On Indian Food

When I landed in India, I decided to become a vegetarian while I was here.

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Ok, those of you who know me well are hopefully in hysterics right now, and those of you who aren’t…well, let’s go get coffee the next time I’m in town and get to know each other better. And I’m serious about that one – take me up on it.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m pretty much a sworn carnivore. I have in fact previously stated that I would never even DATE a vegetarian – then of course every single girl I’ve wanted to date since then has told me that they don’t eat meat. Go figure. (By the way, ladies, just to clarify – that stipulation has been replaced with one that merely demands that you promise to not make ME into a vegetarian. Just don’t push your luck).

Let me give you an idea of what Indian food is like. As far as I can tell, it mainly consists of three of your basic food groups: grains, gravy, and fried stuff.

Starting in the back, we have the fried deliciousness of vegetables. Yes, that’s right, I said veggies – I haven’t seen any meat in this food group, much to my dismay. People here will deep-fry a lot of things – from onions to chili peppers (and the chili peppers, let me tell you, are good). Fried food is very popular among street vendors, because, while it may be the sort of thing that could kill you in the States, on the Delhi streets, anything out of a deep-fryer is naturally more healthy than the alternative – and that’s not just because one of the flies that drowned in the gravy could have been your great grandmother in a past life.

Gravy here is what people in the states who are not chefs might call “sauce.” It usually consists of some kind of meat (usually chicken or mutton) or vegetable in a thick, spicy liquid. While there is some available on the street, for a couple bucks more you can keep from risking your life and get some at a nice restaurant (high-end food at one of the best restaurants in town might run you about 10 USD). Of course, that’s assuming you know the ins and outs of eating, which is where the third food group comes in.

Grains take two varieties here – rice and, for lack of a better word, bread. Rice is commonly just your ordinary, steamed rice. If you’ve eaten at almost any Asian restaurant before you know how it works. However, unlike a lot of Asia, India generally prefers bread as not only its main grain, but its main utensil as well. That’s right – bread here is a disposable spoon. As such, it’s usually laid out in flat pieces, called roti, naan, prantha…I’m not really sure which one’s which.

To eat with bread, you break off a triangular piece, being careful not to use your left hand at all – it’s considered unsanitary and would contaminate not only the bread but any gravy that it touches. You then fold that piece up, pointy part facing out, and scoop up some of the gravy and eat it, once again without using your left hand. It’s a slow, sometimes frustrating process that can take days to master.

Even given a full working knowledge of how to eat Indian food, however, the question of what to eat, or drink, is about as difficult a question as any – specifically for an American tourist. I’ll give it to you in the form of a quiz: which of the following is the most dangerous: a piece of fried broccoli from a street vendor, some Daal Makhani (lentils in gravy) from a sketchy cafeteria, an ice-cold coke, or water from the cooler at my office?

Seriously…take a second and guess.

Hopefully the question didn’t catch you too much off guard, and you wound up washing down the lentils and broccoli with some water. If you didn’t, you might have wound up like Megan, who spent three days getting over 10 bags of IVs pumped into her at a nearby hospital because she took ice in her drink at one of the nicest restaurants in Noida. And yes, I’m serious about that – she just got back yesterday, and had to fight to get released even at that.

The issue is that while boiling water can kill parasites, freezing it isn’t quite as effective. And most restaurants, even nice ones like Geoffrey’s, may skimp a little by NOT using filtered or bottled water to cool their drinks, using instead the unfiltered tap water. Most Indians can handle this quite well, as their bodies have grown accustomed to it after generations of sending those parasites packing, but our frail, sheltered American bodies don’t stand a chance. And so we spend days tethered to a leash in an Indian hospital with an American friend and (thank goodness for me) a couple really hot nurses while enough drugs are pumped into our system that we have more drugs than blood. And then we escape by sheer force of will. But that’s either a story for another day or for Megan’s blog.

And by the way – the vegetarian thing? I broke in about 3 days. The bitterness of failure was totally drowned out by the taste of the chicken, too.