But whenever I see people eat idli-vada, I notice that they always use spoons without exception, and in most cases it is two spoons, in a manner similar to how people use forks and knives to eat food in the west. I am sure that idly and vada dishes have existed since a long time, which means that it is a recent change that has prompted people to use spoons to cut, dip and eat the idlis and the vadas in the slightly clumsy manner in which they do.
Dosas, which are also staple fare, despite also being served with sambhar and chutney are not eaten using spoons. Its probably because its not convenient for them to be consumed that way, although I have seen peculiar characters who do manage to use knives and forks to eat dosas.
As a teenager, I used to eat with a spoon all the time, and I guess my sister picked up from me as well. I did manage to get myself ridiculed for this habit of mine, but I managed to up the ante thereafter when I mastered the fine art of eating with chopsticks.
I’d start eating lunch with chopsticks and since lunch consisted mainly of rice and some sambhar or dal to go along with it, and some curry, by the time I finished eating my lunch, dinner would be served. Despite eating all that I could, my weight still remains what it was when I was 4 years of age. My width has decreased to give way to an increase in height.
Evolution has resulted in me coming back to square one and eating with my hands again. Somehow, I guess, instinctive behaviour is always the right one.
Also, next time you are at a darshini, do pay attention to the way people eat with two spoons. Just makes you feel more superior when you gorge on food with your hands.
How very avant-garde of you
Meh.
I have seen peculiar characters who do manage to use knives and forks to eat dosas.
Guilty as charged, I say.
well, you’re off the hook if you’re abroad and you’re not a non-conformist. However, doing so in our country is going to raise eyebrows at the very least.
Its prolly in lines with eating rice, dhal and chana chhole with chopsticks.
Well for the few years that I was in India, yes even then I did do the fork and knife thing with the masala dosa. It’s not to say that I’m incapable of eating with my fingers, it’s just that I make such a mess of it I’m better off not putting the other people through the torture of seeing a mess and throwing up.
fair enough, although I still maintain that there’s a definite difference in taste while consuming food using forks / spoons vis-?-vis using hands (subject to hands being clean).
That is if we *want* it to taste different, that is.
There are deliberate deceptions and these are games we play with ourselves- authenticity of it all never to be determined in the throes of a reality we envision and an illusion we create only to forgo for reality’s sake. Mind you, our perceived reality. It is as if want to believe in them. And that desire to believe supersedes the slipshod nature of the fabrication, the myth, the illusion, the blurred memory. We repeat the falsehood again and again over the years, till we come to believe it to be true. We wished to believe it, and hence we came to believe it.
Cognitive dissonance, you mean?
Am not sure about how you relate it to cognitive dissonance.
let’s just say that while I might not be exactingly correct in the statement I made about food tasting different, its something I’ve conditioned myself to believe in while having doubts when faced with the choice of the manner in which I’d consume food which has led to my arriving at said conculsion.