Why there is something wrong with the Indian buffet
PremiumIt spoils us for choice and makes a spectacle of itself but that’s only part of the problem
If you want to make Indians laugh, show them what Europeans call a “buffet". Even in a luxury hotel, the spread is so small it would fit into an Indian’s glance, which by nature is sweeping. At one cunning Parisian hotel, the buffet plate was the width of my palm, probably to discourage guests from piling on too many things. On the other hand, in most of Asia, especially India, the five-star buffet is designed to convey that the hotel made a loss on it. The buffet is such a sprawl of dishes that one has to first circumnavigate the entire spread just to get the lay of the land. Still, there would be surprises, nooks from where food emerges and some things that are not displayed but can be requested or extorted.
There is something very wrong with the Indian buffet. To understand why this is so, meander with me a bit, as though we are at a vast buffet of Indian maladies.
The Indian buffet is primarily a spectacle. The food also is, but mostly the people, especially as they fill their plates—some of them in their pyjamas. They feel at home; they are eating at the same address where they sleep, and they pay to sleep here, and that must be a definition of home. So they appear in clothes they would otherwise never wear if they were going to be in the line of vision of a hundred odd strangers. Maybe they wear pyjamas because they wish their bellies to be unencumbered during this limitless meal.
There is so much to choose from in an Indian buffet that people are able to fill their plates according to their mental states. The plates of large people are usually filled with fruits, which is usually their first course when in public. They are also happy to display a plate of fruits, unlike the later trips to the spread that are usually more discreet. But mostly people fill their plates with bread and sugar, because most people are honest in their preferences most of the time.
The whole buffet scene is like a rave party, with distressed waiters dealing in sugar and maida; and addicts of these two sources of nourishment wanting more and more, shouting for the attention of the dealers, asking why something is taking so long, how long must they wait; how long must their poor starving children wait before the next fix. These anxious food addicts are aware that waiters here, unlike in the West, are too powerless to ever tell them, “It’s a buffet, go and take it yourself." Surveying all this is the sanctimonious guy on a low-carb diet, for whom there is nothing much in the spread, but he consoles himself by saying that man does not need much.
The buffet is an overt exhortation to eat as much as you can, which means consume more than you need to. Everything about food and feeding is about excess and space.
Even a modest buffet, like what is offered on a Hindi film set, requires a back-end supply system that occupies considerable space, and it is not merely physical space. I have always associated Indian film sets with eating. The place reeks of food and the remains of food. One of the first vehicles that comes onto the location is the caterer’s van. And the most gloomy part of a set are those uneven cheap aluminium tables with shrouds of white cloth on them, apart from the unhappy men who make elaborate but vacuous food items and pour them into massive vats.
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In an important way, the Indian buffet, especially at a five-star resort, is similar to Indian democracy. Every major region is represented and there is a sense that there is something for everyone. To be precise, everyone with a substantive voice, that is. The buffet reflects its own tyranny of the majority. The minority which is very fit is not represented, and even the few things that the superfit get to eat are there because some famous foods are, somehow, by some miracle, healthy.
At the end of it, much of the Indian buffet ends up wasted. Some people tell me that about half the food in a typical buffet goes waste. This horrifies most Indians, including those given to saying they would never forgive a five-star hotel for not having a buffet breakfast. But then, I have never fully grasped the horror in wastage. As in, I do not know why wastage is a such bad thing. What is the difference if a kilo of biryani is eaten by some guy who does not need so much food, or wasted as uneaten food on his plate, or left in a vat on a buffet spread to be thrown away? The food has been paid for at every stage, and if leftovers are eventually given away to animals and microbes, whose existence completes a complex ecosystem, what is so tragic about this? The planet’s crisis of carbon emission and fresh-water depletion does not become any more bearable because a guy sits and eats his entire serving of biryani.
Still, there is a certain vulgarity in excess and wastage, especially in a poor country.
Consider a massive Indian five-star buffet from the point of view of a new waiter who has arrived from a distant impoverished village. After he recovers from the discovery that a single meal in the hotel costs about half his monthly salary perhaps, imagine what goes through his head when he sees people taking heaps of delicious things and leaving them all behind, or when the hotel throws away hundreds of kilos of perfectly edible food. It is vulgar.
Often, vulgarity itself has no consequence for us. But it is hard to deny that vulgarity is a way of disrespecting the unlucky. Some hotels say they have a system of giving away excess food to the poor, but I do not fully buy this. Even if this is true, it is still vulgar to send decaying food to the poor.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’