I remember this conversation vividly. We were sipping coffee at the university’s museum cafe and as my thesis advisor, Avishek was giving me feedback on my work.
It’s been almost four years and dhoop has been contributing to food literature in India while ever explicitly talking about hunger. How can we, a group of 2-3 people sitting in cities, talk about hunger and the systems that create it without talking about our place in the system and privilege it carries? How can we talk about hunger when it challenges us in ways we might not be ready for? And most importantly, how can we talk about lack of food, when the world we (the people who work in food media) exist in thrives on the availability, abundance and assumption of unlimited food. I heard what my professor told me, but I never truly understood it before today.
We hear about hunger in the context of war-like situations, conflict-ridden countries and historically marginalised communities – as if it exists in some forlorn past, as if things are different now, as if things are better now. All of us who interact with food by way of scholarship, media, journalism or even pay someone to cook daily meals know that food is deeply entangled with power. And we know the lack of it is in fact systemic and created. The removal of eggs from midday meals across West Bengal, the reductive One District, One Cuisine list, the complicated politics of MNREGA, the lack of food safety standards. None of it just HAPPENS.
Today marks the 22nd day of Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike. Hunger is primal – no one can deny it. Pooja Pilai, a senior assistant editor at The Indian Express, in her piece titled ‘We’re no longer hungry. Is that why Sonam Wangchuk’s fast doesn’t move us?’, mentions, “The hunger strike has always occupied a peculiar place in the political imagination of the subcontinent, deriving its power from a simple proposition: That the deliberate infliction of suffering upon oneself can awaken the conscience of another….A hunger strike, then, is not simply the refusal of food. It is the deliberate transformation of one’s own body into an argument. Unlike almost every other form of protest, it threatens no one except the protester and its power lies entirely in the hope that another human being will find such suffering impossible to ignore.”
As a food publication, one would assume that hunger is the opposite of what food media usually covers, but really hunger is so much more about food than food itself. The absence of food is the most pertinent way to talk about food because the importance of food, the way systems are designed, the way the world works, the way capitalism works, how humans function and feel and react is revealed most truthfully by the absence of food.
Things bother us. It bothers us when mangoes are bright yellow by chemicals and ripening agents, it bothers us when a protein company advertises “no sugar added” on its packaging, it bothers us when the best things we grow are exported, it bothers us when our favourite sev puri wala is displaced, it bothers us when a beverage is the price of a meal. And it should.
For those of us, who switch to become occasional non-producer whistleblowers, in the food industry, our questions and concerns should be directed straight at the seat of power. From where the ropes are played with.. the price of onions, the felling of trees for highway expansion, the rights of street vendors, the lack of protein in our diets… a big stakeholder in all of these systems is whoever is in power and collective effort will help us to find answers and solutions. If one question is not acknowledged, then it becomes a pattern for other questions to also be left unheeded. The seed of indifference is best uprooted.
Disclaimer:
Dhoop is an independent food publication.
I am not a journalist, just an editor of a food magazine from India.
Please consume reportage on what’s happening in the country via publications like Newslaundry and Newminute. Some independent journalists like Meghnad, Ravish Kumar are also using their platforms.
