The Big Idea: Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Food is more than just fuel for our bodies. According to author Lavanya Lakshminarayan, food is well, pretty much everything! Dig in to the Big Idea for her newest novel, Interstellar Megachef and see what she’s been cooking up.

LAVANYA LAKSHMINARAYAN:

I’m here to convince you that food is political. What we put on a plate can tell us who we are, and how we respond to food experiences can reveal the spaces we come from, privileges, biases and all.

Let me show you what I mean by walking you through the circumstances that gave rise to Interstellar MegaChef.

I was home from the hospital after a nasty, rather serious illness. Over a two-month recovery period, I lost my appetite entirely, with the exception of one thing. All I could taste was my grandmother’s rasam and rice.

What is rasam? you might ask. Excellent question. Indian food is popular around the world, and I bet you’ve tried a ton of it, from naan and chicken tikka masala to rice and curry.  If you’ve never heard of rasam, the myriad reasons why are the ingredients of this story.

But first: Rasam is a hot, spiced broth made from tomatoes and tamarind, seasoned with a blend of powdered spices (every family has its own secret recipe), garnished with mustard-seeds fried in ghee and fresh cilantro. When made right, rasam packs a kick to the sinuses and a sucker punch to your soul. And it’s the ultimate comfort food—I wish I could share it with you the way my grandmother makes it.

I’m from southern India, and rasam is a staple here. While it sustained me near-exclusively after my illness, a potful of questions brewed within my fevered brain.

How could this nourishing, restorative, genuinely delicious food have such a low-key existence? Why is it that some foods catch on in the popular imagination while others… don’t? And who holds the power to make that happen?

Spurred on by the notion that rasam and rice was long overdue critical acclaim on the world stage, I went down the rabbit hole looking for answers. I delved into the relationship between food and cultural hegemony. I followed the journeys of chefs from historically marginalized backgrounds–struggling to find validation for their traditional cuisines in a world beset by misogyny, racism and xenophobia, facing off against the inflexibility of dominant cultures with powerful patrons (look no further than haute cuisine). I lost myself in the history of all the foods we take for granted—like salt, once the most valuable commodity in the world; sank into the colonial origins of curry; immersed myself in tracing food cultures passed on through human migrations—both voluntary and forced, farming practices, food myths and propaganda from MSG to corn syrup… And the far-future food and culture wars in Interstellar MegaChef began to spill over onto the page.

In Interstellar MegaChef, Saraswati ‘Saras’ Kaveri flees her troubled past on the Earth and heads to Primus, the cultural capital of human-occupied space, to participate in the galaxy’s biggest cooking competition: Interstellar MegaChef. The competition is a showcase of the very best Primian cuisine—carefully synthesised, beautifully plated, perfectly presented, and philosophically-rooted in Primian history…

Interstellar MegaChef: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powells|Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore|Waterstones|Blackwell’s|Foyles

Excerpt

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