The figuration of the world traveler that Jaffrey describes and the autobiographical fashioning of self in her cookbooks already have been analyzed. But an addition to this analysis is the configuration of Jaffrey’s world. In other words, her books’ “gastropoetics” have been analyzed, but the gastocartographies that she maps—or elides—have not. The conventional thinking about global cuisine follows two archetypal configurations: that of each culture bringing to the table its special flavor, its unique inflection of signature tastes or that of the multinational corporation—McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC—that represents a branded flavor recognized everywhere, with a chain opening in each country and region and adapting its flavors to suit local tastes. Both rely on familiar, readily recognizable flavors, but they oppose each other in ways that underscore the special problems of globalization, power, privilege, and consumption.
Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbook, entitled Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, does something in between. In this chapter, I first identify the cartographies that structure Jaffrey’s text, analyzing how World Vegetarian reconfigures globalism by placing South Asian ingredients, cooking methods, tastes, and textures at the epicenter of global vegetarian cuisine, thereby redistributing the forces of culinary globalization by positioning South Asian cooking at the center of global power. Consequently, Jaffrey readjusts the geographic orientation of the currents moving global influence as India becomes everywhere. In this way, her book distances notions of globalization from twentieth- and twenty-first-century economics and its association with an East-meets-West or North-meets-South dialectic. Even as she brings the globe to the table, though, I argue that she reifies differences that threaten her cookbook’s task of bridging cultural gaps. Next I contrast Jaffrey’s model of the world to that of other world travelers. I contend that Jaffrey uses her cookbook to oppose the shape of the world as imagined by such globetrotters as the McDonalds burger-eater abroad, the U.S. vegetarians with only iceberg lettuce for company but whose privilege grants them access to exotic foods, and the multinational agricultural corporation, whose hegemonic structures construct globalization in terms of market share and distributions of labor. I focus on the last as the most important and least visible of these contrasts, as the multinational agribusinesses provide the ideal complement to Jaffrey’s world vegetarian. I examine the problematic relationships between the First and Third Worlds as they emerge in both Jaffrey’s figure of the Third World woman and the manner in which U.S. multinationals feed—and feed on—the Third World spaces that are one of the engines driving their profits.
Consequently, I read the “world” in World Vegetarian as a noun instead of an adjective, a noun that can easily become a verb configuring and disseminating knowledge and power.1 Rather than consider the world vegetarian as a well-traveled cosmopolite whose expansive palate is fed morsel by morsel, I read the world as a supranational entity mapped in a vegetarian mode. Its legend comprises ingredients and measurements: spices and flavors mark boundaries, national and territorial; techniques and directives reveal topography. All cosmopolites travel in a world that facilitates their momentum. Kwame Appiah’s airport conversations and Aihwa Ong’s flexible citizens operate in modes of circulation that also describe the circumference of the world, a material one that they all inhabit.2 The body that refuses national limits is a body whose movements, real or imagined, configure a model of a world with unclear borders.
Regional cookbooks that attempt to transform space in ways that resist the customary boundaries of nation and culture offer such means of accomplishing this configuration. Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian is one of them. In keeping with the aesthetic of mapping the globe, Jaffrey’s objective is comprehensiveness. At 758 pages and with more than 650 recipes for preparing beans, peas, lentils, nuts, vegetables, grains, and dairy products, World Vegetarian gathers flavors and food styles from around the globe, organizes them in categories that make them easy to find, and presents them to the reader in a format that is easy to read, with instructions that are easy to follow. The dust jacket states that the book contains “dishes from five continents [that] touch on virtually all the world’s best loved flavors for an unsurpassed selection of vegetarian fare.” A comprehensive reference for worldwide vegetarian cuisine, the text is global in its expanse: World Vegetarian contains more than two hundred recipes for vegetables, with “at least a dozen recipes for eggplant alone.”3 The book offers access to all corners of the globe: in a single meal, a diner can span several continents, sampling the local flavors from each. The book promises both authenticity and access; food becomes the substrate of the multicultural transaction. The range of recipes for eggplant—cited as a twenty-page exemplar of varied, delicious treatments—offers global variations of a single ingredient, as opposed to the global spread of a single brand with its narrow range of signature flavors.
The ostensible purpose of Jaffrey’s cookbook is to transform the reader into a world vegetarian similar to the author, although she is not a vegetarian and has written many other, nonvegetarian cookbooks. To achieve this, the book strives for inclusiveness in both its content and its audience. The first line of the introduction proclaims, “This book is written for everyone.” Although her next clause narrows “everyone” by classifying its members according to their vegetarian status, the idea that the book’s audience is the entire globe is emphasized. Her book’s “everyone” is the raceless, amorphous mix of all of us, bound together in our need to eat and our desire to sample new flavors. In reading and imagining, cooking and eating, we all become the world vegetarians of the book’s title. If the book strives for comprehensiveness, then it also does not restrict its audience according to race or socioeconomic background. Jaffrey does not address only those who can afford fresh lychee or Kobe beef; instead, her readers are both the “sophisticated food enthusiasts [and the] impoverished students” whom she sees waiting in the same line at the stand to buy Asian noodles in London.4 Rather than concentrating on diversity defined by racial differences overcome by universal commonalities, Jaffrey focuses on a diversity defined by socioeconomic difference overcome by the blurring of borders that make a wide variety of foods affordable to a culturally heterogeneous body of diners.
