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THE STORY of how tea was created by accident is common knowledge, but worth recounting here — legend has it that in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting under a tree as someone boiled drinking water for him nearby. Some of the leaves from the tree blew into the hot water, and Nung, an enthusiastic herbalist, decided to try it, finding the drink flavoursome and deeply refreshing. A successful experiment.
With food, which is so universal to the human experience, there’s a primal urge within us to try new things. Children, before they’re taught about acceptable and unacceptable foods, spend their time mixing entirely random items. This writer has seen one person pair ice cream with fries, and another eat rice with ketchup. Some kids dip potato chips in chocolate sauce, while others have orange juice with cookies. It seems everyone knows at least one person who is the eats-weird-food-combinations person.
But what happens when this adventurous and experimental nature is taken to social media? There are a humongous number of videos of street vendors creating and selling dishes like pastry pakoras (pastries deep fried in gram flour), chai Maggi (Maggi made in tea instead of water), gulab jamun samosas (samosa with a gulab jamun filling), and so on, and on, and on. In the online space, videos like these often go viral. Recording yourself watching and reacting to these videos, or ‘react videos’ as they’re called, has itself become a genre of content around food. So what’s going on in the digital space?
“Everyone has such a personal relationship with food. And everyone has an opinion about food,” says Vrinda Gothi, one half of the Instagram food blog The Hungry Chashmish, which she runs with her partner Abhishek Dhawan. “Such viral trends [where surprising combinations of foods are displayed] evoke a strong emotion in the viewer. When such videos come on my feed, I am either appalled or extremely inquisitive. It boils down to having strong emotional reactions to food,” she adds. This is in large part because food concerns everyone. Everyone must eat. Everyone has strong memories about food, complex relationships with food, and lasting feelings about food.
And when there is online content about food, everyone brings all of their experience and opinion to the digital space. Essentially, chaos ensues. Some people feel a sense of connection. They’re as stunned as the creator or reactor of the video, or they’re all coming together in the comments to feel a sort of communal horror at what they’ve witnessed. Others are amused and creative in their responses. “Of course China will declare war,” says one user, under a video of noodle gulab jamun, which is essentially a street vendor selling Hakka noodles topped with pieces of gulab jamun. Many people laugh together and bond over what they’ve just witnessed. In fact, such videos are almost a type of meme in themselves. These are among the more positive reactions, where a sense of community emerges most strongly.
This is because fusion food, as a concept, isn’t new. At high-end restaurants, for years now, we’ve been eating dishes that bring together two cultures with very different culinary languages — and we’ve mostly appreciated it. On a more accessible level, we’ve all tried ‘Indian Chinese’ or Indian iterations of pizzas, pastas and so on. At every level in society, fusion exists. Social media is democratising this further, allowing street vendors to share their creations with the world. In most such videos, the creator is speaking with the vendor, interviewing them, and sharing the stall’s location with audiences. This, in turn, also proved that the vendors have a sense of autonomy in that content. When that’s the case, social media is simply expanding the dialogue around fusion food, multiplying the possibilities and giving more cooks a platform. Even though people often laugh or cringe at the video, their virality proves how open and receptive people are to these experiments.
But the problem arises when people are critical (and given how strongly food affects people, emotions can often run high, in the negative direction as much as the positive). “There’s this increasing trend on social media where one feels everyone should think exactly the way one does,” says psychologist Tanisha Goveas. “The thought process is ‘I don’t like this, so how can someone else enjoy it?’ and ‘the emotional connection to my childhood memories is being ruined, ’” she explains, highlighting how people often think. When foods we have strong bonds with are used in unhinged ways, it can almost feel like an attack on the food, which in turn feels like an attack on the viewer and their cherished memories. “There are traditions around food. And when you go against those traditions, people get upset,” Goveas says. And the defensiveness manifests as anger at the creator, or more worryingly, the street vendor being recorded. “A lot of that language is also very casteist, which is a whole other conversation in itself. But if a street-side vendor is trying something, there’s probably a demand for it,” she adds.
While some of these combinations may not work, and some might be acquired tastes, there are items that people are genuinely trying and taking a liking to — things that are taking off in a real way. For instance, Goveas recalls being slightly critical when she first heard about pani puri ice cream. “But then I tried it, and it wasn’t bad,” she mentions. Once the initial shock or surprise wears off, many of these items seem to work. And that’s because young people in the country are open to trying new things. “People want to go out and try new things, because after a while, they are bored. Also, the food game in the country has really upped itself over the past decade,” says Dhawan.
And in that sense, social media is erasing some of the inequality and purity around food. It’s for everyone and by everyone. It’s making street vendors popular, it’s making people more accepting of new foods and combinations, fuelling their inquisitiveness in exciting new ways. In the end, it’s up to each individual. Whether they choose to respond lightly or aggressively, with curiosity or judgement, and feel community or isolation and attack, depends entirely on the person. And so, with this dialogue taking over social media, what it means for society is finally a result of how each user is choosing to respond. In the sense that social movements are stories of each person involved in them, online trends are also a reflection of each user, all of them building up the trend, brick by brick, one comment and one like at a time. How are you responding?
