, as this goes to print, I’m still standing two inches taller than Elton John.
Years from now, the nexus between Chinese wet markets and foodies’ wet dreams may seem like a trifling conundrum, but, currently, I still know people who haven’t stepped out since March, not eaten food from outside, spending all day washing their hands. Was I foolishly putting myself in mortal danger or giving in to a wholesome urge to enjoy life again? What’s healthier: To go on existing indefinitely in a state of paranoia or redevelop an appetite for existence?
It’s worth remembering how, 111 years ago, MK Gandhi debated “whether the profession of a clerk or book-keeper is better or more respectable than that of a hawker. A hawker is an independent man. He has opportunity of studying human nature which a clerk slaving away for a few pounds per month can never have. A hawker is master of his own time. A clerk has practically no time he can call his own. A hawker, if he chooses, has opportunity for expansion of his intellect which a clerk cannot dream of.” But the drawback is of course that hawkers can’t claim paid holidays, employment security or minimum wage, and so need us for their day-to-day survival.
Food hawkers aren’t necessarily doom-bringers, because those that I’ve observed are stricter about wearing masks than common people I encounter. Of course, one might wish that a system like the Singaporean “hawker centres” were introduced here — food courts in malls or outdoorsy locations (some were “wet markets” formerly) with stringent hygiene standards, tidy dining areas where gourmets love to hog on satays and seafood soups, and the quality being uniformly fabulous. On the other hand, paying attention to where one snacks might help: Does the dish look like a petri dish?
Besides, although street food isn’t always the healthiest option, it can’t automatically be equated with junk food. Luxurious restaurants apart, where patrons peer into kitchens behind glass walls, vendors with pushcarts are among the few chefs that customers can see in action. Just how nutritious it can get is proved by the annual avarebele festival in Bengaluru’s iconic thindi beedi or “snack street” (at Sajjan Rao Circle) when even ice cream is made with Beantown’s favourite bean avarekai , which is harvested in winter. Around the year, stalls offer wholesome millet rotis, mini masala idlis known as paddus , and, of course, ubattus — sweet coconut-jaggery parathas.
Other safe street-eats of my home town include boiled peanuts, yummy corncobs roasted on live coals, nippattu buns stuffed with a type of masala vadas that make McAloo Tikki™ taste second-rate (some vendors provide baked nippattus rather than the deep-fried variety for the health-conscious snacker), aloo bun with curried potatoes from the nearest bakery counter, and typical fritters such as chilli bhajjis and potato bondas .
In India, whenever you unexpectedly feel hungry, your easiest choice is street food: Competitively priced, available at most hours, it’s what locals love to eat, it’s fresh. In Kolkata? Grab a kathi roll near New Market. Mumbai? First thing to do after alighting from the train is to head towards the vada pav stalls outside the station to get the yummiest pick-me-up of potato dumplings in a crusty bun. Delhi? Take the metro to Chawri Bazar and head up-street to Shyam Sweets, a kiosk dating back to the 1910s, for their legendary bedmi aloo (puffed lentil-flour breads with potato curry). They also sell hygienically vacuum-packaged food with long shelf-life for travellers to take home a taste of old Delhi and I always carry as much as I can (and gobble it up almost immediately). A visit to Shyam Sweets is best followed by a post-prandial stroll to the snacky alleys by the grand Jama Masjid mosque to fully appreciate Kebab City’s delights.
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In many other countries such as Taiwan and Turkey, too, roadside cuisine has reached the highest possible epicurean echelons.
In fact, the world over, travellers will encounter tantalising short-eats: Mezze in the Mediterranean area, tapas in Hispanic lands and, in the country of XXXL T-shirts, there’s even a saying that goes something like “when the president has a Philly cheesesteak sandwich, he proves that he’s one of the common people”. So, after visiting the White House in DC, I obviously had to take the Amtrak train across to Philadelphia and try out the most calorific “Born in the USA” snacky meal — this is a hashed steer steak with plenty of onion smothered in Italian cheese stuffed in a sub and preferably had at Pat’s (where it was invented in the 1930s). Bill Clinton, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra all sampled it there, and it’s the reason why cabbies are fatter in Philadelphia than elsewhere. Though personally speaking, I much preferred the po’boys of New Orleans, a related sandwich but stuffed with oysters. The scariest junk I’ve ever eaten was served at Whiz, a temple of junk-food horror in San Francisco — their corn dog is basically a hotdog coated in corn batter and deep-fried until it becomes lethal, a suicidal treat after which my left arm started tingling and I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. But it tasted almost as good, and is undoubtedly as harmful for humans as a Maggi-noodle paneer dosa in Bengaluru.
Although there’s pandemical panic around Chinese culinary culture, and even if it might be bad for my health, I badly miss the chou doufu or “stinky tofu” that’s been fermented until it trumps the most matured European cheese in terms of olfactory orgasms, then deep-fried in porky lard and served with a drizzle of garlic soy. If that’s not your scene, then the bao — as the name implies a Cantonese cousin of the Goan pao but, in China, we’re talking steamed pork-patty-buns stuffed with slurpy crab roe broth — should hit the gastric G-spot. The only things I found hard to digest on Chinese streets were skewered chicken sphincters and deep-fried scorpions, but at least I tried.
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Considering how price-sensitive we Indians are, it ought to be in our interest to revive the street-food trade. So what if it’s not the optimal fitness diet? One Bengaluru foodie friend asserted that the grubbier the grub, the tastier it is — decontaminated canteens can only serve tasteless nourishment. In the US, I asked a connoisseur why he loved corn dogs, and the expert retorted, “The point is that we’re not meant to live for ever. While we do our best to prolong our lives with medications, Mother Nature dishes up temptations that curtail our lifespans. Every species understands this, just look at lemmings, who don’t have to eat corn dogs to commit mass suicide.”
If one were to analyse this from a spiritual aspect, junk-food is dividable into junk (evil) and food (necessity): The necessary evil. After reaching that conclusion, I felt pretty much all right with my choice of relapsing to wayside cookery.
And now that the ₹4-lakh-crore-plus Indian F&B industry is finally rebooting, I am among the first diners at their doorstep. If gorging on hawked items didn’t kill me, surely old-fashioned hogging at Bengaluru’s classical cafés, such as Koshy’s, will only make me ‘haler’. Prem Koshy, please start deep-frying those potato smileys. And pile up that chopped liver on my toast. I’ll have fish biryani, too.
Zac O’Yeah is a part-time travel writer and part-time detective novelist;
Email: zacnet@email.com