Wine & Dine
Text and Photography by Mallika Chandra.
I wasn’t always this keenly observant of the food being eaten at my parents’ home from a cultural perspective. But that changed in early 2021 when I left Mumbai to live on my partner’s farm in Gujarat. This meant that each time I visited the city, I found myself observing, with a unique insider-outsider view, the alterations in my family’s eating habits while also being more attuned to the city’s shifting food culture at large.
Most of our food has always been cooked at home, and on weekends, we often ate out or ordered in. During the pandemic-induced lockdown, our meals swung from simple cut fruit and one-pot dinners to extravagant feasts on special occasions depending on our morale that day. As restrictions eased, we’d step out (masked) to indulge in artisanal coffee and baked goods, in order to support our…