Dive hand-first into a plate of Indian food
Ayurveda, a healing tradition, suggests foregoing utensils allows for a more sensory experience
This is the first in a weekly series in which reporter Aparita Bhandari explores how to eat the different cuisines that make up Toronto’s diverse culinary landscape.
There’s a lot of foods I don’t know how to eat. But to kick off this series, I thought I’d start with one that I know well: Indian food. I moved to Toronto from India in 1998 and grew up eating Indian food, with my hands — the way it is meant to be eaten.
It’s a practice that gets a bad rap. Some see it as unsanitary. In 2012, when Oprah Winfrey visited India to dine with a family in Mumbai for an Oprah’s Next Chapter special, she said, “I heard some Indian people eat with their hands still.”
That comment, and much of Winfrey’s visit to India, was criticized for presenting stereotypes and clichés.
Indian food, for the most part, is meant to be eaten with your hands.
At home, I regularly abandon the use of spoons, knives and forks, especially when either my husband or I have forgotten to run the dishwasher. And I use my hands to eat everything from roti (Indian bread) and sabzi (vegetables) to daal (lentils) and rice. When I am at a restaurant, I’ll typically use a spoon to eat daal and rice, but any type of Indian bread is best eaten with your hands.
So when I went to meet Kiran Rai, a 27-year-old Indian actor, fellow food enthusiast and YouTube personality known as “Kayray” to share a meal, it was more to explore why we continue to use our hands to eat Indian food.
The philosophy Ayurveda, the Indian holistic healing tradition, suggests that eating with your hands gives you a more sensory experience. How it feeds your body, mind and spirit. But I’m not sure that’s why Indian people don’t use cutlery. Most Indian people just grow up using their hands.
Eating with your hands is common practice in India and many other parts of the world, such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I have pictures of my mother feeding me with her hands when I was a toddler. As I grew up, I tried to emulate my father, who uses one hand to tear roti and pick up the sabzi, leaving his left hand clean to ladle more food onto the plate.
It can also be a display of intimacy. If I’m using my hands to eat more than roti and naan at a friend’s house, it’s a sign of the comfort we enjoy in each other’s company.
Before our lunch date, I hadn’t met Rai, although I’d seen her work on Anarkali, a web series focusing on the lives of young South Asian women in Toronto. I was curious about her perspective, as someone from a younger generation who grew up in Canada, on eating Indian food with your hands. Also, I was sure we would get along famously, as I could relate to her awkward sense of humour. And we did, over a meal of Mumbai Veggie Pav Bhaji and the Veggie Platter at downtown Toronto restaurant Bombay Street Food. I chose this restaurant because it offers Indian street food options, the sort of stuff you eat on a roadside without cutlery.
Like many second-generation South Asian immigrant children, Rai was embarrassed to eat with her hands as a child. When you’re a kid, you just want to be like everyone else; eating Indian food at school — forget about eating with your hands — wasn’t cool back then.
“It’s so much different now, with so much diversity in a city like Toronto,” she says, adding that she regularly uses her hands to eat all kinds of food, not just Indian. “It’s so much easier.”
The technique It’s pretty simple. Your bread is your spoon, so you should tear off a piece that’s large enough to fit a small filling of vegetables or lentils. Depending on whether it’s a dish that’s dry or has some gravy with it, you can either use the bread to pick up the filling or fold it into a conical shape to scoop up some sauce.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to have a spoon to scoop things onto or into your bread. For example, when eating the pav bhaji dish, which Bombay Street Food described as “crushed sautéed mixed vegetable in a medium spice, with two warm buttered griddled pav puns,” the bread can be too thick to pick up the sauce.
If you feel like eating daal and rice with your hands, mix the two, fashion into a small ball and then pop it into your mouth. That’s it! You’ll fit right in.
The facts Pav bhaji is a street food popular in Mumbai. The pav bun is said to be a culinary leftover of the Portuguese colonization of parts of India, particularly Goa. The dish used to be a nighttime meal, made by mashing leftover vegetables in a tomato sauce and served with buttered loaves.
Daal or lentils are a staple of Indian food, especially for vegetarians, providing a protein boost. A meal of daal and rice, especially featuring those lentils that cook quickly, is thought of as a nutritious lunch option.
The most important tip for eating Indian food with your hands — wash them before and after a meal, Rai says. A wet wipe is helpful in a pinch, but using a paper napkin won’t clean out the food under your nails.
“Some Indian restaurants offer finger bowls to clean your hands,” Rai says. “But I just make a quick trip to the bathroom before and after I eat.” Next week: How to eat Ethiopian cuisine.