Food for Thought

I don’t know when the buffet-system came to India but it has spread like wildfire. A buffet is a meal set on tables from where people help themselves.

Earlier, on events like marriages and other social occasions, the guests were requested to sit on mats spread out on floors to be served the common meal. Plantain-leaves cut to size and thoroughly washed, were laid in front of each person. The different items of the meal were served on this for consumption of each guest. There were servers, each carrying a container filled with an item of the meal, going around and serving it to the guests. They would entreat and beseech each guest to have a little more of the item. The host would go round to ensure that each guest was served well and would tell the server to give a little more of the dish to this guest or that one. He would often press the guests to have a little more. This practice is still prevalent in some rare cases.

Then came benches and long tables so that the guests would not have to squat to have the meal. Servers going around and the host going to each guest, pressing her/him to have a little more continued. Guests did not have to ask to get the meal.

There were occasions when a particular guest would like to have a little more of a particular item. Hesitating to ask openly for an item, she/he would ask the server to give that particular item to the person sitting next to her/him. The server would get the hint; he would give the item to the person for whom it would be asked as well as to the first person. This way, the person would be seen as one taking care of another and he himself would get what he wanted. The joke was that kheer got the synonym of tasmai as a result of this practice. ‘Tasmai’ in Sanskrit means ‘to him/her’. The first person would ask the server to give kheer to ‘tasmai’ (to the other person). This way, kheer got the alternative name ‘tasmai’!

‘Pangti Bhojan’  (sitting in a line and being served) has given way to the buffet system. In this, various items of food are laid in a row on tables. Guests have to move along these tables from dish to dish and pick up the items of their choice.  The sympathetic Hindi equivalent of ‘buffet’ is ‘swaruchi bhojan’ - having food-items of one’s choice. This term refers to the fact that out of the fare laid out on the tables, one can choose the items of one’s choice. The adversarial translation of the term is ‘khade khade khana’ (eating while standing).  

The advantages of the buffet system are that it needs less effort and a little lower expense by the host. It requires less sitting arrangement and less management. Only a few chairs are provided; most of the guests take food, standing.

However, with the buffet system, all the personal touches are gone or are heavily diluted. Guests have to first queue up to get the plates and again queue up before the tables on which the food items are placed. Most of the time, there would be a big rush before the tables and one has to struggle to get food. A guest has to stretch out his/her hands (like a beggar?) to be served by attendants. (Of course in some cases there won’t be any attendant; one has to follow self-service system.) Instead of the food coming to you, you have go to the food! The guest’s woes do not end there; after moving in the queue to be served the different items, he/she has to balance the food-laden plate on the fully-stretched palm of one hand and eat with the other, standing unsteadily all the while! If the attention is slightly diverted or the guest is not very careful, the plate would tilt and the contents would drop either on her/his clothes, or on those of the persons standing nearby. Sometimes, while moving a little to have some space, the guest would trip, causing embarrassment. Of course, a few chairs are provided to enable one to sit and have food comfortably but the number of chairs provided is grossly insufficient to accommodate even a fraction of the number of guests invited. Sometimes, this leads to musical chairs. If after having secured a chair, one leaves to get a second helping, one would come back to find that the chair has been occupied by another struggling guest. :((((

Caterers play a trick to reduce consumption of costly items. They place the less costly items at the beginning of the row and the costly items (including non-vegetarian items) at the end, so that by the time a guest reaches there, his/her plate would be more or less full and he/she would feel embarrassed to take too much of these items.

Many times the rush dissuades a guest to go for a second helping. Often there is an array of less costly but more luring and inviting pre-meal items like pani puri (golgoppa), chat, papdi chat, etc. So by the time one goes for the main dishes, one’s stomach is already full!  However, there are exceptions where more costly and tasty pre-food starters are provided.

Of course, many of these problems are taken care of in buffets organized by people in the higher income group as also in star hotels.

Have I given you some food? Some food for thought?

Bon appetit!