A new gender war!

The war of the sexes has found a new battleground—the menu card, forcing Raul Dias to ask “who put the gender in my food?”


The crimson sun is bidding us a languid adieu as we, a motley bunch of six friends congregate at AER, The Four Season Mumbai’s 34th floor rooftop bar and lounge for what else, but a round of sundowners that truly put the R back into relaxation. Round one over and done with, we decide to go against convention for round two as far as our choice of drinks goes. So, it’s a pitcher of beer for the three ladies, while we gents opt for a troika of cosmopolitans. The well-heeled waiter arrives almost instantly back with our order and proceeds to place before the ladies the cosmopolitans, while my two male friends and I are served the beer. “Err…it’s the other way round—we get the cosmopolitans and they the beers,” I tell the stunned waiter who shoots us with a what-kind-of-wusses-drink-cosmopolitans look. That was it! I decide there and then that I HAVE TO finally take a stand for all mankind (and even womankind) and scream out loud from the rooftop (literally!) --“Who put the gender in my food??!!

For years we have been socially conditioned into the belief that while a tipple of single malt is a man’s drink, a screwdriver is a decidedly feminine libation. The fact notwithstanding that I personally know more women (my mum included) who love to nurse a tumbler of Talisker than men! So who are we to decide the gender of a drink or even a dish for that matter?

If going by the way tandoori chicken is perceived in India, then testosterone must be one of its main ingredients. Time and again our senses have been ‘assaulted’ with images of villains like Gabbar Singh and his ilk brandishing a leg of tandoori chicken while biting into it in true cave man fashion. Au contraire, one of the tastiest laddoos we get in India—the deek laddoo—made from the sap of the gum tree, is supposed to be a ‘ladies only’ post-delivery, strength-giving elixir. But try telling that to my 6’2”, 95 kg buddy Adil who can see off a kilogram of the stuff in one go.

Men love their medium-rare steak while women prefer a delicate garden salad—who says so? Walk into any steak house, be it Kolkata’s iconic Peter Cat or New Delhi’s Smoke House Grill and check out the number of women going in for a piece of meat (the edible kind that is!). On the other hand, give the pure vegetarian Amitabh Bachchan a crisp salad any day and he’ll lap it up with manic gusto, a former co-star of his once told me.

The British have gone one step further in perfecting the art of this ‘genderisation’ of food. Even some of the names of their dishes are laced with unnecessary machismo. Shepherd’s Pie is one of them and so is the rather vulgar sounding Spotted Dick, which is in fact, an innocuous and quite tasty steamed suet pudding served with custard. They even apply gender to specific meals. Tea and the social hullabaloo they make out of the ceremonial tea party is as feminine as a coiffered poodle with pink pom poms. Dainty cucumber and watercress sandwiches cut into fancy shapes served with petits fours, scones with Chantilly cream and meringues on pretty lace doilies washed down with demitasses of mild Earl Grey, all conjure up images of Victorian ladies in summer hats sitting in the garden sipping tea, pinkie finger raised et al.

One of my favourite movies Moonlight and Valentino, has a line by Gwyneth Paltrow who says “why should my soup have a gender?” when told that soup is like a comforting elder sister. I couldn’t agree with her more. And why shouldn’t I? Being an avid lover of food and drink, I refuse to join the alarmists and denounce certain dishes as masculine or feminine. Food is food and I love it just the way it was meant to be loved—minus any trappings that pertain to caste, creed and in this case gender. So, bring on the cosmopolitans, the cones and yes, even the steaks and tandoori chicken… and please don’t forget those delicate cucumber sandwiches!

(First published in DNA Me)