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My first encounter with a “foodie” was in class six. She braided her midnight black hair meticulously, tucking every lock into place, as she dug into a lemon tart pastry— a practical decision, she insisted, to avoid strands of hair in the food; not to follow school rules, she assured.
Muskan’s adoration for food was so consistent that I hardly ever noticed it as a unique aspect of her personality. The only thing I did notice was how she always flaunted a slender figure no matter the amount of food she’d ingested— an ever present source of anxiety for Indian women.
Although more than 10 years have trodden by since class six, I find myself fondly recalling the afternoons Muskan and I spent at that old bakery in the alleyway behind our school because of Mayukh Sen.
At just 26, the food culture writer’s works have captured the world’s imagination thanks to his 2018 James Beard Foundation Award win for his profile titled, “She Was a Soul Food Sensation. Then, 19 Years Ago, She Disappeared.” As unusual as it is deserving, the piece feels like a trembling slice of the kind of culinary history that’s used to being forgotten. At the mere threat of his pen (always mightier than a kitchen knife in his case) Mayukh’s work reveals layer upon layer of nostalgia and introspection as he uses his South Asian heritage to reflect on the food he writes about.
In an article titled “The Sad, Sexist Part of Bengali Cuisine,” Mayukh beautifully codes the experience of widows who were forced to follow casteist rituals and unintentionally enriched Bengali vegetarian menus in the process.
In it, he doesn’t shy away from writing of the Bengali widow closest to him, his grandmother. He says, “To my mother, there was little better than didaer hatther ranna, cooking from the hands of a grandmother. This food was bellied with comfort and tempered with pain.”
A member of the Stanford University Class of 2014, Mayukh was hired by Food52’s former managing editor Kenzi Wilbur to be a culture writer with a special focus on food to reign in new demographics, Abigail Koffler says in Forbes. Hence, Mayukh worked towards carving out a distinctly Indian space in the food industry that was eventually large enough for about 415 long-form features.
In an interview with Rohan Kamicheril, Mayukh said, “Writing about myself is a natural register for me because looking inward feels like the most natural place to start— to ask myself what food I ate growing up, and what assumptions and understandings my family’s food traditions were laden with that I’d never considered putting into words.”
However, Mayukh’s liberal dosage of his own identity in his writing worked like medicine on his readers–sometimes soothing, other times bitter. His commentary on racism has been received with the most contention.
“I did cringe when I read your description of her as ‘a person of color’. We do not need the divisive language that ascribes difference based on one’s skin tone or country of origin,” read a comment on his Food52 article on Joyce Chen, a Chinese immigrant who was the first to host a national American cooking show.
Unafraid of delving into the political, Mayukh said his curiosity leads him to people who exist in the margins of society, like women of colour, “Especially those who I feel haven’t gotten their due, or gotten the respect that they probably deserve, or have been taken for granted.”
One could use a couple of metrics to make the argument that Mayukh too exists in margins as he was one of Food52’s first writers of colour. He told Kamicheril of the lack of representation he felt as a consumer of food culture writing, stating, “I find that the vast majority of other food writers I know are either white, rich, or both. I am neither.”
Now that Mayukh’s steady rise is only matched by that of a perfect souffle, his South Asian heritage will serve as a mirror to the rest of us. However, his uniqueness and the significance of his James Beard win isn’t explicitly roped to his ethnicity.
Mayukh currently lives in Brooklyn, a place more conducive to his sense of self than India, despite his Indian roots. Because his queer identity would stick out here like elaichi in biryani, and his queerness is something he candidly spoons into the batter of his personal essays. In his piece on the homophobic etymology of the word ‘fruitcake,’ he writes, “Fruitcake is something like the word faggot’s first cousin. To be nuts was to be mentally ill, after all, and queerness was, for a time, a flavour of mental illness.”
Mayukh’s narratives are soaked in a healthy stew of aesthetics and semantics too. His writing flows as effortlessly as ribbons of chocolate fondue, even when punctuated with research and information.
Documenting the rise of kombucha in the United States of America between 1992 and 1995, he writes, “During a time when H.I.V. and AIDS patients were pathologized as victims of an incurable gay cancer, kombucha was a folk remedy that presented an ideal sanctuary from the snare of Western medicine. Baker and Pryor offered hope, a scarce and valuable commodity, in a time of uncertainty.”
Mayukh’s style consistently disrupts the status quo of food journalism and forces his audience to attribute philosophical meaning to the simplest and smallest of meals.
Post his employment at a writer Food52 and VICE’s Munchies and soon after receiving the James Beard Award nomination, Mayukh decided to venture out into the freelancing world. “The award, ‘created a lot of momentum for me and got more a lot of people to notice me and take me more seriously. It also made me more protective of my byline,’” Mayukh told Koffler.
Those in the writing business know how important it is to analyze topics from a fresh perspective. Mayukh’s distinct place in society as a queer, South Asian man aids him in that regard.
His literary voice, stuffed with familial recollection and an investigation of sexuality, is on a constant journey of self-exploration. Invaluable to the food writing topography, Mayukh lends soul to the seemingly insignificant and routine act of putting spoon to dal, knife to butter, and lemon-tart to hungry mouth. And it lends new flavour to the topography of food writing that represents the Indian diaspora.
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