Identity crisis

For exactly three years of my life, April 9 held a special significance. Those were my undergraduate days and good food — more specifically, food that didn’t cost even a penny — was top priority. Thanks to my friend Prasad, I would eat the best fish fries on April 9. His parents ensured that their elder son’s birthday lunches would be remembered for all the right reasons.

It was at one of those lunches, in a spacious apartment in south Kolkata, that I was introduced to mayonnaise. I had arrived well in time for the yearly treat. Instead of the aroma of breaded fish sizzling in butter, the smell of egg yolk — too many yolks in fact — tickled my eager nose. “I hope Aunty hasn’t changed the menu!” I muttered under my breath. She hadn’t, thankfully. Prasad was simply adding homemade mayonnaise to it.

These were pre-KFC and burger-chain days in India. My concept of accompaniments was restricted to no-frills kashundi (Bengali mustard that blazes a trail through the sinuses) and lumpy tomato ketchup (my family still calls it “tomato sauce”). I didn’t get the fuss about a teenager beating egg yolks with great gusto, and counting every drop of oil and vinegar being added to a creamy whitish lump. But Prasad was making mayonnaise for the first time and everyone had to look pleased, if not impressed.

Twenty years since I first tasted it, mayonnaise remains my least favourite dressing. I don’t like it in my sandwich; burgers always taste better without it; my salads — a far cry from the tomato-cucumber-onion with chaat masala variety from childhood — are mayonnaise-free. But that it means a lot to some others became clear on August 18 this year. Between answering mails and eating toast on a Saturday morning, I learn that the mayonnaise is under threat. That it is no longer the first choice for picnic salads, sandwiches, dips or even French fries. An array of condiments — more colourful and also flavourful — is elbowing it out of the American diet.

The Weekly Word Watch on the Oxford dictionaries blog acknowledges the culinary crisis in its 52nd edition. “In the latest edition of Philadelphia Magazine , Sandy Hingston penned an elegy to mayonnaise called ‘How Millennials Killed Mayonnaise’. Hingston argued in her essay — with her tongue a bit in her cheek, apparently lapping up those last traces of mayo from some egg salad — that younger people are rejecting the condiment as a ‘boring white food’ of the Baby Boomers. And what are they favouring instead? Identity condiments, as Hingston dubbed them, like tzatziki or basil pesto on their toasties: ‘My sandwich, my self’. Her article caused a small sensation on social media, with many coming forward in passionate and hilarious defences of mayonnaise.”

This makes me sit up; the two other words of the week (woke-washing and final solution) can wait. The decline of the mayonnaise, if one goes with what Hingston says, is not just a matter of changing palates. It is an extension of “identity politics” — the kind that covers everything from race to immigration, inclusiveness and the threat of a Mexican wall. In her eagerness to make a case for what is clearly her favourite dressing, Hingston ends up profiling those who allegedly shun it: Millennials, such as her own daughter, who is a “women’s and gender studies major in college. Naturally, she loathes mayonnaise”. She endorses her son Jake, 25, “a practical young man who works in computers and adores macaroni salad” (which, of course, comes with lashings of mayonnaise). The “occasional outlier” stands in sharp contrast — wearing a halo — to the “youngsters who willingly slurp down eight kazillion kinds of yogurt, not to mention raw fish and pork belly...”

Hingston’s outrage, probably prompted by a bottle of empty mayonnaise in her fridge, sounds like a lament on a perceived degeneration of the Great American (White) Culture. I don’t live anywhere near the iconic continent, a beacon of hope for millions across the globe. But a pretty sight greets me when I open my refrigerator: There are bottles of salsa, spicy kimchi (for which I pleaded with a surly Korean restaurant manager in south Delhi), wasabi, aam ki launji (a sweet mango condiment my Marwari friend’s mother plies me with), homemade basil pesto and a creamy blue cheese dip. The tzatziki and the hummus, my Mediterranean staples, have been replenished on pay day. And a little bit of Africa — a jar of harissa — is in transit even as we go to press.

Identity is a tricky word. We may be sure or unsure of who we are, but it’s often the identity of others that makes us think. Or fret. The latter happens when we perceive a threat to everything we claim as our own. If we put this in the context of the condiments crib, I can only say that Hingston is missing out on a bouquet of flavours. Once that basil pesto, crunchy with pine nuts and walnuts, has touched the toast, nothing will be the same any more.

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