As Shameem Black observes, World Vegetarian conforms in most ways to the conventional definitions of cosmopolitanism.5 In addition to her goals of limitless inclusion and comprehensive cataloging, Jaffrey imagines the eater as a global citizen by using herself as a model. This eater is already at home everywhere, and the cookbook provides the means by which she can dine everywhere at once: she eats at home in the world. The cookbook does not, however, create the cosmopolitan subject because it observes an already existing condition. Instead, her reason for writing this book derives from Jaffrey’s observations of globalism’s pervasive effect on culinary culture. She notes, “We seem to be heading toward a softening of boundaries between all cuisines.”6 She does not imply the erasure of difference or the abdication of personal preference or cultural allegiance in favor of a complete lack of differentiation in which all influences converge in a single culinary tradition (the ultimate in fusion cuisine). While culinary traditions may share certain features, Jaffrey does not suggest that all foods everywhere are the same. Her book highlights culinary commonalities and uses them to create meals based on shared flavors. She also describes the cultural specificities of each dish, describing the differences in a system of cultural exchange and interchange that equalizes their values.7
The analyses of the cosmopolitanism of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks look at her internationality, her narrative voice, and her reader’s internationality. Her cookbooks also construct space, using familiar tactics to represent nations. If her previous works mapped India for her reader, then her task in World Vegetarian is to map the world and populate it with readers, eaters, and cooks from around the globe, uniting them over meals both real and imagined. In this way, she practices a special form of gastrocartography: mapping space through taste. By following conventional maps, which are less about accurate reproductions of space than they are about depictions of space that support ideological and rhetorical objectives, Jaffrey’s book is disinterested in the territorialization exemplified by the many maps that represent foreign spaces.8 Instead it is interested in mapping spaces in ways that populate them but leave the reading and eating suspended above and between cultures yet engaged with them in constant material production and reproduction. Ultimately, regional cookbooks—including Jaffrey’s de-regionalized cookbook—share the same basic features of cartography: they initiate a relationship between territory and knowledge. Indeed, engaging with World Vegetarian is to come to know space intimately, in the most embodied fashion possible.
In her World Vegetarian, Madhur Jaffrey depicts cultural spaces by describing culinary habits. She connects eating bodies and literal spaces in somatic, sentimental ways, incorporating her readers in her construction of the world. This world is not of the past; it is of the present and the future. It is “dynamic and imaginative,” encouraging readers to place themselves in its crucial formative moments.9 She both brings lands together and distinguishes them through shared flavors. The imagined communities of Benedict Anderson, invoked by Shameem Black in her analysis of Jaffrey’s cookbooks, are not just the recipes’ cultural designations but also the global communities of its readers that the book creates. These communities thus achieve more than simply an abstract understanding of cultural production. Instead, Jaffrey tries to connect them to real spaces occupied by eating people. Her representations of space defy the dimensions of conventional cartography, although the mapping of space in World Vegetarian follows many of its functions. The bonds between eating people that constitute the substrate of her mapping blur the distinctions of maps from other forms of literary and artistic production by instantiating the logic governing them all. The result of the cartographies that she draws is a sense of place that implies the wideness of the world but still is small enough to fit into a single bite.10
Beans and split peas are a good example of Jaffrey’s gastrocartography. In counting the number of ways in which beans and split peas can be cooked, Jaffrey recounts recipes as the footprints marking her travels across nations, starting with
a 6000-year-old dish, the famous khichri of India, that combines split peas and rice in a stew and seasons it with cumin seeds and ginger, and going on to an unusual and elegant black bean soup from Costa Rica flavored with green coriander and green peppers, … a whole world that remains unexplored.11
Jaffrey’s work plunges into this unexplored terrain, orienting her reader in this world. To do this, she begins with a temporal engagement and then moves geographically along the axis of the global South. Jaffrey and her reader move through space bean by bean.
These gastrocartographies do not configure space nation by nation in ways that make their boundaries as distinct as one might find on a map or a globe, and Jaffrey further rearranges the map by juxtaposing countries in seemingly random alignments. The ordering of the recipes mixes them geographically, inviting readers to stride quickly across borders.12 Rather than the familiar ordering of the world, with nations in their conventional places, the ordering principle is gastronomic resonances that guide the taster through unfamiliar terrain by means of shared flavors. For example, the section on the various preparations of cabbage reveals the logic of ordering that transcends geography by offering landscapes of taste. Tang Chu Bow Pai Tsai from China (Sweet-and-Sour Cabbage) on page 148 shares the sweetness of sugar and marmalade with the dried red currants in Turkey’s Tembel Dolma (Cabbage with Rice and Currants) on the following page and complements the spicy bite of the former’s ginger with the latter’s piquancy of cinnamon and black pepper. The recipe for Tembel Dolma is followed by the Indonesian Sambal Kol (Stir-Fried Green Cabbage with Spicy Red Paste), which graduates from black to cayenne pepper. Borders draw nations closer as they delineate their spatial separation. The book maps national character not simply by the flavors unique to each country but by the similarities and differences of recipes that serve as national ambassadors. Meanwhile, the distinct political units of Jaffrey’s gastrocartographies create embodied citizens whose biopower—enacted in consumption and digestion—contributes to Jaffrey’s larger project of democracy and freedom.
Jaffrey nonetheless includes some stateless foods, dishes that are assigned to no locale and are instead suspended beyond even the fluctuating geographies of taste mapping the cookbook. The Curried Red Cabbage with Cranberry Juice recipe following Sambal Kol is a stateless invention of Jaffrey’s own making, a dish that combines the Indian flavors she learned as a girl with new, American flavors she learned as an adult: “I grew up with neither red cabbage nor cranberry juice. America has taught me to use both.”13 Like Jaffrey’s recipe for Corn with Ginger, Cauliflower Stir-Fried with Ginger and Cilantro, Peas with Ginger and Sesame Oil, and Whole Wheat Couscous with Cumin and Cauliflower,14 Curried Red Cabbage with Cranberry Juice lacks the national designations of other dishes.
