Food for all

Some of you will have eaten food from different regions of India: dal-bāṭī-chūrmā from Rajasthan, sarson kā sāg with makki kī roṭī from Punjab, liṭṭī-chokhā from Bihar, idli, dosa and sāmbar from the south. The number of different dishes you can taste in India must be in the thousands, if not lakhs!

Yet certain food grains are common to almost every part of the country:

• cereals such as rice, barley and wheat;
• millets such as pearl millet (bajra), sorghum (jowar) and finger millet (ragi);
• pulses such as many kinds of dals and grams.

These are called 'staple grains' because they are the basic food for most Indians. You cannot eat a festive dish every day, but at home the everyday meal of dāl-chāval or sabzī-roṭī is made from these same staples.

The book's picture shows the same handful of names turning up from one end of the map to the other: rajma, millet, arhar dal, moong dal, chana dal, masoor dal, gram, chickpea, maize, and many kinds of rice, such as kollam, basmati, ponni and sona masuri.

In the same way, some common spices, such as turmeric, cumin, cardamom and ginger, are used all over the country. (Turmeric and ginger were found in Harappan cooking pots, 4,000 years ago!) We could go on with common vegetables, common oils and so on.

So the same ingredients (unity) are used in countless combinations (diversity) to make an endless variety of dishes! That sentence is the chapter's whole method: look for what is shared underneath, and the differences stop looking like separation.