Of being in lockdown and yet making a fresh start: The #Foodocracy story.

Breakfast with Baby Loaf and Little Nimki. AKA the Kitty Karmakars and Team
Finely Chopped. Savoury French Toast with slightly burnt onions for me & akoori
for K

I bumped into Aditi Handa, co-owner and head baker of Baker’s Dozen, when I stepped into their store at Bandra to buy bread this morning.

We got talking and she told me that the pandemic had made them relook at their business and take steps that they never thought of talking.

The result? Unprecedented growth!

Touchwood.

This sounded so pleasantly and encouragingly familiar. I have heard so many stories of people in the world of food who have ended up doing things in the pandemic that they had never thought they would. Converting dreams into reality. Turning poison into medicine, as the Buddhist saying goes.

The #Foodocracy Story on Foodism

I was thrilled to receive the link to the latest copy of the Foodism magazine earlier in the day. They had covered the story of my Foodocracy series in their article titled ‘survival to revival.’

This was quite the morale booster for me. Let me explain why.

Where did the year go? What happened to all my plans? Did I achieve anything since the pandemic hit us? Should one look at this as a forced ‘gap year’? Have I gone two steps backward?

Are these questions that you have asked yourself at some point in the year that went by?

If you have, you are not alone. I did too. I still do.

Every profession has it own challenges. As do freelancers.

You do not really have anyone ‘at work’ to discuss things with. No team meetings. Strategy meetings. Brainstorming. Stocktaking. Appraisals. Huddles. etc.

Brainstorming with team Finely Chopped while I wrote this

Yes, my cats do hang around me when I write and consider themselves to be a part of team Finely Chopped, but taking out a white board and presenting plans to them might worry some people.

I am of course lucky to have K in my life to share my worries and concerns with, and she has been most encouraging. Making me believe in myself and supporting me in what I do.

Yet, the nature of self doubt is such that it never leaves you.

Which is why I found the Foodism feature so reassuring, for it gave me an opportunity to talk about the #Foodocracy story and do some introspection in the process.

It started with the #FoodocracyIndia series which I started first as an Instagram and blog post based feature and then moved into an Instagram Live based podcast format.

The one thing that excites me the most when it comes to writing is telling the story of the people behind the eateries that we love so much. Street food places, family run mom and pop places, historical places with crumbling edifices and vibrant hearts, individual run cafes and bakeries and restaurants. The pandemic meant that I could not go out to hang out at such places. Or go out and find more such treasures.

#FoodocracyIndia became my spot in the ether world where I would share fond memories of eating at such humble and yet big hearted places across the country over the years. Places that do not have a PR budget or a marketing team, places that are not ‘trendy’ and do not make it to any list, but have given many happy moments to those who have come to their doors.

They were shut during the lockdown, but #FoodocracyIndia was where one could sing tributes to them and often exchange memories with their other fans. Most of the 40 odd establishments that I covered here would possibly not be on social media or even know about this, but hopefully some of the positive vibes generated rubbed off on them while they cooled their heels till they came back to life again. Bruised and battered, but not broken.

With Aditi Handa at Baker’s Dozen. She has shared her story on
#foodocracyforher in the past

I had been wanting to do something to promote and help women in the F&B industry ever since I attended the BNI Queens meet, as the only male speaker, a few months before the lockdown. I had discussed this with Ira, a former colleague of mine, just as I had discussed plans to promote street food eateries earlier with Sameer Malkani. We could not crack the way ahead in either case. Then came the pandemic and the time to think differently. I am pretty sure that all the chats that I had with both Sameer and Ira had an effect on what I did in the months that followed for both #FoodocracyforHer and #FoodocracyForIndia and I am grateful for that.

The answer I sought came in the form of my #FoodocracyForHer series, where I interviewed women from the F&B Industry week after week starting from 5th May 2020. I am not good with tracking stuff but I think I have done around 35 episodes so far. Featuring restaurateurs, story tellers, home chefs, chefs, bakers, chocolatiers, entrepreneurs… from across the country. Some well known and with a strong social media presence. Others with neither, but who were doing stellar work. Some actually created Instagram accounts or learnt to do lives for the first time when we chatted as I had started this as an Instagram live series. As fatigue set in with live broadcasts, as the world began to open up and people got too busy watch lives, I shifted to a pre-recorded Zoom interview format which I then broadcast across #FinelyChoppedTV channels across social media. What I can tell you is it still remains K’s favourite amongst all the content that I have created. At a personal level, it is the series that has inspired me the most.

