Antiserious — Food, 2018
All about our Food issue
The cover illustration of our ‘Food Issue’, as you can see, is an onion — an onion that is gradually unravelling, filling the air with its strong smell that offends upper-caste sentiments. Onion is a strange fruit with multiple layers. The peeling of onion is often the job of the people who do not have the agency to say no to the task. At home, it is the domestic help who is assigned the responsibility if the “owners” are cooking. In houses which are “progressive” and domestic work is “equally” divided, men help with peeling potatoes and matar, but don’t bring them the onion. Onions make first-time cooks cry. Onion is what you would be dealing with in PGs when you are a new member and you cannot cook. Onion propels innovations like wearing helmets and chewing bubble gums with a knife and a chopping board at disposal. Onion is the purveyor of strong emotions; also a marker of inflation, it can bring down governments. As farmers of Nashik, known predominantly for its onion crop, organize and agitate for better policies from the government, we, at Antiserious, bring out our issue on food, which we expect to be as diverse as the layers of the fruit.
This issue contains Nandini Dhar’s essay, “Why My Skinny Book Was Half About Cooking and Half About Mothers”, which vehemently defends writing on food, food blogging and, in the larger scheme of things, writing the domestic space against the cultural establishment that trivializes domestic labour while reaping benefits from it. Pallavi Rao in her essay “Rasam Sadham as (Dis)Comfort Food” provides a rasam recipe that systematically disturbs the Brahmin kitchen. Poet Kiran Bath in her poem “Chai recipes in the Times today” brews a storm of culture in a teacup. Soniah Kamal’s essay, “Chai and Me”, navigates through a world of chai-tea lattes to reach a cup of tea. There’s Madhulika Liddle, who in her essay “Bye-bye, Christmas Goose: We Never Knew You” attempts to shatter stereotypes about Indian Christians and gives us a very innovative, very non-Hollywood/ Bollywood list of Christmas food rituals. Lenny DellaRocca through his poem “Asparagus” connects everyday food to the aromatic violence that lives in our history books; in his other poem “My Father’s Cooking” we get a glimpse of a past, the smell and the taste of which refuses to leave, even after years. Shikhandin’s poem “Cakes” shows us how food crumbs are keepers of bite-sized histories of our seemingly staid, subtly violent, romantic relationships. And, finally, Anamika Dutt in her memoir “My Fish Memoir” writes about her journey and growth as a fish-buyer; using the fish market as a performative space, she writes about how the journey pushed her beyond the identity of a Bengali fish-buyer.
Antiserious would not be possible without its readers and lovers who are always around in various ways. We would like to thank Abhishek Bhattacharjee to whom we owe our logo and cover design, and whose work you can follow on his website. Our team members Manjiri Indurkar, Sumana Roy, our newest member Shruti Ravi, and let’s talk about how I should not praise myself.
We hope you enjoy reading our “Food” issue, first in our series on Domestic Space — Food, Fashion and Home.
Debojit Dutta
Founder and editor
AntiSerious
