Monday, January 11, 2010

The Next Big Thing???? Let's Hear It For The Subcontinent!


We've been through Tuscan, and Asian Fusion, Nawlins, and Santa Fe, Vietnamese, and Thai and now it seems that the great karmic wheel has finally come round . Is Indian food the next big thing? According to this article in Salon.com it may very well be...or not. Krishnendu Ray who is an assistant professor of nutrition and food studies at NYU  is quoted as saying Indian cuisines' day may not be here for quite a while, at least until 2065
"If you look at Italian immigration to the U.S., it mostly began in the 1880s and Italian American food started climbing up in prestige in the 1980s, about 100 years later. But Indian immigration also has to continue up to certain a point. There are about 2.7 million Indians in the U.S. -- about half a million in New York City -- and the culture won’t be able to insinuate itself into everyday culture until it’s in the range of 20 million people. Indians have to be partly as ubiquitous as Italians."
  Maybe that will turn out to be true, maybe not. One thing that's not taken into account is the times we live in.We live in an age of texting, IM'ing,  rapid international travel and intermingling between cultures and people. If it took all the years and WWII to popularize pizza widely in the US, how to explain that one can now walk into almost any supermarket including ones here in my tiny town of Sonoma and purchase Naan bread and any variety of frozen Indian entrees in the freezer section!
 For me, I'm betting on Indian cuisine. My only question is, which Indian Cuisine? Indian is a vast and complex country, a country to match it's dishes. Ten years is barely enough time to make a dent in what it offers.

1 comment :

  1. I think you've got something here. Indian is definitely in & very hot!! I'd go with North Indian/mughlai cuisine. Nothing to beat that!!

    ReplyDelete

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