Indian writing on food: A skewed representation of contemporary social reality

Food is a basic requirement for life, and it remains only that for a painfully large proportion of the human population. In India, for more than a quarter billion people food is a matter of sheer survival. Even though the fame of India’s riches may have spurred the European race to seek out India from the fifteenth century onwards, its image in the West is predominantly one of a poor country with regular droughts, famines and starving millions. Today neither the picture of amazing riches nor of stark poverty is completely baseless.