Ranjona Banerji | Yucky to yummy: Do our tastes change as we age?

What’s the one thing you hated most as a child, that you were forced to eat or drink by your parents? For me, it was milk. From the time I was born. Human, cow, buffalo, same result: revulsion.

And that whole episode of a large multinational having a massive meltdown because a social media influencer flagged one of its products as containing too much sugar took me back in time.

A thread about milk on Twitter brought things to boil. Some agreed with my dislike; others were shocked at my blasphemy. Several innovative ways of fooling parents and getting rid of that liquid were presented. Why exactly parents do this to us, especially in India, was never quite explained.

I was just grateful that at some point in my adolescence, it was agreed that years of throwing up and throwing out meant freedom from the tyranny of food for calves. Unfortunately for my Mother in our long journey of milk together, that unmentionable milk supplement did not work for me. I hated it almost as much as the milk. She had to buy expensive stuff to disguise the taste.

Food and eating habits are perennial fun conversations on social media. I say fun, but often the best mango competition and the definition of biryani can lead to the social media equivalent of fisticuffs. Luckily, the mango fight is seasonal and also luckily angry mango heat on social media is virtual, even if it may feel real.

The biggest battle is usually between the sweet luscious if bland Alphonso from the west coast and the unbeatable Langda from North India, despite the strings and that slight end-taste tang which the dictionary describes as the taste of turpentine. (Lexicographers have really tough jobs.)

Have I given away which side of the battle I’m on? Of course, then there are the pernickety purists with their specialist mangoes, the Himayats, Himsagars, Dasseris, Chausas. Some of these reach the markets, some must be carefully sourced. Where I live, you get an endless supply of tasteless Banganapalli — not because the mango itself is tasteless but perhaps because of travel woes and some nefarious ripening methods — until Langda arrives. At least that’s how I see it.

I shan’t get into the biryani argument at all. Is it a pulao, if it’s vegetarian? Is a real one with mutton or chicken? Lucknow or Calcutta or Hyderabad or one of the various hybrid versions available all over? Did Wajid Ali Shah add potatoes because he liked them or because he ran out of money in exile? Is this what the Mughal Army marched on? That’s for another time.

Instead, my mind wanders to something much worse: particular types of vegetables. I can feel the bristling already. First, from the Millennials and Gen Zees who eat a “plant-based” diet which mainly consists of avocado and “oat milk”. They are easily upset and ready to “cancel” you of course if you disagree. Then come the vegetarians. The latter are the worst hypocrites. I have lived around many avowed vegetarians and their “plant-based” diet mainly consists of potatoes, Bengal gram flour, lentils, pulses, rice and wheat. The green stuff at best comes from coriander garnish.

I, on the other hand, ahem, eat a lot of plant-based vegetables, or vegetable-based plants or whatever the trendy name currently is. Not just tomato and lettuce. You don’t even get lettuce all year round. That’s the other problem: I eat seasonal. I don’t shop for plant-based plants from that giant transnational delivery behemoth. I don’t even shop from shops. I buy from roadside vegetable vendors. So apart from summer staples like pointed gourd (or what Bengalis call potol, in Hindi it’s parwal and many people hate it), whatever sort of brinjal is in season, I get delicious green leaves like bathua — pigweed? — and some exotica I met recently like kachnar buds — from the Bauhinea tree.

What I avoid if I can is the worst of the gourd family. Especially bottle gourd or lauki, which is something of a watery bland abomination in my head. The fault lies clearly with health nuts, who convinced me to drink lauki juice every day for some years. It benefitted me not. And pained me a lot. I have thus reverted to my Bengali roots and can only eat “lau” if it is suitably disguised with some chingri that is prawns. But then I recently met someone who said his version of food heaven was a slice of lightly salted steamed lauki. Human beings are truly marvellous.

Gourds are a funny group of plant-based plants. They specialise in tastelessness and need severe embellishment to be properly edible. Why else would one drown a bottle gourd in sugar to make a sweetie out of it and then it still remains boring after all that effort? I can manage the ridge gourd with the ridges but not its close cousin without ridges. They are even better as loofahs though. Which I suspect is their true purpose.

I have never eaten a “tinda”, which the search engine tells me is a Praecitrullus fistolosus. This nomenclature is not appetising at all. That the beautiful Indian laburnum is Cassia fistula is equally unfair. Such a broad range covered by this fistula word, from a vegetable I will never eat to a summer flowering delight to a terrible anal problem.

And funnily, as often happens, planty-type plants I hated in my childhood I quite enjoy now. Like capsicum. Any sort of peppers, really. And spicy food. I couldn’t even eat raw green chillis and onions until I was about 50.

But what is really odd is that the most obnoxious vegetable on the planet is the one which really riles some Indians if you say you don’t like it. It’s called “gawar (ka) phalli”. I am not sure if the gawar is a socially offensive insult to a village bumpkin but it is more probable it has something to do to guar gum, a food emulsifier. For philistines like me, tasteless usefulness makes better sense than having to eat the stuff. It’s a very divisive vegetable. Not even prawns can save it. Why would you ruin prawns like that anyway?

The writer is a senior journalist who writes on media affairs, politics and social trends. She tweets at @ranjona.