The loss of taste: memory, the senses and everyday eating in Delhi

Abstract

A central tenet of economic liberalisation in India, initiated from 1991, was that consumers would not only enjoy food in greater quantity, but also a ‘more varied and exciting diet’ (Barlow et al 2020). Taking a sensory approach, this paper nuances understandings of the ‘trade-diet link’ by capturing the everyday reality of eating in the Indian capital since Independence. It does so by drawing on a unique set of interviews undertaken by university students from Janki Devi Memorial College in Delhi with members of their own families as part of a programme to create a ‘People’s Archive of Food Memories’ during the Covid-19 pandemic. Though most interviewed were migrants to India’s capital, the sample was otherwise varied by gender, age, religion, social status, regional identity, living location and language. Still, a unifying theme within the interviews was the standardisation of cuisine – or, more precisely, how the intense variation when it came to ingredients and dishes in the past had been replaced in contemporary Delhi by a limited palate of ingredients and comparatively few regular dishes. For the older generation, this culinary shift was remembered, above all, as a loss of taste and its corollary, smell. A sensory focus thus illuminates historical shifts in ingredients and cuisine, cooking methods, eating patterns, generational preference and health discourses within a broader context of agricultural and economic change, urbanisation and migration.