At the age of three, I could not handle the bold, sharp, fiery tastes that are the characteristic features of Indian cooking. I remember how the mixture of haldi, imli, jeera, and adrak would overwhelm my senses and send me running, literally. Oh yes, I was that child.
The child that had to be force-fed at every meal. The one that would take one look at her plate, feel the slow burn in the back of her throat caused by the mere smell of the spices, and flee. I know now that my parents had good intentions - they were trying to prepare me for the spices that my Indian heritage would present to me nearly every day of the rest of my life. But at the time, I could not see past my fear of the spices, and saw hiding as my only viable option. Sometimes I would hide under the dining table itself; other times, I took to the sliver of space behind the bathroom door. Sometimes I would run from one spot to the next, with the false hopes that my parents would never catch me.
But with two of them, and one of me, the night would always end with me being held down in my seat, trying to chew and swallow my food in record time so that my mouth would not have to deal with the spices for so long. My mother would always leave the carton of milk out on the table, right in front of me, because it took about three huge gulps of milk to end the suffering caused by each bite. I used to finish off about a quarter of the gallon in just one sitting.
After I swallowed my last mouthful, and drowned it with a few feverish sips of my milk, my parents would breathe an immense sigh of relief and start the clean-up process. While they busied themselves with loading the dishwasher, I would glare at the disingenuously innocent wooden structure on the counter next to the fridge. My mother called it the “spice rack,” but I fondly referred to it as my “arch enemy.” I was convinced that the differently sized, colorful bottles that had been shipped to my home from around the world housed the greatest malice and hate that a three-year-old could comprehend – they were even worse than Cinderella’s evil stepmother.
Fast-forward ten, maybe twelve, years and “that child” had learned to enjoy the spices that once terrorized her. She was well on her way to becoming her father, whose (possibly excessive) love of spices had caused him to lose taste buds on certain patches of his tongue. I was the girl who proudly added chili powder to almost every dish she cooked; the girl who carried around a bottle of Tabasco in her purse instead of candy-flavored lip gloss like her friends; the girl whose parents had to send her black pepper when she went to sleep-away camp because her tent was not stocked with it and she absolutely could not eat without it.
Somehow, over the years, I had lost my appreciation for the simple and the plain. My every meal was flavored with an assortment of imported spices. Even my ice cream sundaes were topped with a generous spoonful of gur, an unrefined cane sugar imported from India.
Unfortunately for me, the simple and the plain were the defining features of my homeland. While my tongue and soul may have been enamored with the bold tastes of India, my physical body was situated in the heart of New Jersey, a state that organically grows alarmingly few spices. Ask any mother in my town, and she will agree that locally-grown, organic produce is healthier than dried and powdered spices imported from third-world countries. And this view is shared by other groups of experts as well; dietitians, nutritionists, athletic trainers will all give the same advice - eat more locally grown food.
Enter a deceptively simple school project: cook an entire meal from completely locally-grown, organic produce. A team was formed - Courtney, Amy and myself - and a course was charted - our meal would focus on the rich flavors of Italian cooking.
At first we made bold strides, eliminating spaghetti from our menu (because it was made from Semolina flour produced hundreds of miles from our town) and replacing it with locally-grown spaghetti squash from the Farmers’ Market, in a move that we saw as ingenious. But when we undertook the preparation of the meal, we realized that we had forgotten an essential component of our meal. It was a component that I saw as essential, and one that my team saw as insignificant. It was truly the only component of the meal that mattered to me. Yes, we had forgotten to find locally-grown substitutes for our spices.
After two hours of “baking” spaghetti squash in the microwave, scooping out its “goopy” innards with a fork, and sauteing the onions and tomatoes that we planned to serve with it, we had one plate of soft, squishy, imitation-pasta. The Italian-inspired pasta was certainly present, but - as I learned shortly after ingesting my first bite - the robust Italian-inspired tastes were not.
While we ultimately prided ourselves in creating a meal completely from scratch, a meal that could represent the natural vegetables grown near our town, our spaghetti squash was bland, flavorless and dull. After struggling to down mouthful after mouthful of the tasteless squash, my stomach surely felt satisfied, and my body surely felt fortified with squash’s natural, organic goodness. But though my stomach was not aching, my tongue still was; it was yearning for the foreign, imported zing that I had taken advantage of for all of the seventeen years of my life.
My teammates would have taken one look at the “Imported from India” labels on all of my spice bottles and deemed them “illegal,” since Indian tastes are as exotic and far from home as it gets, for them. But, honestly, the spices were never imported or foreign to me – they represented my home just as well as the spaghetti squash. I had been eating these so-called “exotic” ingredients for my entire life, and I had no plan to stop eating them at any time in the near future.
Organic, locally-grown food may have countless benefits for my physical body, but my soul needs my spices. For me, food has never been simply about physical nourishment; it has always been, at least in part, nourishment for my soul. And while my health may suffer from the additives, growth hormones, and preservatives in my food, my soul will thrive on the spices that have inexplicably become an integral part of who I am.
It is nice to think that my food community includes only the purest food, grown right near my hometown, but I have come to the realization that it actually stretches across the world and includes ingredients that have very negative connotations. A perfect food community seems to be the unreachable ideal, too far from attainable practicalities to actually be implemented in my life. After all, food without my spices, is hardly food at all.
Nitrites, sulfites, and BHT, you are welcome here.
"Italian Style Spaghetti Squash" from Phase 2 of the South Beach Diet:
2 lbs of Spaghetti Squash, halved lengthwise and seeded
2 T olive oil
1 medium white onion, thinly sliced
4 medium tomatoes, diced
1/4 t salt
1/4 t coarsely ground pepper
- Place the squash halves, cut side down, in a glass baking dish. Add 1/4 cup water and cover with plastic wrap. Microwave on high for 8-10 minutes until tender; cool slightly.
- Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat 1 T of the oil. Add the onion and cook over medium-high heat for 3 minutes until the onion is translucent. Add tomatoes, salt and pepper. Reduce heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes.
- Using a fork, scrape the squash strands into a bowl. Toss with the remaining tablespoon of oil. Mound the squash in the center of 4 serving bowls and spoon the vegetable mixture around the mound.
RSS Feed (xml)