I came up with [Curried Red Cabbage with Cranberry Juice] one Christmas when I wanted to braise red cabbage with Indian seasonings. I also did not want to use any red wine, whose tartness and color helps to keep the red cabbage red. And so I came up with the idea of substituting cranberry juice and was very happy with the results. … The fennel seeds add a very special, sweet flavor, which I have loved since childhood.15
This recipe inclines toward diasporic yearning: it instructs in the preparation of a Christmas dish that retains the deep reds of the holiday season in the United States16 yet is refracted by nostalgia for foreign shores, signified by Jaffrey’s use of curry powder. While coriander, peppercorns, and cloves are perhaps the stereotypical inclusions in the Christmas flavor palate (an always already “foreign” assemblage of spices with a lengthy imperialist history), turmeric, chilies, cumin, and brown mustard seeds are perhaps new faces at the feast. This dish maps taste as it marks attenuation and as it also maps the world by bringing together disparate cultural influences in a single mouthful.
In her presentation of the universality of rice, subject to the modifications of color, length, and density demonstrated in the color photos, Jaffrey artfully arranges this staple grain of the world in a single tableau. She complements the visual array in the color photos with a description of the geographic specificities of its worldwide consumption:
In all of Asia and many parts of the Mediterranean I find it remarkable that everybody prefers their own rice. If you are used to eating rice, you are used to eating a particular rice and nothing else quite satisfies. … In Bali, you will hear that the only perfect rice is the plump Balinese one, grown under the watchful eye of the goddess Sri. The Japanese, who could export cheap rice from California, will pay six times as much for their own because they insist that it is sweeter and has more texture. The Italians prefer their own risotto rice, while the Greeks and Turks, who have similar rices, will prefer to eat what they grow. In India, much of the west coast thinks that that the best daily rice is their partially milled red rice and in the south, it is “boiled rice,” a parboiled, medium-grain rice that sits on every single plate and banana leaf.17
In the globalized array of foods, rice is subject to its own provinciality. However, among the plain rice dishes on pages 375 and 376, only the basmati rice recipe of India has a national identity. Meanwhile, the nationalized rice dishes on pages 377 and 378 exhibit the morphological differences that mark them as exotic: Plain “Forbidden” Black Rice is so visually striking that Jaffrey declares that “you almost need to create a meal around it,” and its color, paired with grilled red peppers with romesco sauce or surrounded with “sliced summer tomatoes and mozzarella—with fresh basil and extra-virgin olive oil, of course”—creates a dish whose visual appeal complements its gustatory richness. The black, red, white, and green color contrasts are the basis for a culinary consumption of the exotic other, and the gastrocartographies of these plates surround China by Italy and Spain.
In mapping the globe through its rice and her insistence on national preferences, Jaffrey establishes two things about American rice consumption: first, that American rice is an inferior product that can be most suitably treated according to the American-style food rules that privilege speed and ease over flavor and texture; and, second, that American appetites for rice follow a more fickle model of cosmopolitanism, one marked by scant attention and superficial engagement. In writing about the international tastes for provincial varieties of rice, she describes American appetites for the exotic: “It is only in America, where rice is still not in the blood, that every new rice is embraced as the wonder of the day.”18 Meanwhile, in her instructions for preparing Plain Long-Grain Rice, Jaffrey acknowledges that cooks in a rush may not have time to wash and soak their rice, so offers a recipe to accommodate these conditions. In advising her readers which variety to cook, she writes: “It is best to use American-style long-grain rice here. It would be a pity to waste the basmati.”19 This is more than simply an acknowledgment that different ingredients should be prepared according to best practices in accordance with their provenance. If an ingredient requires a specific touch, of course it is wasteful to gloss over necessary steps, ruining the ingredient or cheating the eater of its flavorful promise. Indeed, the recipe for Tengai Saadam (South Indian Coconut Rice) on page 382 uses long-grain white rice, preparing it according to the recipe Jaffrey provides a few pages earlier. The language of waste, however, puts American-style long-grain rice into a wholly different register. It does not require care and is part of the dismissive regimen that both alienates American vegetarians from their counterparts around the globe and makes them into culinary cultural dilettantes.
Cross-referencing the index with the book’s geographic regions reveals uneven geographical distributions of the recipes’ origins. It is here that the cartography of the volume becomes clear: most of the recipes are Indian, placing India at the epicenter from the globe, which radiates outward from South Asia and across the global South. This means that Jaffrey’s cosmopolitanism is that of an Indian traveler at home in the world, which is supported by a map drawn to reflect this specific cosmopolitical engagement. This in turn complements Jaffrey’s intervention in the debates of gastropoetics, shifting it away from authenticity and toward an expansive sense of self by creating a world that accommodates her movements.20 Both Jaffrey’s gastrocartographic and gastropoetical practices accord with Black’s observations of how World Vegetarian “construct[s] an expanded sense of [Jaffrey’s] own Indianness” as India constitutes the geographic home orienting the book.
World Vegetarian’s recipes for eggplant provides a clear sense of how a single ingredient can map the globe in ways that establish Indianness as its base. About eggplant, Jaffrey writes: “Almost every nation in the world cooks it,” unlike chickpea flour, which is, according to Jaffrey, “known in limited parts of the East and West and totally unknown in others. It deserves better.” Jaffrey continues,
How they cook it is what makes the dish regional or national. If there are mustard and fennel seeds in it, it must be Bengali. If it is creamed with olive oil and lemon, it has to have a Middle Eastern or a Greek/Turkish bias. If it is cooked with honey, it could be Moroccan.21
This passage is open to a number of interpretations that point toward how an ingredient can be used as a tool for mapping a global gastrocartography. However, in the twenty pages of eggplant recipes, a significant number are from South Asia, and the majority of South Asian recipes are from India. The number of eggplant recipes is distributed according to national origin: four for India; two each for Turkey, Hong Kong, and Sri Lanka; one for Korea, Trinidad, Japan, China, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia; and one also for a stateless, Tuscan-inspired recipe.