The start of the lockdown was all about being home with no house help or restaurants to look to for food. Atma-nirbhar Bharat as our Prime Minister called it. We would cook a fair bit then. I would shoot with my phone camera while cooking and share these recipe videos under #FinelyChoppedKitchens. I posted 30 odd recipes of easy to cook and fairly tasty dishes and I loved it when people would message saying that they had found these useful and even shared pictures of dishes that they had cooked.

The home chefs swung into action after the first couple of months of the lockdown, cloud kitchens too, before restaurants opened again. As K said and I agree, we had some of the amazing food in the last one year courtesy the home chefs who presented food from different parts of India through their home kitchens in Mumbai. There was Maharashtrian, Kerala, Tamil, Mangalorean, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Assamese, East Indian, Parsi, Memon, Odiya, Bihari and Bengali food, and a lot more on offer.

This is something that had always excited me about Mumbai. The multiplicity of cultures that the city is home to. I had been wanting to do something about this for years. A book, a food show, a column…nothing had materialised. I could not excite anyone about my plans it seemed.

Then came the pandemic and I began my third and most recent #Foodocracy series, #FoodocracyKitchens. First as a blog post and then as a video series where I would talk about the food of different communities of India, through the story of different home chefs whose food we would get to try. Either when we ordered it, or when they sent it to us to sample and when the food excited me. The stories here are largely home chef based, with the occasional small, family run business and cloud kitchen story.

This series was difficult to produce oneself and I would often get K to shoot me while I sat at the table with all the food and spoke about it. One has done close to 30 odd stories here.

The results? A year of continuous posting took my YouTube subscription numbers from 1.3 k before the lockdown to 4.4K now. It’s a drop of water in the ocean compared to a world where people talk in terms of millions, but to me each new subscriber is not a nameless number. It is a beacon of support. The #foodocracy views have been driven by Instagram and if I take the content put out there, the views across social media would be around 100,000. I need to sit and do the math someday but then it’s storytelling that excites me and that’s where I concentrate my time. Moving to video over just writing has made me more productive.

This is also when I began partnering with BookAWorskhsop.in where we leveraged my past professional experience as a market researcher and present experience as a food writer, to come up with first live, and then a pre-recorded series on brand building for home chefs and other independent operators in the food business. Working with a team, and a pro-active one at that, was a welcome break from the solitude of being a freelancer. As it was working with the Soul Company team to bring alive the #MumbaiNativeKitchens. A curated home chef festival showcasing food from home chefs whose food represented that of the early settlers of Mumbai. I have also had the opportunity to record sessions on brand building for home bakers for Bakedemy.

I promoted the zero waste life under #LoveYourLeftovers and that of healthy and conscious eating under #LittleJackHornerMeals. There were a few client projects that happened during this period.

I discovered a life beyond food and told stories of our cats under the #KittyKarmakars and #BandraCats handles and people could not get enough of that. To many this was such a source of joy.

Maybe it’s time for me to stop being pessimistic and instead, like so many I have interviewed have about their own lives, learn to appreciate the paths that the pandemic have allowed one to embark on. Roads that might have remained untravelled otherwise.

And, I know that this might seem like a cliche, but please give yourself a pat on your back if you are feeling low. It has not been an easy year and you have done very well, no matter what you have done. It is just not visible to you!

How could you help the #Foodocracy series?

It would help if you could share the stories and like and subscribe to the pages. This is an organic series and every bit of help in spreading the word counts because hope is what we need now and that is what the #foodocracy series is all about. The story of everyday food and of winning through that.

If you are a brand with marketing budgets, please consider sponsoring the series as that would definitely help one continue with this and build it too. Spices, tea and coffee, salt, grains, kitchen appliances… I can see lots of synergy there. I hope you do too. Please do not offer barter. That does not help.

I also work as a brand consultant in the food sector bringing together my experience if market research and that as a food writer in Finely Chopped Consulting . Do mail me at kalyan@finelychopped.net if you have a brief that I can work on.

Thanks for reading. I know that I have not been very regular here. It has been a conscious decision. I have started a writing project and I want to prioritise my writing time for that. I also need to sleep earlier and wake up earlier and be more productive. Your best wishes will help!

In other news, I have been walking almost every evening for at least three weeks now. 2.5 to 3 km a day. I think that this has helped with my back issues and I have lost a couple of kilos too, but the biggest motivator is getting to meet my furry friends, specially Smol and Lady Laddoomati!