By P. Dalai
Amongst many exotic cuisines that we have grafted into our urban culinary culture, there is a general taste for eating baby vegetables. This appears to be the most ostentatious appetite of modern gastronomes, driven by insatiable consumerism. As inevitable items of what they call ‘fine-dining’, baby vegetables nowadays are the most vulnerable natural entities in brigade de cuisine.
Whether cheap or grand hotels, urban or suburban restaurants, homemade or packed foods, a usual gastronomic fascination for such fashionable cuisines, made of baby vegetables, is the hallmark of our social status and eating habits. Eating them raw, boiled, roasted, singed or steamed, as they appear in verbatim on our exquisite urbane menus, is the exotic symptom of our consumption snobbery, our nouvelle cuisine. Even displaying these green-infants of nature on commercial ads, food exhibitions, food packets, social gatherings, digital platforms, markets and dinner tables does a lot of disgrace to these.
There has been a general amnesia and silence on this issue of culinary ethics of baby vegetable sacrifice. Even religions across the time and space have been silent on this. Most of our debates and diatribes conveniently gaze on vegetarianism vs non-vegetarianism. But baby vegetables are victims of both the omnivores, which need urgent attention. It is, therefore ethical now to intervene in this culinary carnage.
Origins of these culinary carnages may be attributed to the advent of new economies and mushrooming of urban eateries that propel such devouring desires, even in most unlikely places and times. Also, in the contemporary culinary landscape, there is a paradigmatic shift of eating habits from the shared, sustained, and ethical tradition of past to a modern, solitary, and quick hunger-taming culture. It is this strange culinary turn that has forced us to transgress the ethics of eating, particularly the virtue of ‘sustainable eating’. We now belong to an age of culinary killing!
The contributions of food technology, tourism, hotel managements, culinary capitalism, on one hand, and our relentless experimentation with new flavours, colours, tastes and lifestyles largely tempted by ‘fusion cuisine’, on the other, are some of the gastronomical avarices that have galvanized the increasing and unethical treatment of these baby vegetables — baby corn, baby jackfruits, baby potatoes, tender drumsticks, onion or garlic shoots, not to mention of tender leaves, buds, and flowers of some other vegetables. We literally nip them at the buds!
Some modern gastronomes taste these natural products as appetizers, others snobbishly please their eyes, while some others make status statement by trying these baby vegetables garnished on their goblets, dishes, or laid naked on their costly salad plates.
We are the real hungry-alists of fashionable culinary innovations whose stomachs always rebel against monotonous food/dishes. We hate repeating a dish for very long; we love experimenting our tastes; and the result is the sacrifices of nature and sacrilege of ethics of eating! Several of us who belong to this gluttonous generation love to devour these poor children of nature for mere food-fashions we are entreated into by predominant culinary bourgeoism and late gastroeconomics.
Now, who should be held responsible for this unethical eating– our stomach, pocket, farmers, restaurateurs, or market? I think it is an organized crime of herbicides committed by our society in general. We can’t blame it on our poor stomach because it is most human for it to welcome anything into it. Our pockets? No, because it doesn’t have a mind to think of ethics. Food is a mental construction, so is hunger, much like poverty, caste, gender, nationality, and identity. It is not our stomach but our mind which decides our menu.
The premature herbicides of vegetables in contemporary gluttonous culture can, therefore, be attributed to this social construction of tastes and food. Can we not deconstruct our desire, our hunger, and our taste to refrain from such infanticides of nature?
It is not that our predecessors did not consume baby vegetables at all. Of course they did, and they did more than us. But they ate those vegetables that offered them in the most appropriateness of their seasons and species. They did not transgress the edible time and species of vegetables.
We have defied this appropriateness of seasons and species of nature; we almost promote a sort of vegetable-Darwinism and merely kill them as culinary snobs. I am sure our forefathers were no snobs to prepare exotic dishes out of baby corn or baby jackfruits for their own sport, status, or fun.
Somehow, we moderners have made spectacle of our culinary tastes, disrespecting the dignity of nature! Our oldies had respect, patience, justice, and wisdom both in the matter and manner of eating, and these eating virtues are what we mostly lack now, or, at least, despise to practice.
The sharp decline in the edible-age of vegetables, especially the untimely harvest of vegetables, is something grotesque and abominable. I think consuming vegetables in their infancy is not a wisdom but greed and snobbery of the urban folks.
The oxymoron of our consumption culture is- ‘we rear to kill’. Let us not justify our gluttony for any creative destruction; let us, instead, vow for no destruction at all.
It is too anthropocentric to consider that plants are insentient and, therefore, it is not sinful to sacrifice them for human tummies. Baby vegetables have irresistibly succumbed to the experiments of modern/metro appetite. As part of the deep ecology, we humans must consider this culinary case of vegetable-subalterns as epistemological tool to critique on the urban psychology and culture of consumption. It behooves, therefore, to espouse the ethics of “sustainable eating.”
The writer is Professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Banaras Hindu University