Indian Food

            South Indian food is very different from the North Indian food I’m used to eating at home. I like it, but I’m really sick of white rice and I’m craving meat, pretty badly. I’ve had meat a few times, but you need to find a Sikh or Muslim restaurant and even then the quality can be questionable.

A normal meal consists of three courses: the first course is rice, chapatti, or dosa with some type of gravy dish and sambar, the second course consists of rice with rassam, and the third course is usually rice with curd, a type of homemade yogurt. When we first got here nobody in the group had any idea of the proper order to eat the food in, so we just ate it all together and found ourselves laughed at by the hotel staff. It was probably like mixing pasta, a hamburger, and ice cream together in one dish. Most South Indians are also Hindu and thus keep vegetarian, which leaves me with a lot of rice and not a lot of protein. Lentils are pretty prevalent in the diet, but it’s just not the same as a piece of chicken. North India grows a lot of wheat, which leads to more breads in the diet, while the South grows mostly rice. I love the curd because it provides protein and good bacteria for digestion.

            My stomach has taken a couple of hits, but it hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting going into the trip and I can usually recover pretty quickly too. Some of the other kids haven’t been so lucky, though.

            American fast food is also really popular here, especially KFC and McDonald’s. Apparently most Indians swear by KFC. Just for the hell of it, three of us went into KFC and McDonald’s two days ago. We were really surprised by how nice they were. They were clean, busy, and relatively “hip.” Fast food also has a reputation in the US for less than ideal standards of hygiene, but these kitchens were probably the cleanest that I’ve seen in India. At KFC we ordered some popcorn chicken and at McDonald’s we ordered a McAloo Tikki and the Chicken Maharaja Mac. If we closed our eyes, we could almost feel like we were home. All were pretty good, but the Chicken Maharaja Mac had something in it that we could only imagine had been a chicken at one point because chicken was in the name.