If you’re a true foodie, try the food at Indian ashrams
Trust the Italians. As Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love went from bestselling memoir to a Julia-and-Javier starring romantic blockbuster in the film theatres, tour guides in Bologna, Naples and Rome were pulling in the groupies.
For foodies and Gilbert groupies, the two big destinations of choice after the success of the book have been Italy and Indonesia. Flocks of tourists have headed off to Bali to find their very own medicine men and healers — Gilbert found herself a dashing, romantic Brazilian man as well, but this may be beyond the reach of most tour group operators.
And Italy, where Gilbert famously put on enough weight to confirm that she not only gorged on buffalo mozzarella but had begun to look like a very small, round cheese as well, now has some of the happiest pizzerias and trattoria owners in the world. The Gilbert diet in Italy allowed no calorie-watching, and some of her favourites were: streetside pizza in Naples (“Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise”), gelato, chocolate and the pleasures of putting together a meal for oneself out of eggs, asparagus, goat cheese, salmon and a ripe, luscious peach.
Perhaps the most liberating part of Eat, Pray, Love’s Italian excursions into food was the way in which Gilbert celebrated gluttony —thereby freeing up this generation of women. They may diet in Delhi, count calories in California, but Italy is now earmarked on their maps for Indulgence. At the San Crispino gelato shop near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, women stuff themselves silly. This is so not the sorbet; instead, this is food porn, for a generation of fashionably starved women.
Italy has the food tourism market cornered, between Bill Buford and Liz Gilbert. Buford has encouraged hoards of enthusiastic gourmands to make the trek to Sicily, to discover the art of the old-school butchers and the true heart of slow food. Liz Gilbert has now mapped the best pasta, gelato and fried zucchini blossoms for tourists who want, if only for a brief season, to experience the joys of complete, sensual abandon to gastronomy.
In all of this, India’s missed the bus. This is in part because Liz Gilbert skipped travelling around the country in order to ‘find herself’ at a particular ashram (not listed on the many “Pray” tours cashing in on the Gilbert effect). But it’s also because Gilbert, like all too many tourists, doesn’t dwell strongly enough on the pleasures of ashram food. (She does mention it, but the purity, austerity and cleansing virtues of the food don’t stand comparison with the descriptions of melting, perfect, lush cheese in sunny Italy.)
But if you’re a true foodie, Gilbert’s path really is the one to follow: excess in Italy, compensated for by good-for-the-soul eating in India. Most ashrams have spectacularly good kitchens — and chefs — the relative austerity of ingredients and the emphasis on freshness means that most ashram cooks are experts at creating great flavours.
One way, and perhaps the most common, for tourists to experience this is by booking in at an ayurvedic-friendly resort, such as the many excellent places in Kerala, or if your budget stretches to seriously high-end, to places like the Ananda Spa in the Himalayas. An easier and more time-honoured way for visitors who don’t mind a little sermonising and friendly bhajan-singing for their supper is to visit the Hare Krishna temples, or to partake of any of the gurdwara langars.
The Italian Gilbert gluttony tour is well on its way to becoming a permanent tourist attraction — we need to respond with an Eating-at-the-Ashram package before Eat, Pray, Love mania wanes.
[Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi -based freelance writer]
