ABSTRACT
When I went to do fi eldwork in Bangalore city in South India in the spring of 1998 I found middle class housewives and working women excited about packaged foods that had begun to fl ood the urban Indian market. 1 When I returned to Boston in the fall of 1999, I found working women of the Indian diaspora equally excited about the same products that had begun to enter the “Indian” markets in the United States. My fascination with why these women were so attracted to these “instant” foods has led me to a questioning of how global food fl ows construct identity in a cosmopolitan and multicultural world and the social and symbolic contours of transnational food consumption (Appadurai, 1981, 1986). So here, in a context devoted to understanding the family in a transnational world, I revisit the question that has bothered social theorists since the time of Marx: How are relations among people shaped by relations between people and things? In this exploratory paper, the focus is upon recent trends of consuming a variety of packaged and pre-prepared “Indian” food among (Achaya, 2005) Indian families, and the convergent symbolic trends among two twinned transnational Indian communities-urban, middle class professionals, and their families in the South Indian city of Bangalore, and the same urban, middle class, diasporic professionals and their families in the city of Boston, in the United States. This article addresses two interrelated questions, one pragmatic and the other affective-the radical transformation in
*Originally published 2006
the manner of food consumption occurring due to globalization and concordant development of the packaged food industry in India; and the anxiety over identity loss experienced by South Asians both in urban India and abroad.
