There is no such thing as Indian food

I am an Indian, living in the US. So I get asked a lot of questions about Indian Food. "Do you always cook Indian food at home?" "How did your mom cook naan, did you have tandoor at home?" And countless others.

I try to answer as politely as possible. No, we don't cook Indian food at home all the time, in fact my wife loves to cook different cuisines every day. No, we did not have tandoor, and my mom did not make naan even once. Rarely do I tell the real truth about Indian food. There is no such thing as Indian food.

This sounds a little crazy, after all when you go to a typical Indian restaurant in the US, there are those staples of tandoorie chicken, butter chicken, chicken masala and naan. Those certainly are Indian food, aren't they?

Yes they are.

So am I talking about the fact that they originated around Persia and were brought to India by Muslim rulers?

No I am not. If a food item is consumed in a sizable part of India, for last few hundred years, I don't give a damn about where it originated, and who brought it. It is Indian food.

Now I just gave definition of what Indian food is. How can I then say there is no such thing as Indian food?

Well, let me clarify. What I mean is that a typical foreigner has a specific idea of what Indian food is - mostly based on their experience from rastaurants. That includes some specific dishes, made with a set of ingredients and spices. The problem is that a huge majority of the Indians hardly ever eat that food. This is because of plethora of reasons - the typical North Indian dishes mentioned earlier are not part of the traditional diet of Southerners, and the Westerns and the Easterns. The other reasons are that many of them contain meat, which a lot of people don't eat because they are vegitarians or because they can't afford it. I for one, came from a family that had a traditional food from my state, and it did not include almost any dish from those available in a typical "Indian" restaurant.

India is a place where diversity rules. We have hundreds of languages, with thousands of different dialects. If you asked, what is the Indian language, there is no single answer. The same goes with the food. There are different flavors, spices, ingredients used in different regions. The quisines change by the region, by the religion, by the cast and the subcast. In that sense all those foods are Indian foods, yet there is no single set of dishes that we can call Indian food! True, we can accumulate all the dishes that are consumed in India in a sizable quantity for large enough number of years and call them Indian Food. And that will be different from a similarly gathered Italian food. But the two populations will be enoromously complex compared to the simple foreign-restaurant-Indian/Italian-Food. The restaurant food is just one edge of a tip of an iceberg. It is just one facet of the whole jewel that is Indian food, not unrelated to the rest of the structure, but simply does not do justice to the entire picture.

To explain this phenomenon in mathematical terms, imagine a space of recipes. Some of the axes will be ingredients, cooking times etc. This is very hard to do, but nevertheless, it can be done. In this space a particular dish can be represented by a point. The same dish with everything exactly the same, but extra salt will be another point right next to it, shifted by the amount of salt on the salt axis. So if you make the same dish multiple times, it will look like a tight bunch in the space, no two dishes are exactly same even though made by the same person. If you look at the same dish prepared by thousands of different people, it will appear as a much loser bunch in this space. Now, if you look at all the dishes that have been made in India for the past 500 years, say, you will a complex structure. Closest anology I can give is that of a tree. The branches of this tree may correspond to different regional cuisines. The leaves represent individual recipes. The real picture will be complicated based on which angle you look at it. For example bread and naan will have similar location along the ingredient axis. However, if you look at the cooking method axis they will be farther away. Kind of like looking at our tree from top down or from sideways. Two particular leaves will appear at the same location if you look from above. However, if they are at different height, you will see the difference when you look at it from the side.

Indian food is just an example of other larger more potent simplification problems. Grouping some things into one group is certainly not wrong. But forgetting that there are other things out there that belong in the group is definitely a problem. We use the words like jews, muslims, blacks in a single breath and make statements about them. (need some examples). What we know of that category, comes from a collective experience. This experience may not necessarily represent the whole population. But we nevertheless make those statements about the tip, about that one facet. It is like looking at one bunch of leaves and talking about the shape, size and expanse of the tree.