By itself, the prominence of South Asian eggplant recipes may not be noteworthy (although Monsanto’s work with Bt brinjal, examined briefly later, provides a counterpoint for Jaffrey’s use of eggplant as a gastrocartographic key). The index also devotes five columns to Indian recipes—significantly more than those of any other nation and more than those of whole other regions combined. The representation of South Asian recipes thus redraws the map to enlarge South Asia and shrink other nations. The five columns of Indian recipes are complemented by a much shorter, but no less rich, selection of Sri Lankan recipes. Other South Asian recipes are scattered throughout the book and configure space in interesting ways: Bombay-Style Green Mango Pickle, Bengali-Style Green Beans, and Madras-Style Spicy Yogurt Drink stand apart from the rest of India as geographies of style rather than as national representatives. Other recipes work their own geographic alchemy: Kashmir is granted a degree of sovereignty by Kashmiri-Style Tea and a chutney of its own; so, too, is Palestine, with a complete meal of Eggplant with Garlic, Rice with Lentils and Browned Onions, and Tomato-Cucumber Salad.22 In this way, the world of World Vegetarian is one with deep roots in South Asia.
The book’s globalism is not necessarily along the axis of India’s increasing cultural and financial power abroad. Indeed, how the book maps the globe may reflect how its author has experienced the world, as Shameem Black argues and as Anita Mannur examines at length in her book Culinary Fictions. As a cosmopolitan Indian who has traveled widely, Jaffrey tries global cuisines in each locale in which she sets foot and translates them, not just for other world travelers who set out from other points of origin, but also for the much narrower culinary lexicon of a woman who learned her culinary skills as a child in India. This means that the book recasts the globe to show the flows of global capital and reimagines the globe as resisting these flows. To observe that World Vegetarian is an image of a culinary world as seen through the eyes of a woman on the move does not account for Jaffrey’s observations about her audience in the earlier sections of the book, even as it acknowledges that she speaks from a position of authority as an Indian woman who cooks. In other words, it is perhaps true that Jaffrey’s book is a translation of her own culinary experiences around the world. She offers only her own, subjective view of a world shaped by her own hands, relying on her relatively limited expertise to reproduce these dishes, inflecting them with her own accents as she prioritizes taste over an accuracy that she may fail to reproduce. Rather than attempt to produce Indonesian Corn Soup using imprecise techniques not honed by decades of culturally specific practice, Jaffrey must use her own expertise to produce reliable results.23 Reading her book in this way, however, does not fully account for the cultural transactions between Jaffrey and her readers and between Jaffrey and the cooks on whose authority her culinary representations rely.
One of the features of cartography that Ian J. Barrow describes is that maps obscure territory even as they establish territorialization.24 The maps that Jaf-frey draws pose the same risk to less-than-careful readers, obscuring the lives of those living on the ground even as they show how to reproduce them. The book’s invocation of the Third World woman is one such area of elision. In other words, Jaffrey’s maps highlight and then remove certain global citizens. Jaffrey’s introduction to the section of the text listing recipes for beans uses a universalized image:
The oldest women of the house—generally my grandmother—would place a few handfuls of lentils, split peas, or beans into the big metal plates we each held. Quite automatically, we drew the legumes to the edge nearest our bodies. Then, in an ancient ritual, enacted as if in a half-remembered dance, we began pushing the lentils toward the far side one by one, plucking up and discarding all sticks and stones as we did so. Sometimes we sang, sometimes we gossiped, sometimes we were lost in our own silences.
As we were doing this in India, Chinese, Syrians, Mexicans, and Peruvians were doing the same in their own courtyards, gardens and kitchens.25
The culturally specific activity of a group of Indian women cleaning lentils echoes the identical activity in households around the world, households in India, China, Syria, Mexico, and Peru that are distinguished by cooking processes and economic privilege from the West and the global North. Removed from their cultural contexts and placed next to one another in a global system, cooking methods thus adhere to the same model of globalization that Gayatri Spivak describes in Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet, in which “globalization is achieved by the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.”26 Cooking methods bring the globe into a coherent culinary whole by establishing a uniformity that can be achieved only by placing individual elements in a system of knowledge that levels their values even as it acknowledges culturally specific points of origin. In other words, the globe assumes familiar contours by pointing out that these women’s labor is the same everywhere and is of value to Western readers because it will put them in touch with something important about themselves by pointing out their difference from them.
In her description, Jaffrey offers a poem that “unites us all,” by the Armenian poet Zahrad, entitled “A Woman Cleaning Lentils”:
A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A lentil, a lentil, a lentil, a stone.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black. A stone.
Suddenly a word. A lentil.
A lentil, a word, a word next to another word. A sentence.
A word, a word, a word, a nonsense speech.
Then an old song.
Then an old dream.
A life, another life, a hard life. A lentil. A life.
An easy life. A hard life. Why easy? Why hard?
Lives next to each other. A life. A word. A lentil.
A green one, a black one, a green one, a black one, pain.
A green song, a green lentil, a black one, a stone.
A lentil, a stone, a stone, a lentil.27
As this poem suggests, cooking binds our bodies in a way that the very global economy that grants us access to esoteric ingredients divides and isolates us. Cleaning, cooking, and eating beans reminds us of “what our ancestors did to plow the earth and wrest from it foods to nourish us … something we of the supermarket culture have quite forgotten.”28 This very act of remembrance makes Jaffrey very thoroughly, very bodily Indian as it also conjoins her Indian woman’s body to other women’s bodies halfway around the world. The contours of the globe conform to the shape of each body participating in the “half-remembered dance” that reinforces family and cultural bonds as it feeds other hungry bodies. However, Jaffrey has outlined a curious axis of remembrance: she cites India, China, Syria, Mexico, and Peru as countries in which women still perform the ritual of cleaning beans. Women in the United States and western Europe apparently do not participate, as they constitute the “supermarket culture” whose amnesia has unhitched its members from the rest of the world.29 South and East exemplify an earthbound globality that can teach North and West how to reconnect with the very substance of life. For Jaffrey, becoming global in this way entails an act of remembrance, in which food recovers its links to the processes used to prepare it and to the other eating bodies around the world. What this means is that the body of the Third Woman becomes the shuttle in the transaction between the inauthentic, amnesiac body and the site of healthful authenticity that proliferates in Third World spaces.
