I wrote this for Pragati Express. Reposting it here since my general readers might find it interesting as well. This follows from my old blog post that bathrooms should be banned.
Yet another wedding, yet another truckload of wasted food. If, in reality TV show style, we were to try to identify the “root cause” in this instance, it was the cook (or the team of cooks, rather). Each of the seven respondents this correspondent surveyed expressed their displeasure at the quality of the food. One even called it her “worst ever Indian wedding dinner”.
This wedding was only one isolated instance – it is all too common an occurrence in these parts for copious amounts of food to be wasted all because of a cook who ended up cooking badly. And it is all the fault of the cooks, most of whom have never gone to culinary school (we don’t have too many of those in India), and many of whom haven’t gone to school either.
When thousands of people in India die of hunger everyday, and farmers continue to kill themselves in Vidarbha(and elsewhere), this wastage of food is indeed criminal. It comes at a high human cost. And that it comes out of sheer incompetence of unregulated cooks makes it indeed tragic.
There is only one solution to this – the government should regulate cooks. Not just wedding cooks – since wastage of food at weddings and other parties are only part of the problem – the government should regulate anyone who wants to cook. The other day my daughter refused to eat an idli. We decided to salvage our karma by feeding it (the idli) to the neighbourhood street dog, who took one bite and promptly ran away.
Whether you want to make yourself a 2-minute Maggi, or Shantavva in Santemarahalli wants to make a ragi ball, or chef Madhu Menon (hope he doesn’t edit this bit out) wants to make bloggers’ b***, you should need a licence from the government, which certifies that you are a cook of a high enough quality that what you cook will not go waste.
That’s the only way we can save millions of our population from hunger. There is already enough wastage of food because farmers cannot coordinate on what to grow, and because of inefficiencies in the food supply chain, and because of the way agricultural markets are regulated. We don’t want badly cooked food to add to the wastage. And the only way to ensure that is by having the government regulate cooks.
PS: As Ravikiran Rao, a former editor of the former avatar of this publication, likes to put it, “#thatzwhy we need strong regulation”
PS2: Some readers might be advised to consume irony supplements along with this article