The foodscape in Delhi and other metros have changed drastically in recent times with the increasing presence of migrant’s workers coming from Northeast India to the Metros. It is not only their identity which is contested in the context of the Northeast India but also their food habits. When the fermented and “smelly food” of the region reaches the metros along with the “Northeast migrants”, it led to conflict and contestation resulting with the state entering into the kitchen space of the migrant Northeast people. In recent times, the increasing visibility of “Northeast” food restaurants and shops in the metro can be seen. Here, the foodscapes and foodways travels from the local to the national through migrant’s population to the metro cities, where the cuisine of the everyday (in the home place) is reinvented as a marker of regional, tribal, group identity inorder to assert their identity and belongingness or of difference in the Nation’s capital.
This paper will look at the profile of the consumers consuming Northeast food which helps in constructing the image of the “metropolis”. At the same time, it also leads to the creation of the category of the “exotic food”. This in turn forces one to further examine the sociological category of “cultured” and “uncultured” as a result of food consumption against the notion of “purity” and “pollution” of the larger North Indian Hindu society. These categories are created based on people, region and the type of food they consume and thereby reinforced food racism and hierarchy. Age, class, region, caste etc., will be an important category to be interrogated in this paper.