There are two specific, yet interlinked problems with this figure concerning images of Third World women in many regional cookbooks. The first, most immediate, problem is that she vanishes. Jaffrey’s woman cleaning lentils appears early in the text and then nowhere else, jettisoned in favor of the trappings of First World modernity to include the image of limitless mobility. Two pages after the “ancient ritual” of cleaning lentils by sliding them one by one across a large metal plate while gossiping and singing with other women and by also implying that this is a global practice, Jaffrey begins her list of steps for preparing legumes with a disavowal of canned beans—beans that the woman preparing lentils will never eat but that their First World counterparts will reflexively use. Jaffrey’s list follows the logic from acquisition to consumption as she moves from buying, storing, picking over and washing, soaking, cooking, and seasoning beans. Over these steps, especially in seasoning the beans by pouring spiced, heated ghee or oil over them, the specter of the Third World woman hovers. But by the time we get to the recipe from Costa Rica for Black Beans with Rice, or “Spotted Rooster,” on page 14, she has fled. Describing the ubiquity of this dish, Jaffrey writes, “So pervasive is Costa Rica’s national breakfast dish, even the local McDonald’ses and Burger Kings feel the need to have it on their menus.” Because fast-food restaurants have this local dish on their menus, the Third World woman whose labor is so romanticized in the tedium of plucking stones and twigs from the beans disappears in favor of the other international flavors of the fast-food chains and their connections to globalization and international commerce.
The second problem with using the Third World woman is that Jaffrey depends on a structure of separation and alienation, a mode of forgetting, or “half remembrance,” to intensify her power in the text. This means that her alienation from the readers becomes essential to the sentimentality that connects her to the readers. The pages of the cookbook putatively invite them into her previously unknowable, desirable life. But in actuality, they do not: the imprecise handful of lentils poured onto her thali becomes the precisely measured one cup that is used in Tarka Masoor Dal (Red Lentils with Cumin and Scallion) or in Masoor Dal Hyderibadi (Red Lentils Hyderibadi) once we step out of the kitchen of Jaffrey’s youth and into the kitchen where we will prepare her grandmother’s bean dishes.30 This is a woman whom we can imagine but whom we cannot know. We almost get to know her as Jaffrey points out her labor, but then the text sidesteps her life. The distinction is much more sharply represented in the poem about picking lentils, in which the proximity of lentils to stones highlights their similarity in shape, size, and shared space even as it underscores their difference by distinguishing an undesirable hard life from a desirable easy one. We all are lentils and stones in the same pile, segregated only by the hardness and ease of our everyday lives. The act of separating the two questions that very act of separating the hard and undesirable from the soft and is a song of solidarity. You, whose life is hard: I recognize the proximity of my easy life so very close to your own, and it is this small act of picking over lentils that calls attention to this closeness. Yet once the page is turned, the bag of lentils from the supermarket obviates the activity in the poem. We no longer have to pick over my lentils, and we no longer have recognize my closeness to the song’s metaphor of little stones and twigs that can crack our teeth, even as we prepare the dish that welcomes us into your home. We can pick through the lentils—but only if we want to. Meanwhile, the “hard lives” of Third World women everywhere season our food. Although we eat their food, we suffer none of their privations. By the time the page has turned, we have stepped out of the Third World.
The reason why Jaffrey’s invocation of the Third World woman is problematic is because, despite the call to solidarity in Jaffrey’s description of women cleaning lentils, there remains an incommensurability between the First and Third Worlds. In this gap lies the difference in privilege that segregates the First World woman from her Third World sisters, precisely because neither can cross the span between them. Other, even more complex figures populate this space. One of them is the busy Indian woman who, in 2005, made headlines in the New York Times by buying frozen and ready-made food. Twenty-four-year-old Rujuta Jog of Bangalore, a recently married office worker, was guilty of buying her yogurt and using Pillsbury flour to make rotis. She works forty hours a week outside her home and spends part of what she makes on “ready-to-drink packaged Nestlé buttermilk, prepared ginger-garlic paste and even frozen chickens [she doesn’t] have to clean.” For her, they save time and are inexpensive. Even the markets where a Mumbai woman might buy her produce have changed, selling pasta alongside basmati rice and offering the same range of international vegetables and fruits that I can buy at the Whole Foods around the corner from my home. As culinary influences and products become available in the markets where the Third World woman shops, the recipes that she prepares will not be subject to translation because they will not have to be translated; they already are framed in the familiar lexicon of canned beans, prepared meats, and vegetables such as broccoli and iceberg lettuce.31 Increasingly, developing countries are experiencing the same culinary drift, for example, in colonial India, according to Parama Roy’s Alimentary Tracts. The problem is that in order to maintain their credibility, these shifts must go unremarked in regional cookbooks.
Culinary representations, which allegedly offer a true cultural communion, still take advantage of the Third World woman, romanticizing her labor and making her impoverishment the base for authenticity. If she had a choice, would she grind her spices using a stone? Would she trust her food to an unevenly heated grate? Does she envy the easier life of the First World woman? What substitutions does she make in her recipes before they are translated, to hide what she may lack, correct mistakes, or improve on her recipes? Why are these recipes unstable even in their rawest incarnations? And how do we flatten her world so that only one figure may emerge globally as the trusted cook: a woman with a covered head and worn hands, kneeling in native garb in front of raw ingredients? Meanwhile, not only does the text conveniently dispose of her when she is no longer needed, but the world in which she lives looks vastly different on the ground from the one described as “authentic.”
