Inefficient Curry

I make a really good goat curry. This is a fact. But if you were to look at the process from an efficiency-based standpoint, you would think I was losing my mind.

It’s a dish called kosha mangsho. It’s a Bengali mutton curry, and the defining characteristic of this dish is that you have to cook the spices and the meat for a long, long time. You can’t rush it. You have to stand over the stove, stirring and scraping the bottom of the pot so it doesn't burn, literally for hours. Your arm gets tired. The kitchen gets hot. You smell like onions and turmeric for three days afterward.

If food was just about "fueling the machine," nobody would ever make this dish. We would just boil the meat, chew it, and move on. Or we’d drink a protein shake.

But we don't. We do the hard thing. Why?

This is where Food Anthropology gets cool. It asks why humans put so much effort into sensory pleasure.

Cooking is one of the very few things that make us human. No other animal cooks. Levi-Strauss, a famous anthropologist (not the jeans guy), basically said that the difference between "Raw" and "Cooked" is the difference between "Nature" and "Culture."

When I stand there stirring that goat meat for two hours, I’m not just making dinner. I’m performing a ritual. I’m doing exactly what my relatives do, and what their parents did. I’m taking ingredients and modifying them into something that signifies "home" and "comfort."

There is also the chemistry of it, which I love. I like knowing that the heat is breaking down the collagen in the goat meat, turning it into gelatin, which thickens the sauce. I like knowing that the Maillard reaction is browning the onions to create that deep, savory flavor.

But the science is just the how. Anthropology is the why.

The "why" is that food is a language. When I make that curry for my friends or family, I’m communicating something that I can’t really say in words. I’m saying, "I care about you enough to stand here and sweat over this pot for three hours."

I want to dig into more of these inefficiencies. I want to know why we eat peppers that burn our tongues. I want to know why some cultures think milk is gross while others drink it by the gallon. I want to figure out why we decided that lobster was peasant food two hundred years ago, but a luxury item today.

It turns out, the history of the world is on your dinner plate. You just have to be willing to poke around with your fork to find it.