Going Local

At last, we are getting real food, sourced from our own environment.

- Vir Sanghvi

IT IS funny how food trends change every decade or so. In the ’70s, the nouvelle cuisine movement was at its height in Europe and chefs were throwing out their flour-thickened sauces and focusing on fresh flavours.In those days, the chef was supposed to go to the market every day, buy whatever was fresh and seasonal and then come back to the kitchen to find interesting ways of cooking the produce.

By the late ’80s, improvements in transportation and the slow advent of globalisation began to change all that. Chefs stopped going to markets and worried less and less about local ingredients. They dealt instead with vast networks of global suppliers who were able to make any ingredient available at any time of year.

Did the chef feel like asparagus in November when the season was over? No worries. The supplier knew somebody in Peru who grew large (if mostly tasteless) asparagus spears and would happily fly them thousands of miles across the world. Scallops in warm-water countries? Sure. Frozen North Atlantic scallops that looked right (even if they tasted all wrong) were available all year round.

For us in the Third World, globalisation came as a boom and a curse. I remember Indian chefs, in the ’80s, struggling to adapt local ingredients for Western dishes. At the Mumbai Taj, they had trouble importing mozzarella. So they found an expat at the Rajneesh ashram in Pune who made his own. Because there were no fish imports, enterprising chefs would trek to the nearby Sassoon Docks to see what the fishermen had caught.