If you have ever eaten food in an Indian restaurant in the United States you may think that you have tried Indian food, but this is probably not true. What you’ve been eating is a tourist imitation. There is a significant difference between real Indian food and imitation Indian food prepared for American tourists, and there is one sure way to test whether or not you’re actually eating Indian food. You simply apply this test; begin eating and see if you like the way it tastes. If you are tasting lentils and chickpeas, saffron rice and tandoori chicken, and you think yourself “isn’t this unusual and tasty food,” then you are eating imitation Indian food. But instead, if after eating the first two bites of food you completely lose your ability to taste anything, and if your remain incapable of tasting anything at all for – oh say – three hours or so after your dinner is over, then you have eaten true Indian food. It’s that simple. If you eat Indian food – authentic Indian food – it will be one of the most painful activities of your entire life.
Let me explain. I’ve described previously to you the first day that I was in New Delhi, the quarters that we stayed in at the University of New Delhi while we were there, and some of the people I was with. On the second day there, a number of us decided to go out to a restaurant and try “real Indian food”, and of course we took the one member of our group along who actually spoke Hindi. We got in the taxi and he asked the taxi driver to take us to an Indian restaurant that was suburban, authentic, and in a location where the local people ate. So we drove into this little Indian suburb (I’ve described previously what an Indian suburb is like), and situated within the suburbs is what I would describe as being similar to an American strip mall. They are groups of stores and shops arranged around a square with some ornamentation in the middle of the square that is guaranteed to be broken down or nonfunctional or dead. The sidewalks are dirty, the curbs are broken down or left unconstructed with broken down knocked over warning signs on top of them, and there are small little cars parked everywhere including places where nothing should be parked. There are also tons of bikes either being ridden or propped up and left in various places.
We went into a restaurant and the owner was very glad to see us because we represented a large group (seven or eight) of hungry, well-paying Americans. They found us a place to sit, gave us menus, and then we began the laborious task of trying to interpret everything on the menu and order it all through one person who spoke Hindi. The owner of the restaurant hovered around our table constantly to make sure we were well taken care of while the waiter took our order. It was a complicated affair. I remember when we began to order the owner interrupted us and ask if we wanted Indian food or the other kind of Indian food. This caused a lot of conversation at our table for we had no idea what he meant. Of course we were there for authentic Indian food but now we had to figure out what the two kinds of Indian food were. In the end the owner surmised from our conversation and our orders that we really wanted the other kind of Indian food and not the authentic Indian food. I’ll call this other Indian food Americanized food for tourist consumption. For example I remember ordering tandoori chicken. I’ve had this before an Indian restaurant in the states and it’s quite tasty, as it was that night. Tandoori chicken is not authentic Indian food – very few people in India eat tandoori chicken. It’s an animal, and almost everybody in India (and that’s a lot of people) are vegetarians; they won’t eat chicken. Remember, they believe in reincarnation, and in India this means reincarnation across species. Human or animal, everything has a soul and the soul cycle through life changing from one form to another as the sole learn universal lessons. When it comes to eating meat, only some of the rich elite class of India eat meat, as well as all of the tourists – they all have tandoori chicken.
I’ve always found it interesting that countries with extremely high populations tend to have religious beliefs that make meat eating an undesirable religious quality. Tropic feeding levels always start out with primary producers at the bottom, moving up to primary consumers and then to secondary consumers including a variety of levels for predators, and ending with the apex predator (that’s usually us). Only about 10% of the energy is transmitted from one trophic level to another in the creation of biomass. What this means is, in a country like United States where we have an immense amount of agriculture, we can afford to take most of the grain that’s grown in this country (somewhere around 80%) and feed it to secondary consumers (cows, pigs, sheep, etc.) which we can then eat. Most people in the United States have meet at least once a day, and usually two or three times a day. But remember, by eating the animal instead of the grain we are getting only 10% of the energy that we could have gotten if we had eaten the grain itself. In a very poor country there is not enough food produced to waste all that energy on secondary consumers. In India, if they did that, 90% of the people in the country would starve to death. So grains are the order of the day in a country with a high population in order to feed the masses of people and stave off starvation. And coincidently this simple fact of energy transfer between tropic levels almost always aligns nicely with thousands of years of religious tradition that indicates that meat should not be eaten.
That day that we had the dinner in the Indian suburb was our first full day in India and our only day to adjust to the jet lag as we waited for the remaining members of our party to arrive. And unbeknownst to us, that evening meal represented our last experience eating food prepared for the “delicate Western palate”. On the following day we boarded a small bus and left for the Himalayas, and thus began an extraordinary culinary experience – an experience that I never want to repeat again.