Price
$22.00
About This Book
What do India’s cities eat when they wake up, and what do those first bites reveal about how we live? In First Bite, journalist and food–culture writer Priyadarshini Chatterjee travels through ten Indian cities—Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Amritsar, Varanasi, Shillong, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad—to explore breakfast as history, habit, and everyday necessity. From temple offerings and home kitchens to roadside stalls and century-old eateries, she follows the morning meal into lanes, markets, and workspaces, uncovering the rhythms that bring a city to life at dawn. Neither a recipe collection nor a list of must-eat addresses, First Bite instead uses breakfast as a lens to understand how cities function: who wakes early and why, who cooks, who eats out, and how foodways are shaped by labour, migration, caste, class, faith, colonialism, and capitalism. Drawing on archival sources, literature, and years of on-the-ground reporting, Chatterjee traces the evolution of India’s morning meals, from ancient texts and ritual offerings to working-class sustenance and the rise of public eateries in urban India.
About The Author
Priyadarshini Chatterjee is a food, culture, and travel writer based in Kolkata, India. Her work has appeared in a number of national and international publications, including Condé Nast Traveller India, Whetstone Magazine, Mint Lounge, Scroll.in, The Hindu BusinessLine, and Lonely Planet India, among others. She graduated with honours in political science from the University of Calcutta, followed by a postgraduate degree in media and cultural studies from the University of Sussex. But her heart lay in writing. She returned to India and worked for a while on the features teams of different publications, before quitting her job to write independently. She chose food as her area of exploration, dabbling in different genres of food writing—from blogging about family recipes to critiquing restaurants—before focusing her work on the intersections of food, history, and culture. She is particularly interested in exploring food in its historical contexts. When she is not writing or researching about food, she can be found cooking up a storm in her kitchen.
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