ABSTRACT
One of the tantalising attributes of normality is that, on the one hand, it has a quiet taken-for-granted quality that has a lulling effect. People are not always aware of everyday experience, the normality of normal that has to be worked upon to be achieved. Locating the everyday kitchen within the house raised some interesting issues concerning the description and ownership of houses. Most of the part-time cooks are called rannar lok in Calcutta and bhuas in Dhaka who only cook everyday in middle- and upper-class homes. Almost all households have time routines that are calibrated by cooking, cleaning, washing, and consumption of meals. Everyday food is an event that reveals food as a thing-actant and desh as foodscape as a place-actant. Thus, the event of everyday food evinces normality as the effect of heterogeneous distributed actants engaged in precarious negotiations.
