The Table Scribes

Inthe ‘70s, there was Busybee. Thirty years later, there’s still Busybee. Butit’s been a long and eventful journey for food writing. Behram Contractor,better known as Busybee, made eating out of the small hole-in-the-wall eateryfashionable. Since then, there have been other writers, regular columnists anddilettantes, some successful, others forgettable - Dileep Padgaonkar, AsitChandmal, C.Y. Gopinath. Writing about food is classy, and everyone is tryinghis (or her) hand at it. C.Y. Gopinath writes Travels with the Fish, whoseeccentric sideshows are recipes and luxuriant descriptions of eating experiencesof the kind that only an obsessive foodie can churn out. Karen Anand, the queenof pickles and masalas, has been writing about eating out in India since 1984.Says she, "It’s essential for a writer to cook and to know what’s inside adish."

Chandmal’sstyle is to visit the birthplaces of international cuisine and learn gastronomyfrom the locals. He lived seven years in Paris; spent another seven years inSingapore, and goes back regularly to see how his favourite cuisines, French,Japanese and Chinese, in that order, are evolving. He insists he’s not a snob:"Give me a good bhelpuri and I’d eat that too."

ForDileep Padgaonkar, food writing is a literary genre. "The next thing to goodeating is the pleasure of reading about good food," he says. But he doesn’tfind such writing in India:  recipebooks with coffee-table pictures are "gastro-porn." Says he, "Most goodwriters use nine-and-a-half adjectives, starting with ‘Ah’ and ending with‘yummy’." His dream: to delve into regional literature to discovernon-English-speaking writers who have written about Indian food.

FarzanaContractor is always looking for good food writers for her quarterly, UpperCrust. The glossy, almost a year old and marketed as "India’s food, wine andstyle magazine", sells 45,000 copies, she claims. She writes a column, ‘TheUpper Crust Gourmet’, for the Afternoon Despatch & Courier, a Mumbaitabloid. But there have been other mags in the past, efforts that failed. LikeVimla Patil’s Food Talk: it began in 1998 and folded up less than two yearslater. Will Upper Crust survive the crucial two-year gestation period? Perhaps,that will determine, conclusively, the market for food writing. Or the absenceof one.