A Taste Of Life

These are the new curiosity shops: shelves lined with gleaming bottles of greenolives, pimento-stuffed olives, olives stuffed with vibrant red-hot chillies,jalapeno peppers, Spanish capers, pink peppercorns; jars of cranberry mustard,honey mustard,all kinds of jams; chunky cheeses in every shape. And the quickfixes to rustle up a Chinese, Thai, Lebanese,Italian gourmet’s delight -curry pastes, yellow bean pastes, shitake mushroom oyster-flavoured sauces.Available too are tongue-teasing delicacies - salmon roe caviar, goose liver andduck liver pate, pate de foie gras. To be sure, the prices are steep: 100 gramsof orange caviar can set you back by Rs 1,250.

The entire culinary world seems to be contained in 250 square feet at Rashmi UdaySingh’s Mumbai-based Good Food Gallerie - curries from Thailand, sausages fromDenmark, maple syrup from Holland, tahina from Iran, coffee from Austria, etc.Mumbai’s Crawford Market has a small store selling ‘all varities of stufffor Chinese, Thai, Italian, Mexican restaurant at very reasonable rate (sic).’Yet other ingredients are now made locally - fondue cheeses in Pune andsun-dried tomatoes from Bangalore.

Thanks to an expanding Open General License list, more and more food items are becoming easily importable. Not just necessity items but also luxury/lifestyle items like wines, olive oils, balsamic vinegar, pastas. And in April 2002, all import restrictions on speciality foods shall go.

A storeowner at Crawford Market says the 50-odd food stores in the market puttogether make Rs 2 lakh a day. Uday Singh’s Gallerie makes between Rs 19,000and Rs 35,000 on weekdays, and up to Rs 1 lakh daily on the weekends. And it’snot just the caterers and restaurateurs who’ve had their prayers answered.Housewives, amateur chefs and foodies are all testimony to the fact that food isthe  new four-letter word for globalisation.