Lucca Back : A tuscam town's clampsown highlights

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A Tuscan town’s clampdown highlights need for travelers to preserve diversity of cuisine
Few would disagree with the contention that one of the most pleasurable aspects of travel is the cuisine of different countries. The first taste you get of a culture is from its food — at least I do — and they point a lot to the history and culture of the people who created it. A case in point, from the Indian perspective, would be say, the cuisine of Trinidad.
That distant Caribbean island is home to a large ethnic Indian population, yet what passes off for ‘Indian’ food there is not recognizable to Indians from, well, India! That’s because their poor forebears who left India’s shores generations ago for a long journey into the unknown, took with them only a knowledge of basic spices — salt, turmeric and chili — and so their ‘Indian’ food now has no familiar aromas of ‘garam masala’ and other rich add-ons that we take for granted.
Yet, they have influenced the cuisines of the other people who also arrived in Trinidad from other parts of the world, leading to the creation of a unique ‘Trinidadian’ cuisine. The point of all this? Well, to point out that the traveling tendency of cuisine can turn out to be a double edged sword.
And that has been ably demonstrated by the happenings in the spectacular walled city of Lucca, not far from Florence in Italy’s tourist-friendly Tuscan region. The city’s centre-right councilors have voted that no restaurants serving “ethnic cuisine” will be allowed to open in its historic city centre any more. That means no kebabs, curries, couscous or even Mc Burgers, actually.
This has been opposed by left wingers as a sort of gastronomic racism, since many poor immigrants from Turkey and the rest of Asia make a living from these cheap eateries. And it is worrying that several other historic towns on the tourist circuit and even Milan are contemplating doing the same.
However, while the opponents have a point, so do the proponents. After all, how would you like it if a major tourist spot in India — the Taj, Mahabalipuram, Mysore, Ajanta, Bodh Gaya, Ajmer Sharif, Amber Fort or even the Qutab Minar — suddenly sprouted only Thai or Chinese ‘dhabas’ or offered pizzas, doner kebabs and burgers instead of tandoori chicken, samosas and idlis? You would be outraged, right?
Where is something to be said for fiercely protecting local cuisines from the onslaught of fast foods and convenience foods. To that extent the downturn has been a boon, forcing people to buy local and eat in. Other wise the world seemed to be hurtling, via fusion food and satellite television into a quicksand of homogenized cuisine.
Already the world is becoming a smaller place and the average family’s daily diet is “traveling” further than the previous generation... Who could have imagined two decades ago that pasta and noodles, broccoli and mushrooms, et al would become Indian staples? But as we travel more and more and our palates warm to other flavors, we bring them home as mementoes — so the mushrooming of foreign cuisine outlets is inevitable.
The tricky part is how to gauge when the foreigners are beginning to swamp the local cuisine/culture and call a halt. And even trickier is how to do it sensitively. Several difficult questions arise. For instance: could this rise of foreign eateries round the world arise from a hardening of taste buds among travelers? Could our demand for daal-chawal whether we are in Armenia or Argentina, Iceland or Indonesia, be the culprit?
Or could it be that buoyed by the feel good factor of boom tourism, good quality local indigenous cuisines — particularly in Europe — have priced themselves out of the average tourist’s reach, forcing everyone into cheap and cheerful options like doner kebabs and dim sum? Could this also be the reason why cheaper olive oils from Greece and Turkey and truffles from China are spoiling the market for the ‘real’ stuff from Liguria and Perigord?
Where ever the blame can or should be laid, it won’t do to create an impasse. Taking the case of Lucca, maybe the city fathers should look into the quality of local restaurants and their pricelists. Maybe they should look at who is eating those dratted doner kebabs — even if they are being made by Turks and Arabs, they certainly aren’t being bought by them.
All of us should look deep into our own cuisines and see how far ingredients have traveled. That may make us less chauvinistic about it and more open to new flavors. Just think about it: if our ancestors did not have open minds about new ingredients , our cuisines would not have had potatoes, tomatoes, onions and so many other flavorful ingredients!
So before we head for the Pizza Hut in Patiala or the dosa vendor in Manhattan — in a misplaced affection for either international or Indian flavors — it’s time we gave indigenous cuisine its due when traveling. By letting a million culinary forms continue to bloom, we will not only enrich our own dynamic cuisines, but will also preserve the particular charm of faraway places....

Courtesy:- ET dtd:- 26-02-09