A lot of great cuisine comes out of constraints, says Abhijit Banerjee

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Jaipur, Feb 3 (PTI) The one element that connects European, Chinese and Indian cuisine is being mindful of the ingredients and making the best of the little material available at hand, believes Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee.

Banerjee, also a food enthusiast, was speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Monday.

The economist said that a lot of great cuisine across the world has come out of constraints.

“...out of thinking about how you can make something out of very little. I think one great thing about Indian food is that there are so many delicious things that are made out of the most everyday ingredients. That's why I think it is one of the highlights of Indian cooking,” Banerjee said at a session titled “Chhaunk: On Food, Economics and Society”.

Banerjee has authored a book of the same name, illustrated by Cheyenne Olivier.

“Europe is a lot like India and China and has evolved a culture which is very mindful of the ingredients. Why? Because you didn’t have anything, you really had to use things strategically,” he said, citing the example of using “little fish” to add flavour to vegetables in Bengal and Maharashtra.

“You strategically use little bits of pieces of fish or some cheese in Italy or really everything else that is the cheapest possible thing,” he added.

Meanwhile, the food in the US is one that is a story of “the plenty”.

“What’s interesting about America is when people came to America from Europe, what they were struck by and they wrote letters saying, ‘Everybody can have meat here every day’. That was the excitement. In Europe, poor people had bones, tendons, they never had real meat,” he said.

Adding to the argument of using ingredients strategically, Banerjee noted that “a lot of great food in the world is the food of the poor”.

“Pizza is one, so is chowmein, it’s everything you could put into noodles, and so is khichdi.

“There are many of the iconic foods of the poor. Even the famous Calcutta biryani is mostly famous because it replaces aalu (potato) for meat,” he said.

JLF this year featured a lineup of over 300 luminaries such as Nobel laureates, Booker Prize-winners, journalists, policymakers, and acclaimed writers.

The participants included Esther Dufflo, Amol Palekar, Ira Mukhoty, Geetanjali Shree, David Hare, Manav Kaul, Javed Akhtar, Rahul Bose, Yuvan Aves, Shahu Patole, and Kallol Bhattacharjee. PTI MAH RDS RDS