The Changing Tastes Of Indian Households with Inflation

Living in India teaches you a lot of budgeting. Trust me  Indians are very calculative when it comes to their regular lives. So am I. Well but then a hell lot of fun happens when the budgeting hits the kitchen.

Last year one fine evening my mother who used to give me these long lectures about some vitamin in tomatoes suddenly started blaming this very vegetable( or fruit as you prefer) for her acidity. Well the reason was that rate of tomatoes increased from 30 per kg to 10o bucks per kg. I mean 100?

I was very amused with all the jokes on twitter and facebook  about the 100per Kg thing. But that is not my point. With that changed the statistics of my kitchen. Tomatoes were forbidden. My yummy tomato sandwitches changed to potato sandwitches, the daily salad disappeared from the dining table, our very own Mc Donalds deprived us of that single slice of tomato they placed between the Mc Aloo Tikki  and my mother to top it all started using ketchup instead of tomato puree reasoning me that they are more or less the same. She even found substitutes like raw mangoes, dried mango powder and even lemon juice as if none of them were remotely acidic. I cursed the vegetable sellers who mocked us for buying just 250 gm of tomatoes that is around three tomatoes in a week.  Obviously he felt rich because he could afford a cart of tomatoes .

After a good long wait of 4 months , I got the taste of tomato soup and I felt like a King.

Next my kitchen was hard hit when suddenly onion prices went high. Yes you guessed it right my mother insisted that we being Brahmins should quit eating onions and stick to a pure vegetarian diet. This time my dad joined her league. He was one who’d never eat his meals without raw onion salad and then he started giving lectures on how disgusting a smell raw onions leaves. My favourite “Paneer sabji” looked like balls of white swimming in spicy water without onions and tomatoes.

And restaurants, well they had a totally new ideology. Every dish that had he word “PYAZA” or “Tamatari” had its prices doubled and the amount of tomato and onions halved. We as customers felt cheated. On asking for marinated onions all we got were 3 small shallots that too half eaten by God knows whom.

This was really a testing time for all middle class families like mine. We went on a never ending fast. Barring the rich who were least concerned as the vegetables that they eat are usually very highly priced like  broccoli, asparagus , blabla.

Trust me you might find this funny but being an ultimate foodie it was the biggest torture I ever had.

Signing off now...