Food habits

Close your eyes and imagine your favourite dish... How it looks like, how it smells...

Well, asking to do the same to an indian person may become a difficult task for him/her because, at least for the lunch time, they don´t have the same notion of pleasure in gastronomy. Between morning work and afternoon work the most important thing is to focus on filling the stomach as much as posible.

For that, they go to restaurants that can differ depending on the class their clients are from.  Either in a restaurant or in a street food stall, the worker clients have more or less the same habits: they eat as fast as possible, without losing time for a chat with the person in front, looking to the infinity they seem to be very concentrated on the fact of eating. The culinary offer of these places is quite limited to rice and chicken curry. Either sitting or standing up while they eat, they will always only use their right hand as a spoon and their thumb to push the food into their mouth, while the keep their left hand immobile.

In the case of the street food stalls, they provide the water from some mysterious plastic barrels from which they fill the plastic bottles that people will use to pour water in their mouth without touching it with their lips. This is a basic “hygienic” measure for these bottles used by hundreds of people a day.

In the other hand, at diner time we can find a more relaxed enviroment in the so called family restaurants. After a long day of work people eat while talking to their companions and taking more time to appreciate the diversity of the menu and the friendly treatment.

So to conclude, we can say that the eating habits of the common indians can vary during the moment of the day but they don´t have the same understanding of the gastronomy as a moment to socialize, enjoy and relax as we, the europeans, do.


Maddalen & Maëlle