This means that the Third World Woman participates in what Timothy Brennan calls “the image-function of the periphery.”32 He describes the Third World woman’s value best in regard to the lack of modernity of the villages of rural India or Latin-America, which allows the Third World woman to stand at the cultural periphery as “a countersystem of value, a hope.” She is emblematic of the periphery’s charms, which Brennan sees as having to do with “the art of conversation, the decrease of speed, the altruistic act of hospitality, and the decommercialization of artistic performance, all of them important psychological and emotional outlets for the negative energy overwhelming a metropolis characterized by anxiety, fear, and restlessness”—and, I would add, ennui, alienation, and other hungers of the spirit that a meal from a rustic kitchen can readily satisfy.33 To put it uncharitably, like the artist whose work is imitated at the Luxor and the trees cultivated in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, and the folk doctor whose identifications of plants contribute to the medicines of large pharmaceutical interests, the regional cookbook writer often borrows liberally with little meaningful attribution. Jaffrey’s mapping of the globe prompts a response to Brennan’s challenge to those who borrow what he calls the “cultural inventions” of others: “Ideas routinely stolen from other civilizations are sold to a docile public without even a thought to paying for the goods taken.” I repeat that challenge here in regard to how it affects the relationship of culinary representations with the bodies of women who model its practices, and the royalties paid to regional cookbook authors, because the pillaging of the Third World woman’s knowledge and the oversimplification of her home and habits resonate with his argument, though they may differ in kind but not degree. Brennan writes:
In an entertainment economy like our own, where fatuous scriptwriters in Hollywood are paid large sums for options on some micro-twist to a clichéd story line … there is not even a hint that there might be legal claim under the principle of intellectual property rights to folk healing or the copied designs of a theme hotel. If the demand for royalties might in the latter case be absurd, let us by all means make it anyway to underline the absurdity of a system that sells patents on vitamins, on story lines, and in the future (why not?) on the air. To ask for payment is to expose the process of appropriation occurring asymmetrically on behalf of a country that seeks to extend its national property rights laws universally.34
Can the Third World woman whose recipes for tarka appear in Jaffrey’s instructions for living in communion with the world; can this woman insist on a generous slice of the royalty payments that are the invisible underside of the regional cookbook’s engagement with authenticity? What is her due?
The flip side of the world vegetarian that Jaffrey maps may not be the provincial vegetarians eating iceberg salads garnished with pallid, grainy tomato slices in the continental United States, nor is it the world’s meat eaters consuming slabs of cooked flesh. Nor is it the world travelers who trust no food unless a familiar logo adorns the package. It is perhaps another pair of world travelers: Cargill and Monsanto, two of the world’s largest agribusinesses. A perhaps not so minor aspect of these travelers is that U.S. corporations have legally protected personhood that grants them a range of rights along with suprahuman privileges.35 Among these is the ability to have a real presence in multiple locales at the same time: If Madhur Jaffrey’s world vegetarian is a woman with a foot on every continent, then Cargill and Monsanto are even more dexterous world travelers. Unlike people, multinational corporations maintain a real presence in many spaces in simultaneity and perpetuity, a feat that Jaffrey attempts to teach her readers in the assembly of a multinational meal. Unlike the feast that I prepare that focuses the world on my plate, the plural presences of multinational corporations work as components of a monolithic organism designed to produce food. For example, Cargill’s production strategy creates phosphate fertilizer in the United States that is then used in Argentina and the United States to grow soybeans to be pressed for oil; the soybean meal is then sent to Thailand to grow chickens to be processed, cooked, and packaged for sale in Japan and Europe.36 But whereas Jaffrey’s world traveler celebrates difference and diversity, the multinational corporation’s touch is a homogenizing one.37 As it intervenes in local economies and communities, Cargill is Cargill, whether it is in Egypt, the United States, or Brazil. Rather than be altered by its experiences in other spaces as Jaffrey has been and her readers will be, the multinational corporation alters these spaces, sometimes to devastating effect.38
For example, when describing the role of multinational corporations in the mustard oil crisis of 1998, Vandana Shiva implies that the casualties prompting the ban might be laid at the feet of Monsanto as it sought to export soybeans to India. To prod the Indian government into taking action against local producers of mustard oil, it was widely believed that agents of the corporation tainted the oil, killing and sickening people to drum up the hysteria that resulted in a ban against an ingredient that Shiva identifies as central to Indian cultural identity. The poisonings and the consequent ban neatly coincided with the U.S. government’s exemption of agricultural commodities from the May 1998 trade sanctions imposed as a punitive measure against India’s nuclear weapons tests. Shiva suggests that heavy corporate lobbying, coupled with underhanded tactics, succeeded in granting U.S.-based multinationals a larger market share of the global South. In answer to why the multinational corporations would go to such lengths to move their seeds, Shiva responds that global pressures from First World markets resulted in a surplus of soybeans that they could not sell. “How to get rid of all this increasingly unsaleable produce?” she asks. “The answer could be to dump it on the Third World, in countries such as India, where the public had not yet been alerted to the possible dangers of GM [genetically modified] crops.” A temporary market share is not in Monsanto’s long-term interest, though the elimination of mustard plants is. Shiva explains:
By encouraging the Indian government to ban the sale of mustard oil throughout the country, the food multinationals were provided with a perfect market opening for their products—which would enable them to dominate, and on a permanent basis, the market in that country for vegetable oil. And, if traders cannot sell mustard oil, they will not buy mustard from farmers and farmers will stop growing it. This will lead to the extinction of a crop that is central to India’s farming system and food culture. Once mustard oil has gone out of cultivation, even were the ban on mustard oil to be lifted, we would still remain dependent on soyabean for our edible oil. If the government were to allow us one day to reintroduce mustard oil it could only be a patented genetically engineered variety—as Monsanto has already patented all the brassica grown in India.
