The Importance Of Food In India

Food is central to human life; to think of food is to think of sustenance. It maintains individuals as a live being, for without it our body would no longer to perform the processes necessary for survival. The word ‘food’ itself conjures platonic images due to the fact that it is essential. The term cuisine, however, provides a much more intimate stance on food. When one thinks of food as it relates to cuisine, the train of thought naturally digresses to the food associated with countries, and that is where understanding ends. For example, when one thinks of India, the obvious association would be curries; however, many different regions of India are very specific in their composition of a curry, as well as other regional dishes. Travelling from one part of India to another makes for wildly different curry bases and associated spices. Furthermore, the word ‘curry’ is not the Indian nomenclature for the dish, but an Anglicized term (Gibney, 2016). The same logic is applied to Chinese cuisine, but is two-fold. To the average Westerner, Chinese cuisine attributed to the whole of China is typically the North American fast-food version, dishes such as General Tso’s and Kung-Pow Chicken. This is in addition to the aforementioned neglect of the existence of regional disparities already applied to a country’s cuisine on the whole. Chinese cooking is …show more content…
Previously this was due to natural geography, but in recent years the coastal nature of the Fujian and Guangdong regions have been mostly due to human intervention. Artificial dredging and reworking of landscapes on a large scale has allowed the natural environment to facilitate those who live on it, rather than hinder oppourtunities moving forward. By overcoming these obstacles, the Chinese people of this region have managed to keep their cultural and cuisine very much alive (Anderson,