Dates, Lentils, Psyllium Husk Part 1
We’re all train conductors in a way. What goes into the tunnel must come out. Some days ruined by rush-hours, the odd multi-carriage pileup. Now I have you eye-deep in a metaphor about poo, listen, I’ve noticed how my heart is warmed each Ramadan by the overlapping gastric interests of Whatsapp Aunties forwarding sehri stratagems and Reddit Bottoms debating what ratio of soluble/insoluble fibre will yield the shortest douche. In short, how dates and psyllium husk are bringing the girls together. Toot toot.
The internet is a place where people are empowered to make their own narratives and find community, that’s the soil where I lay my little heart. But I’m here to rant and scoop at a rancid underbelly- something about South Asian diaspora food discourse irks me, specifically this format of desi health listicle. There are very valid cases for pride towards yum produce and against your-food-smells-like-shit encounters with Whiteness. A part of me cherishes mango-centric tales of care and resistance but hot take, I also hate the orientalist marketing of miracle produce from far shores even when done by ethnic people. Lugging around a second-generation identity crisis, basing who I am on what I eat and buy comes with a manipulative tenor.
I leave relatives on read when they Whatsapp me tenuous articles on the benefits of chickpeas- let’s be real, it’s an act which constructs ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, pillars of toxic diet culture. Something clicked when listening to my friend’s podcast episode on eating, fatness and race (shoutout But Also, Get Therapy) which drove home how the body positivity movement has been hijacked by privileged bodies (i.e: thin, White) to not feel bad about said privilege. On a similar plate, I feel like the glorification of diaspora foodstuffs can do the same thing in making diaspora feel OK with their place in extractive supply chains.
Like ok, make your coin if you’re a Black or brown independent business with a foothold in moneyed audiences. But as an annoying moralist who bangs on about how there needs to be more class nuance when speaking on the South Asian experience, I’d be a hypocrite to flatten my privilege as diaspora and not call out ways I create demand for neo-colonial agriculture- newsflash: class doesn’t stop at the border, that hallmark of Britishness has been furiously exported for centuries. The way I’m racialised doesn’t spare me from being complicit like the British public a la the story of England, the Caribbean and sugar or what’s happening with avocados and cartels between Mexico and the US. Even if the real power and scale of effect lies in the hands of corporations and governments, it’s nothing to be smug about.
Zarina Muhammad writes a whopping mic-dropper on diaspora art as an apolitical aesthetic which is sold as radical but actually keeps the South Asian subject locked in self-appraisal against the White gaze. I feel like something similar is being done in ethnic food discourse in relation to western biomedicine and beauty ideals. Eating “better” comes with a superiority complex which day to day manifests in ‘we don’t eat that shit’ pearl-clutching vis-à-vis foods associated with Whiteness- think the pathos of Dadsgiving, overpriced avocado toast or luncheon meat. I’ve leant on it myself as a way of feeling more rooted in my identity- something that feels misguidedly sturdy with its backing by an unquestionable hodgepodge of Ayurveda, the commercial success of the curry house and Western biomedicine, all endorsed whenever suits and all defining the self in relation to what the White other thinks.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this skinfolk-aren’t-kinfolk political moment in Tory Britain, it’s to understand how I’m never off the hook with my home seat in the heart of empire. As class mobility is on the rise and generations have less of a political stake in the global South, the magic of dates, coconut oil and khala sana as panacea feels increasingly staged.
And yet, I’m too wuss for the alternative, swapping colourful imports for endless seasons of spiceless potato and cabbage, God forbid. I don’t have an answer yet and for now sit in my contradictory ideological brine like I’ve peed myself and am too embarrassed to get up, legs getting itchy.