India food is one of my favorite cuisines. I love asian food in general: Thai, Korean, Japanese, Chinese; but Indian food is notorious for it’s foods' variety of spices. The Indian subcontinent with the fertile plains of the Indus and Ganges river ( Sen, 15), and the rich cuisine of plants and spices have given its people one of the richest cuisines in the world.
So what’s your opinion of curry? Well maybe it depends on the type of curry we’re talking about. Purists in the curry market exist, but everyone seems to have a different opinion of what spices to use, and how much to use. Curry is different everywhere you go in the world. In fact, curry is so global, that it is hard to even get a solid definition of what a curry is. “Curry: A Global History” by Colleen Taylor Sen defined curry as “a spiced meat, fish or vegetable stew served with rice, bread cornmeal or another starch”. This is a much broader view then the Americanized view of curry being a distinctively Indian food.
Think of all the dishes across the world that are curried: American curried chicken salad, thai mussasmum beef curry, rending daging (Indonesian), buoi phuc trach (austrailian), nyama choma (east African), khichri (british). The global food ‘curry’ is branded differently across the world.
This applies in exactly the same way as organizations will brand themselves to the culture they exist in. Restaurants are the easiest example to explain, but any organization with multiple locations is going to have cultural differences across different nations.
Maybe by understanding this, we can have an appreciation of how culture shapes the products we use each and every day. How we brand ourselves, may be contingent on our cultural identities. Being an American, concepts like – individualism, assertiveness, standing out and questioning authority are very attractive. This could be significantly different in an east asian culture that values uniformity, group action, and harmony.
Even if India is largely responsible for the distribution of curry throughout the British empire and into neighboring territories, there is no true curry dish. Anyone who can appreciate the difference between northern Indian and southern Indian food can vouch for the intercultural differences of Indian food in general.
With that said, may the world continue to enjoy curry in it’s wonderful forms and fragrances.
No comments:
Post a Comment