https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/Goan-Food-Going-Global/191744
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% 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” of 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 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 twentysomething 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.