The ascent of Goan cuisine in the global imagination acquired
interesting footnotes this week, as the latest edition of the wildly successful
MasterChef Australia television series came to an end with Sarah Todd – who has
based herself in India’s smallest state since 2015 –pushing hard throughout
finals week, before succumbing to the one-of-a-kind composure and sheer
culinary chops of Billie McKay, the first-ever two-time winner of the world’s
most popular reality show.
Less than 3 percent of Australians are ethnic Indians.
Nonetheless, the subcontinent has exerted outsized impact on MasterChef
Australia via previous winners Sashi Cheliah (an Indian- Singaporean-Australian
prison guard who won in 2018), and Justin Narayan, the Indian-Fijian- Australian
youth pastor who emerged victorious last year. Todd is not Indian, but became a
desi social media star in her first season of competition when she prepared
Aloo Gobi to the delight of millions of viewers on this side of the Indian
Ocean. This time around, rising to the top in an unusual mingling of previous
favourites and new competitors, she cooked with Indian emphasis constantly.
Todd used to be married to an Indian-Australian of Punjabi
descent. After the 2014 series of MasterChef Australia made her famous, she
toured New Delhi, Mumbai and Goa to deliver cooking demonstrations. In a 2018
interview, the native of Queensland told the journalist Tanvi Dubey “it was my
first trip to India and I had never seen anything like it before. The town
where I am from has 1000 people, so it’s very small. When I got to India, I was
so overwhelmed with the people [but in Goa] I felt like this was a sanctuary
for me. Also, Queensland with its Great Barrier Reef, its tropical climate, sea
and food is similar, and when I visited [Goa] it felt like home.”
In 2015, Todd opened
her “dream project” Antares, one of the ambitious restaurants and hotels
clustered (with deeply uncertain legality) near the waterline in Vagator on the
North Goa beach belt, and also immediately started making a television series.
Wikipedia says ‘My Restaurant in India’ was broadcast in 150 countries, and
‘Serve it like Sarah’ and ‘Awesome Assam with Sarah Todd’ have aired in several
different markets.
All this is textbook
celebrity strategy, implemented by an indisputably attractive talent (Todd is a
former model). But there’s an additional twist which became increasingly
evident – and eventually undeniable – as MasterChef Australia 2022 laid out the
rich emotional banquet for which its producers are justifiably famous. We were
able to see and understand how Indian flavours aren’t just another career move
for this ambitious culinary/media icon-in-the-making: Todd knows and loves them
intimately, keeps travelling and studying how they are used, and both Goa and
India have become essential elements in her sense of belonging in the world.
This is complicated
territory, because Australia is a settler colonial country founded on
extraordinary atrocities – indeed genocide - and remains defined by systemic
racism centred on the unscientific and patently absurd notion of “whiteness.”
As the wonderful East Africa-born Goan-New Zealander (she works in Australia)
academic Ruth DeSouza writes on her excellent blog at ruthdesouza.com, “The
consumption of ethnic food points to a desire to consume difference through
appropriation of food and tradition as exotic, where ethnicity becomes spice
for mainstream culture, losing its own legitimacy in the process. Instead of
engagement, the other is consumed.”
Is this what Todd
does, when preparing Cafreal or Xacuti (which she did on MasterChef Australia
this season)? Does that qualify as cultural appropriation, which DeSouza
defines as “a charge levelled at people from the dominant culture to signal
power dynamic, where elements have been taken from a culture of people who have
been systematically oppressed by the dominant group.” The answer has to be
solidly no. That is not what is happening here. It is true we haven’t seen the
more enlightened stage of cultural appreciation either – DeSouza says we would
recognize an “exchange where mutual sharing is involved” – but there’s no doubt
Goa/India isn’t any gimmick to Todd. It’s part of her identity.
As it happens, just a
few months ago on the opposite end of the planet from “down under”, Goan food
had another unlikely tryst with big time global media as Crystelle Pereira – an
endlessly enthusiastic twenty-something relationship manager for Goldman Sachs
- stormed her way into the finals of The Great British Bake Off television
series, while continually referring to her family background and ethnic origin.
Although, she has definitely spent much less time in her ancestral homeland
than Todd, this cheerful young Goan-British culinary enthusiast personified
those cultural roots with great feeling, most notably when she won both Star
Baker and “a showstopper Hollywood handshake” for her curried chicken and
potato terrine pie that was based on a recipe by her late great-grandmother
Lily.
GBBO is an
extraordinary phenomenon. It is nearly as internationally ubiquitous as
MasterChef Australia (other editions of MasterChef have markedly less universal
appeal) but goes in precisely the opposite direction from the Aussie export’s
slick cosmopolitanism to full-on British eccentricity at its most baroque, so
incredibly twee that it quite possibly crosses the line to being radical. The
philosopher Tom Whyman shared a useful insight with The Guardian, that the show
celebrates “an imaginary, idealised Britishness, consciously updated to take account
of multiculturalism [which] makes people feel the concept of Britishness is
still relevant.”
Of
course, Australia is not MasterChef the UK is not GBBO, and “reality
television” is just show business. But make no mistake, these are hugely
significant cultural products with an immense impact on the way the world
thinks about Australia and the UK, and – much more crucially – how the Aussies
and British think of themselves. In the end, this is why it has been so
meaningful – and rather moving – to watch Sarah Todd work so sincerely to
embody her idea of the soul of India in her cooking, and to hear Crystelle
Pereira speak up about her family’s heritage with terrific passion and verve.
Both of them have represented Goa with distinction.