Eating out!

We used to travel quite a lot when we were small. Every two or three years my father got transferred and so we had to pack and move to the new place. Besides these travels we used to go to our native place almost for every school holiday. Added to these travels, my parents, especially my mother, loved travelling and took us on trips to new places for sightseeing every other year, as described elsewhere.

After my childhood, the same pattern repeated albeit in a grander scale as my husband and I were moving between states rather than districts. Our family covered the sightseeing tours offered in the faraway places in the last year before we moved to a new place. In between we had to make a long trip to visit our native state for weddings in the family or celebrating festivals together.

In all these trips, one aspect of the travel has changed through the years. My mother used to take a stove and flour in the car boot, to make wheat, ragi or rice dosa. This way we were assured of hygienic meals wherever we put up for the night.

For the first day of our journey we used to equip ourselves with lots of rice and pickles. Tamarind rice always won hands down in my mom's list as it could keep even for two days. Idlis with milagai podi was the favoured choice for breakfast or dinner that day.  She used to pack a bundle of dried banana leaves to serve them on for the numerous members of our large family. Two ground sheets were packed for us to sit in the shade of a tree on the roadside in case we hadn't reached our destination before mealtime. At that time I used to complain about the cold idlis, the wrinkled dry leaf that served as plate and the ants that tried to crawl on to our picnic sheet. In retrospect I realize we were following a 'green' way of life with disposable organic packing materials!

The hotels we ate in served food on green banana leaves, used only once and readily disposable as wandering cattle 'recycled' them as their food at the back door ofthe hotel! We trusted enough to drink the water they served. Maybe pollution was not a problem back then! In fact till we moved to Chennai we never boiled drinking water, using 'thetankottai' to get clear water from river water.

By the time I got married, the travel meals consisted of food packets prepared for the three meals of the 24 hours journey by the loving relatives in whose house we were staying. I can never forget how my mother-in-law got up at 4 o' clock in the morning to make parcels of idlis for breakfast to eat on the train and packets of lemon rice, curd rice, potato curry and pickles for lunch! She really spoiled us daughter-in-laws by behaving more like a mother to all of us:-)

Sometime during this period the Indian trains served hygienic albeit tasteless food from their pantry cars. This prompted us to tell orrelatives not to go to the troule of preparing meals for our train journeys. But we did miss the tasty home food as we ate the insipid train food!

Nowadays, hygienic  and tasty food is available in the motels and inns on the roadside and packaged drinking water is everywhere. The train food has improved cosiderably too. The idea of eating only home made food has given way to eating out as often as possible even when we are not travelling. What a sea change in a few decades!  Already ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat food packets are available in all the grocery stores. At this rate in another few decades there would be no home cooked food at all and the only people who cook their own meals would be health freaks who like to eat only 'fresh' food!