Shiva indirectly connects Monsanto’s desire to monopolize edible oil to food riots in Indonesia as dependence on global market forces increased the price of oil, putting it out of reach for the average Indonesian consumer. Her indictment of their deeds places at the feet of Monsanto and Cargill the responsibility for global civil unrest rising from a lack of affordable food.39
At the time of this writing, the Indian government is suing Monsanto for biopiracy, claiming that its attempt to patent Bt brinjal, an indigenous species of eggplant used in a wide range of dishes and exported abroad, constitutes theft of a native crop. This is the first legal action of its kind anywhere.40 The public outcry against Monsanto’s “frankencrop” variety of Bt brinjal prompted the government to ban it in 2010 for an indefinite period of time, stating that the corporation’s work on GM varieties of native plants violates India’s Biological Diversity Act of 2002. If Jaffrey’s use of eggplants in World Vegetarian as the model for a widely available ingredient allows her to map global spaces using the different preparations of this vegetable, then Monsanto’s attempt to genetically modify and then market brinjal works along a different axis. It is an example of an attempt to gain biological control over various local foods and economic control over the people who eat them.
It perhaps would be overreaching to speak of the iniquities of Jaffrey’s book in the same breath as those of U.S.-based multinational corporations. She does not differentiate between the authentic and the inauthentic or the global and the local that leads to the conflict between farmers and the multinational corporations that exploit their labor, intrude on regional markets, and draw local populations into penurious relationships with global capital. But her cookbook does display—and attempts to overcome—a parallel with the relationship that these corporations maintain with the local populations on which they depend for their profits. In other words, Jaffrey’s invocation of the Third World woman and her mapping of the world replicate the structure of this conflict.
Despite the tension between the hypervisibility and the invisibility of the laboring women in her cookbooks, Jaffrey’s work serves as a crosscurrent against the practices of large-scale agribusiness that map a similar, complementary geography: Jaffrey, born in India, travels to Britain and then the United States, where she writes a book that maps a consumable world; Monsanto, ConAgra, and Cargill, born in the United States, move abroad to establish global networks of production and consumption. Jaffrey describes the book as “[her] handpicked collection of the world’s best vegetarian recipes for you to cook at home. … Of course the recipes are chosen from my point of view and reflect my taste.”41 As Shameem Black argues, the “world vegetarian” of the title is actually Jaffrey herself, a world traveler whose book constitutes her travel narrative. In it, she advocates a model of cosmopolitan engagement with the world. However problematic this engagement, it binds people bodily to one another by connecting the fundamental aspects of human life. It is perhaps something of an overstatement to suggest that the book participates in a form of global ecological activism, but the question must be asked: Is the woman cleaning lentils the same as the woman counting the suicide seeds that might have claimed her husband’s life?42 This implies that the book opens an ecocritical commentary on the relationship among people, plants, eating, and living in a cosmopolitan mode. It is in the comparison between the objectives of Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian and the activity of the multinational corporation that quite a different picture of the world emerges, in which global eats and eating the globe yield to the more complicated cartographies mapping how and what we consume.
1. My chapter examines the concept of worlding (particularly as pertains to the Third World woman) in ways that are in keeping with Gayatri Spivak’s notion of how the Third World is worlded. She articulates this idea in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
2. In thinking through models of cosmopolitanism, Bruce Robbins invokes Neil Smith’s rethinking of space:
As Neil Smith has suggested, rethinking the imperfections of democracy requires rethinking space: the pertinent subnational and supranational units of agency and communication, differentials of a scale that rule out many of our most frequent moralizing, universalizing gestures and demand a politics that is also differential. The most generous and useful way to begin rethinking cosmopolitanism, it seems to me, is neither as ideal unplaceableness nor as sordid elitism, but as a way of relativizing and problematizing the scale and the units of democracy.
Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 261.
3. Madhur Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999), ix.
4. Ibid., viii.
5. Shameem Black, “Recipes for Cosmopolitanism,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 1–30.
6. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, viii.
7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten [Imperative to Reimagine the Planet] (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 1999), 44.
8. Ian J. Barrow’s Making History, Making Territory: British Mapping in India, c. 1756–1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003) is an excellent, comprehensive study of the connection between cartography and British imperialism in India.
Matthew Henry Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) states that “imperialism and mapmaking intersect in the most basic manner. Both are fundamentally concerned with territory and knowledge. … To govern territories, one must know them” (1).
Madhur Jaffrey’s books exhibit not necessarily a colonial, imperialist relationship between cooking and tourism (warnings about which abound in Lisa M. Heldke’s Exotic Appetites) but perhaps a postcolonial desire for supranational citizenship. The basic mechanisms, however, that power the imperialist dynamic among map reader, cartographer, and space precede the mechanisms that undergird representations of space in culinary writing.
9. According to Ian J. Barrow,
The land [the cartographers of India] depicted had histories of ownership and occupation and that, if carefully crafted, their maps could portray those histories in an effective and seemingly direct manner. But they were also aware that they could make their maps more appealing, authoritative, and beguiling if they used maps as a way of incorporating the past into the present. In other words, map makers would not only show how the present political situation was derived from what had occurred previously, they would also invite their readers, through a perusal of symbols, juxtapositions, and wording of the map, to relive and once more participate in those moments in the past which made the present possible. The history that they wrote and drew into a map was dynamic and imaginative; it encouraged the map viewers to place themselves in the crucial formative moments of the past. (1–2)
Barrow’s book is not about “how modern mapping contributed to the imagining of an Indian nation.”
Nor do I examine the processes whereby an essentialized nation may have been projected into the past as a way of buttressing Indian nationalist agendas. Instead, I focus on how colonial cartography depicted histories of British territorial possession in India, and how these histories helped the British to make themselves legitimate as rulers while also reinforcing the construction of a British sense of national identity. Hence, this book is not about the construction of an Indian geo-body, but about the making of a British colonial territorial state. (12–13)
His work instead highlights how mapping obeys ideological impulses. In other words, the maps he analyzes are not about what they represent but are about something else: the management of space. Similarly, regional cookbooks do the same: designating spaces through flavor palates and national dishes. Thus, Jaffrey’s book is largely disinterested in faithful reproductions of space in dry, ethnographic tones. It is however, interested in engaging the cartographer’s basic tools to create a decolonized, transnational space of porous borders, albeit a mappable, manageable space nonetheless.
