you walk into a mess in mylapore. expecting the usual. paper roast, gold and wide as a table. waiter shakes his head. steam items only.1
“gas shortage pa”, he says. something about the strait of hormuz.2 tankers waiting. prices spiking. supply chains choking.
it stops you. we think of food as the most local thing we have. batter fermented overnight in this humidity. coconut scraped from a shell this morning. sambar brewed with drumsticks from the market. it feels like it belongs to the soil here.
but the heat that transforms it is foreign. that’s geopolitical.
we are eating oil. not in the food, but under it. the crispy texture of a dosa is a function of btu.3 and btu is a function of foreign policy.
it’s a strange vertigo. sitting on a steel stool in chennai. realizing your breakfast depends on a shipping lane in the persian gulf. a blockade there means NO crispy dosa here.
we talk about independence. about being self-reliant. but the fire in our kitchens comes from a hole in the ground halfway across the world. we are tethered to places we will never visit. bound by pipelines and shipping routes we can’t see.
globalization isn’t just iphone parts. it’s the crust on your breakfast.
the waiter brings idlis. soft, white, steamed. low energy cooking. survival food.
ate them in silence. thinking about how fragile the crust of civilization actually is.
just like a dosa. takes a lot of heat to hold it together. without it, we all go soft.
Footnotes
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idlis, string hoppers… things that don’t need a roaring flame. the backup plan of south indian cuisine.
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a 21-mile wide choke point. 20% of the world’s oil passes through here. if it sneezes, mylapore catches a cold.
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british thermal unit. a measure of heat. or in this case, the difference between a crispy roast and a soggy disappointment.