Food Is Not Respect

Following up on the previous entry, Jennifer and I are fond of commenting that the defining characteristic of both Indian and Italian families (and, we think, also Eastern European and Jewish) is that Food Equals Love. If you love someone, you feed them. If someone tries to feed you and you don't eat enough of the food, you don't love them enough. It turns out that food can also equal respect, or at least acknowledgement of relative positions on the social-work ladder. If you respect someone, you feed them. In some ways, this is good. It means that there's almost always a cup of tea available when you want one, and it does mean that I never go hungry. When I'm with my family, it means a cornucopia of calories that might put Mr. Creosote to shame.

The problem with use of food as a status symbol is that it can get regressive. For instance, when we go to a meeting with our community health workers, they want to show that we're to be respected. So, they sit on the floor, and we sit up front in chairs, and nobody sits down until I sit down (despite my protests otherwise). We are then given tea, and sometimes a decent snack. (Fried things plus some biscuits and a sweet is the typical.) Meanwhile, the much less nutritionally-endowed women of our audience get fed after we do, if they get fed at all. Same thing happens when any dignitary visits here. He sits up on a dais and munches pakoras (battered fried things, usually potatoes). The audience, none of whom make a tenth what he does, may not even get water. I find it hard to deal with chowing down in front of people who might not quite have food security each day[1]. But, it'd be rejecting hospitality not to eat (and in fairness, these days I'm usually hungry, since my GI tract has recovered), so I eat. A close variant happens when we're doing fieldwork. About every fourth house, we get detained for fifteen minutes because someone insists that we take a cup of tea with them.

Now, that part alone isn't too bad. Yes, it's discomforting to be lording it over people like that, but more often than not they do eventually get fed, so I could deal. The truly bad part is that as noted in a prior post, when food = respect, you can lose some of the other things that might show up on the left side of that equation. For instance, in the US, work = respect also. If you respect me, and I'm a boss or co-worker, you'll do a good job on projects that I ask you to help with. Standard work culture here is more that as long as you've given me food, offered me a chair, and otherwise scraped/bowed a bit, you're not obligated to actually do work. This has gotten a few people shouted at when they've ignored important project-related duties in favor of trying to locate foods they think I'll want (the most recent being someone arranging a lassi instead of arranging a meeting I'd asked him to take care of). And, as usual, the language barrier makes it hard to explain in advance that no, I don't care about whether lunch happens on time or is especially gourmet, I care about whether we visit our houses and collect our data and get the job done.

I think there's a lot of people around here who'll be glad when this pesky doctor sahib finally goes away and lets them get back to doing things they way they've always been done.

---

[1] It's even more heartbreaking when the guy who works for you tries to give you his only pen as a gift, because he feels he NEEDS to give Doctor Sir a gift to prove friendship. I can't do it. I know it's courteous to accept, but I can't take things from a guy trying to manage on Rs 100 a day.