Premium Quality Edible Puzzles

The Moral Burden of Almond Butter

I found them while clearing my small pantry. Sitting at the back of the shelf were these two small jars, one with a golden lid, the other with a black one.

I remembered one came in a Diwali hamper, the other as a thoughtful gift from someone I had met for the first time and to whom I had in my frequent bouts of unabashed frankness and stupidity, told I ‘love’ almonds.

The next time I met her, she leaned forward, her eyes wide with mystery, her voice a mere confidential whisper near my neck, “You must try this, it is not regular almond butter,” and thrust a package into my hand.

I came home and opened it. Inside was a 200-gram jar that displayed a price more than my monthly milk bill.

I kept it at the back of the shelf and of my memory. It stayed there hibernating, till a few days ago when I was clearing up to prepare for the humid weather. 

What must have looked like a spread when packed, now had acquired a different personality. The oil had divorced the solids and confidently floated on top like a cargo ship on the ocean surface; the work of our 42 degrees Celsius summer.

Following James Bond’s tip on martini, I shook it several times, every time my arms trying to show more might, but the contents refused to undergo any physical change.

Curious, I opened the bottle and immediately dropped the idea of mixing the criminally oily contents in a blender. It would get very difficult to clean afterwards.

I poured the oil out in a bowl, inserted a butter knife into the solids, now like nearly-dry mud. I tried harder, and harder, till chunks of the solid mass broke under my muscular endeavour.

Tired, I read the list of ingredients. It also had Himalayan pink salt & added sunflower oil. That pricked me.

It is not that I have anything against sunflower oil or salt. We all use them for cooking. They might have added sunflower oil to improve spreadability, longer shelf-life or profit margins. If I was large-hearted, I would have used it for vegetable stir-fry or in paratha dough and forgotten about it. But my objection was against sunflower oil masquerading inside something that sounds noble.

Separating emotion from chemistry and mildly respecting the contents, I tasted it. It was very dense and stiff, sweet and savoury, tasting mildly of almonds and not much else.

I took two precious days to decide its fate. Eat up the chunks, finish, wash the bottle and close the file, my mind said.

And I also concluded I am not worthy of such premium quality edible puzzles.

Haven’t you ever bought or got something gourmet in a tiny jar which seems excessively healthy, priced like a gold nugget and yet the contents leave you confused about their purpose of existence? Or the urge to check if they have a Linkedin profile?

Aspirational foods occupy the same emotional category as exercise equipment, unread classics and expensive notebooks. Their primary ingredient is optimism, I feel.

The performative vocabulary suggests purity, implies health, evokes mountains and grandmothers, the missionary zeal of boutique consumption, the moral superiority attached to packaging.

My mind, however, translates this list of absurd virtues into something else entirely. See the examples and how my mind interprets them:

·         Organic: expensive reassurance that something once touched a plant

·         Artisanal: someone with good lighting made it.

·         Himalayan: geographically distant, morally elevated.

·         Stone-ground: suggests moral hardship

·         Ancient grain: survived 2,000 years, defeated by glucose syrup

·         Handcrafted: respects manual labour

·         Small batch: an experiment by the creator

·         Premium quality: a self-awarded distinction

·         Custom made: admits irregularities

·         Cold-pressed: sounds spiritual.

·         Made by a small group of women in Nilgiri foothills: source, origin unknown

None of these terms are necessarily false. Yet many of them carry a moral halo far larger than their actual usefulness.

They might quietly conceal sunflower oil, maltodextrin and ‘permitted’ stabilisers, but make me unable to say ‘no, thank you’. And if, like me, you are not careful, you are guilty of artisanal spoilage.

Sometimes ‘artisanal’ is genuine craftsmanship. Sometimes it is merely ‘craftwashing’ dressed in environmentally- safe packaging.

But the labels manage to convince the buyer that their nutritional value is greater than their commercial equivalents. You feel morally bound to use them to the last spoonful.

As a result, you could have a montage of truffle oil in tadka (tempering), cranberry chutney in paratha roll, salted, roasted almond strategically inserted into poha, ragi biscuits crushed into experimental trifle pudding.

We are a country that once stored carefully for scarcity. Now we are storing curated excess that asks for not merely eating, but project management. Such foods come with storage and usage instructions more demanding than a pedigree puppy.

If you too have a jar labelled with moral adjectives, I suggest you launch an emergency consumption campaign before the monsoon arrives. The limited-edition foods have limited shelf time too.

The second jar remains unopened. Some foods nourish the body. This one appears designed to test my spirit, my upper-body strength and my commitment to cold-pressed wellness. I have decided not to sit for the examination.

A small jar with unusually ambitious expectations.

                                                                                                         - Anupama S Mani