Socio-economy of food

Published On: August 19, 2018 12:55 PM NPT By: Sarbagya Raj Kafle


Sarbagya Raj Kafle

Sarbagya Raj Kafle

The contributor for Republica.
news@myrepublica.com

Food stuff acquires a tremendous cultural signifying baggage based on who consumes or avoids it, for what reason, where and how

I remember the day when I was just 10 and was in the nearby pasture with my friends, mostly from Tamang family, herding our cows. Niraj, one of my friends, shouted with joy as if he spotted a hidden treasure behind a bush.  It was the serendipitous gems of creamy white puffy balls of countless mushroom studded on the green ground. He started plucking them up and filling the fold of his t-shirt end. I followed him and filled mine with those soft balls. Elated, I was anticipating a fresh delicious mushroom dish for the dinner. On the way home with my cows, one of my neighboring aunts inquired about the big bulging end of my shirt. With a sense of pride, I showed her the content and expected a compliment. Her frown and remark—“How dare you bring mushroom being a kid of Brahmin?” made me crestfallen. 

Her words injected a shearing sense of guilt and raised a big question mark on my Brahmanness. For immediate course correction from my imminent ‘fall,’ I freed the tightly held end of my shirt. All the mushroom balls hit the ground.  Erstwhile treasure of delicacy became the most abominable thing that almost adulterated my sense of self.

Food and power
Back in those days, when there was no mushroom farming and reliable way of testing the toxicity of mushroom, perhaps the safest way for Brahmins was complete abstinence from this impure food. But this logic is an alibi not to acknowledge Brahman’s ignorance and the other ethnic people’s ability to exploit the nutritional value of mushroom. The discourse of the eater and non-eater and corresponding sense of self suggests the power dynamics of the society. With changes in technology, organized farming, scientific identification of nutritional benefits and gradual democratization of social values, earlier non-eaters also became the producers as well as consumers of mushroom to a great extent. 

The same aunt offered me a hot bowl of mushroom soup when I visited her last winter. In course of time, the ‘field of meaning,’ to use Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams’ phrase, of mushroom has changed from the cuisine of curse for Brahmins to the potent source of protein. 

A food item’s value primarily lies in its edibility and physiological utility. Williams, in his 1981 book The Sociology of Culture, enunciates that food lies at the lowest rung of signifying hierarchy. However, the food items we consume, as New Historicists assume, are very potent cultural symbols with multilayered cultural valences. Politico-ideological signifying practices surround the food items and these valences are spatially and temporally situated. That mushroom episode of my childhood day is a testimony to how a food item is associated with the sense of self and politics in a society. Thus food stuff, apparently a biological need, acquires a tremendous cultural signifying baggage based on who consumes or avoids it, for what reason, where and how it is consumed.

Another item shunned as kuanna or bad cereal is millet, kodo. Allegedly upper caste people carefully avoid it during the festivals and rituals. Though they eat millet pancake and dhindo and appreciate its nutritional value, its exclusion from their sacred ritual, festivals and communal feast continues. But the ethnic communities of Gurung, Magar, Rai, and Limbu use millet as an important comestible in their rituals. However, people prefer to grow millet as a cash crop or to exchange it with rice. Compared to rice, neither its plantation nor its harvest gets much fanfare. More often than not, its fermentation to make local alcohol has rendered its status as tamasik food, a matter of abjection, though some celebrate the same. Therefore the eater of the millet, usually a member of certain ethnic community, is often derogatively called kode implying that the eater necessarily imbibes its abominable tamasik qualities. Thus the pejoration attached with millet is used as an effective tool of social hierarchy marker. Even in literary imagination millet has rarely got space in comparison to its overrated cousin rice, which even graces the coat of arms of the New Nepal.  

As people are more aware of its rich nutrients, millet and its powder are now available in the superstores of metropolises at home and abroad.

Infamy of rice  
Unlike the mushroom and millet which show a movement from pejoration toward amelioration, rice, being a staple food of Nepali, entertains prestigious position in our community to the same degree the wheat has received privilege in Eucharistic societies. From its plantation to the harvest, various rituals accompany it. Rice grain is always a symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity. 

Karnali region’s poverty is by and large associated with the low production of rice, whereas prosperity of Tarai has to do with high yield of rice. Nepal’s Hill-to-Tarai migration was triggered by the abundance of rice yielding fields. Of course, there is hierarchy within the types of rice. Consumption of certain type entails certain class status: Basmati, Anadi, Masinao hold high class status whereas Mota holds the lower class irrespective of the nutritional value. Though the agrarian blessing ‘timro mukhama bubu-mam’ (literally, ‘milk and rice in your mouth’) has gradually lost its edge with urbanization and modernity, one humble genus of OryzaSativa has left behind all other food stuffs of Nepali culinary culture: the now-notorious Jumli Marshi. Its fateful presence in the dish of delicacy savored by Prime Minister K P Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal at  business tycoon Durga Prasai’s place marks this alpine cereal’s radical spatial shift from Himalayan plateau down to the dining table of metropolis.

Now it has acquired ironic political baggage of meaning and has now become a part of folklore repertoire.  The spatial shift of consumption of Jumli Marshi and its nexus, maybe inadvertent, with profiteering Medical Education and Dr Govinda KC’s fifteenth hunger strike to reform medical sector metamorphosed it into a sinister symbol of corruption and corny capitalism. The nutritional potency of alpine red rice in a way diluted the redness of the top brass of Nepal Communist Party. Thus mired in Marshi they are likely to have tough time to brush up their image.

“Culture begins and ends on a plate,” writes G Murphy Donovan, a former USAF Intelligence officer and Vietnam veteran. The field of meaning of the plate and its content keep changing acquiring different cultural and political meaning. Mushroom, millet and Marshi testify this inexorable process of transformation that goes well beyond the gastronomical etiquette and acquires quality of multilayered metaphors.

The author is a Lecturer at Tribhuvan University’s Central Department of English
sarbagyarajkafle@gmail.com


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