2014
17 Countries : 18 Participants

Download Combined 2013-14-15 Catalogue .pdf, 8.5MB

DELISH

masticating time
between the hollows
of my mouth
i surrender myself
to
the sap of our loving.
i nibble spaces
(they pop)
i peck at memories
(they sizzle and pass on)
who says food feeds us?

The circuitous routes and reasons for ingesting, rejecting and lusting after food are many. Food and relationships may have a discontinuous link but there exists an underlying harmony between the two, nevertheless. Food fashions us just as clothes, music, books and friends do. In reality, it is not always we who choose food ~ more often than not, it is food that chooses us. This is so, because of prevailing socio-economic, cultural and even religious factors (“religious” when it pertains to, say, vegetarianism not because of dietary preference but because religion deems so).

Food is an anthem. It culls out our most passionate romances with life, remembrance and rejuvenation. It is replete with colour, texture, aroma, and substance. You may savour, sip, nibble, swallow or masticate food or for that matter, life itself. The bouquet of tantalising aromas is present even in our humdrum lives; in order to arouse its full potential, we only need to pause occasionally and to submerge ourselves within the caucus of Food legislators! With food, however, there are hardly any rules. And absolutely no limits. It is a pity that, as with other phenomena of life, post contemporary times have reduced food too, into a cliche.

But sphinx-like, it raises its magnificent head again and again through the forests of time, refusing to be denigrated by suffocating definitions. Food, in the final analysis, is hardly about ingredients or component parts or elements of culinary practice; it is, in fact, a levelling ground, a porous field wherein men and women, poets and madmen, rhythm and blues, forks and knives mutate in order to emerge whole.

After all, breaking bread with those we love, is by no means, a trivial act.

– Anahite Contractor
(‘Delish’ © 2014)