10. Jaffrey’s construction of place in her mapping of the world closely resembles the literary cartographies analyzed by Rick Van Noy in his Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003). Quoting Wallace Stegner, he writes: “A place could require poetry because it is more than the sum feelings, and concepts—gives us what we call the sense of place. To bring it into being, we need a complex intersection of cartography and literature, a charting of interior and exterior landscapes” (xvi).
11. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, ix.
12. According to Shameem Black in “Recipes for Cosmopolitanism,” “As her cookbooks register and direct an audience’s inchoate desire to engage affectively with a wider world, they promote imaginative border crossing through the readerly and performative labor of cooking” (2).
13. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, 151. Anita Mannur offers a detailed analysis of Jaffrey’s diasporic desire in Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), describing how Jaffrey serves her audiences in the United States: “As a diasporic subject who has adapted her cuisine for American kitchens, Jaffrey enables cooks in American kitchens to take pleasure in the complexity of Indian flavors that might be easily created with American spices and ingredients” (195). Mannur also describes a community of Indians living abroad: “Placing patriotism squarely in the middle of her agenda, Jaffrey’s words are also directed to an audience of responsible and ‘patriotic’ Indians in the United States who care enough about their nation’s culinary image to portray an ‘authentic’ version of Indianness in the space of their homes” (34).
14. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, 171, 162, 257, 498.
15. Ibid., 707.
16. The red and white colors of the U.S. Christmas season were made permanent by Haddon Sundbloom’s famous paintings of Santa Claus as part of a Christmastime advertising campaign by Coca-Cola. See Bruce D Forbes, Christmas: A Candid History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 92–93. This means that Jaffrey’s stateless dish is the odd stepchild of a global commercial culture, which complicates in interesting ways the book’s critique of multinational corporations.
17. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, 371.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 376.
20. Shameem Black writes in “Recipes for Cosmopolitanism”:
Gastropoetics are often discussed in the language of authenticity and fraudulence, read as ways of inventing ties to an ancestral imagined community or as performances of fakery that exploit the enhanced social capital associated with the foreign and the novel. Jaffrey’s intervention in this debate, I suggest, is to construct an expanded sense of her own Indianness (and, implicitly, of other ethnic and national affiliations of her readers). (20)
21. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, viii, ix.
22. Ibid. 699–700, 207, 657, 650, 659–60, 191–92, 404, 638.
23. Ibid., 584.
24. Barrow, Making History, Making Territory, 48.
25. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, 3.
26. Spivak, Imperative, 44.
27. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, 3.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 68, 69.
31. Monica Bhide, “As Cash Flows In, India Goes Out to Eat,” New York Times, April 20, 2005, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/dining/20indi.html?sq=mumbai%20working%20women%20frozen%20food (accessed February 24, 2009).
32. Timothy Brennan, “The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 101–24.
33. Ibid., 118.
34. Ibid., 118–19.
35. This statement is a simplification of the debate surrounding corporate personhood, which Susanna K. Ripken examines at length in her article “Corporations Are People Too: A Multi-Dimensional Approach to the Corporate Personhood Puzzle,” Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law 15, no. 1 (2009): 97–177). In this chapter, I rely on the theory that corporations are real entities.
36. Byeong-Seon Yoon, “Who Is Threatening Our Dinner Table?,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine 58, no. 6 (November 2006): 57.
37. Yoon writes: “By promoting specialization in agriculture, TNACs [transnational agriculture corporations] are increasing environmental degradation, reducing the diversity of genetic resources, expanding the supply of standardized production, and imposing uniformity on agricultural production” (“Who Is Threatening Our Dinner Table?,” 61).
38. Yoon writes:
Developed countries have been providing a variety of subsidies to agriculture, resulting in an abundant production of cheap food. However, in developing countries where hunger is prevalent and food is scarce the result of this global system of production is to promote not the independence of the national food supply and self-sufficiency but increasing dependence. This is why flour imports to developing countries increased from a mere 10 percent in the 1950s to 57 percent in 1980, and why agricultural products emanating from developing countries are directed not at their own needs but at the wants of the rich economies managed by the TNACs. Hence the local economy in the underdeveloped economies is not expanded and people’s often dire food needs are not met. (“Who Is Threatening Our Dinner Table?,” 61–62)
39. Vandana Shiva, “The Mustard Oil Conspiracy,” Ecologist (2001): 27–29.
40. Jonathan Benson, “India Files Biopiracy Lawsuit against Monsanto Says Biotech Giant Is Stealing Nature for Corporate Gain,” Gerson Healing Newsletter 26, no. 6 (2011): 7–8.
41. Jaffrey, World Vegetarian, viii.
42. Andrew Malone of the UK Daily Mail covered this trend, citing the case of Shankara Mandaukar as an example of Indian farmers driven by debt to kill themselves. See Andrew Malone, “The GM Genocide: Thousands of Indian Farmers Are Committing Suicide after Using Genetically Modified Crops,” UK Daily Mail, November 2, 2008, available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html (accessed October 28, 2012). The debate over the connection between Monsanto seeds—bred to yield only one harvest but to produce no viable seed, thereby guaranteeing that the farmer will buy them annually from Monsanto—and an increase in the deaths of farmers moved by despair to kill themselves because they were drowning in debt is a contentious one. A study published by the International Food Policy Research Group disputes this connection. See Guillaume P, Gruère, Debdatta Sengupta, and Purvi Mehta-Bhatt, Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India: Reviewing the Evidence (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, October 2008).