Garam Masala - When Bread Becomes Butter for Protests

Vikram Doctor blogs for The Economic Times:

Food and protests have always had a complex relationship, as this year demonstrated. Perhaps it was because it was a food vendor who set it off. Mohamed Bouazizi was a fruit vendor, one of the most ubiquitous and basic street trades, and it was exactly his ordinariness that him such a sympathetic, identifiable figure when, unable to bribe the authorities to get back his confiscated weighing scales, he set himself on fire. His ordinary helplessness galvanized Tunisia in ways the government could not respond to, and it fell, setting off a chain reaction across the Middle East.

Food has always been a pretext for protests. Ottoman sultans lived in fear of the day their elite Janissary troops would start to bang their pots, as a sign of discontent with food that could lead to rebellion. Gandhi’s use of salt is well known, but the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, which some, like ET’s Swaminathan Aiyar, have argued was what finally convinced the British to leave India, was also partly instigated over poor food quality.

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Many of these quixotic struggles never quite succeed, and this can have unexpected food results. Life has to go on, even after a cause is lost, and many on the losing end have often taken to the food trade to survive. It is one of the easiest options, since people always have to cook and eat. The world is full of ethnic restaurants started by people fleeing failed protests to other countries.

In Mumbai, the growth of Konkani seafood restaurants is probably linked to the many mill workers from that region who had to find other ways of survival once they lost their great strike of 1982 and the mills started shutting down. The idea of the restaurant itself goes back to the French revolution when unemployed cooks from aristocratic kitchens opened eating places where anyone could eat the sort of food that only their masters could enjoy before.

But perhaps the biggest challenge that protesters face with food is just getting enough to keep their protests going. Protests can’t always be planned, but once they get going the need for a regular supply of food become critical. The Paris Commune realised this and an early initiative was to set up a communal food kitchen called La Marmite (the stew-pot) under a revolutionary named Nathalie Lemichel, a real life model perhaps for Babette.

In my column about Egypt I wondered if the protesters were sustained by the many stalls selling kushari near Tahrir Square and sure enough I found reports about how kushari had become the mainstay of the revolution, with people brining bags of it to the protests. Kushari is a mixture of rice, lentils and pasta topped with fried onions and a spicy sauce, a simple but satisfying food that fairly obviously has roots in Indian khichri.

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