Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In August 2021, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten penned a piece that mentioned his profound dislike for Indian food, which according to him was defined by a single spice: “curry.” The response was immediate and fierce; Mindy Kaling questioned the article’s point while Top Chef’s Padma Lakshmi called it ignorant and racist. The same summer, BuzzFeed reposted a video by food vlogger Chaheti Bansal calling for the term “Indian curry” to be canceled altogether. “There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100 km,” Bansal asserted, “and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularized by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes.”

Of course, as Weingarten was schooled, “curry” is not a single spice: While the curry leaf is used as an ingredient in some South Asian dishes, curry powder is a varying mixture of spices, one that is rarely found in Indian households. According to Top Chef contestant and cooking teacher Amirah Islam, the word “curry” may have derived from the Tamil word “kari,” which means spiced sauce. When the Portuguese invaded India in the 15th century, they began using the word “carree” to describe broths poured over rice.

Two centuries later, British colonizers began reworking local dishes to their palates and referring to all of them as curries. Indian merchants capitalized on the situation by commercializing curry powder and selling it to the British, who began using it in their versions of Indian dishes. Later, curry became linked to harmful stereotypes, like the term “curry-muncher.”

“Curry is a term that became popularized via colonialism,” says Anita Mannur, author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and a professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. “If colonialism is a system of power, part of that power comes from the ability to name, simplify, and take away complexity. So shorthands enter lexicons—and curry is one of those.”

Since the early 1900s, Punjabi people have made up a large share of South Asian immigrants into the United States, and North Indian cuisine—or Mughlai cuisine, as it is known in India—has dominated the South Asian food scene in the West. And it’s a particular form of Mughlai food, heavy on spiced sauces often referred to by Americans as curries, that has been further assimilated to Western tastes, says Sana Javeri Kadri, who was raised in Mumbai and now lives in the Bay Area, and founded a spice company called Diaspora Co. This adaptation of tastes flattens our understanding of the diversity of South Asian food, Javeri Kadri argues—“it does everybody a disservice.”

As chef and activist Preeti Mistry sees it, referring to all Indian food as curry is “a way to devalue and collapse, as if somehow our food is a monolith. It comes from not understanding and not wanting to.” Mistry, whose family hails from the Indian state of Gujarat, ran a restaurant in Oakland called Juhu Beach Club until 2018, serving up Indian street food and homestyle specialties. Once, a chef on a food tour didn’t want to stop at Juhu because “they didn’t like curry,” Mistry recalls. “I took offense because this was someone who knew me and my food, who was still choosing to dumb it down like this.”

Given curry’s speckled past and reductive associations, should the term be phased out entirely? Islam, the cooking teacher, thinks we should move away from it. She advises chefs and home cooks to instead “take up space—tell your stories. It’s imperative to talk about where specific culinary techniques and cuisines originate to give credit and respect to the cultures they derive from.” With her upcoming The Diaspora Cookbook, Javeri Kadri hopes to introduce readers to hyperlocal cuisines from places like the hills of Kerala to help them understand the nuances of tastes from across the subcontinent.

There are signs that the moniker may be falling out of favor anyway. “One way we already see this happening is in the growing presence of South Indian food in Indian restaurants,” Mannur says. In June, the James Beard Foundation named Chai Pani, an Asheville, North Carolina, restaurant serving Indian street food, its Outstanding Restaurant, essentially deeming it the best restaurant in America. The menu features dishes like the multitextured bhel puri chaat, and uttapam studded with corn and peas—and not a single dish labeled “curry” to be found. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate