Picture this: you’re relaxing in Trinity Bellwoods Park, Toronto (Canada), and you’re feeling hungry. Instead of using food delivery apps or waiting in long lines, you pull out your phone, and voilà! You’re greeted with floating ice creams, enticing food and drinks in 3D space, thanks to the WenuEats platform that lets chefs, bakers and culinary creators set up virtual storefronts. Stickers with QR codes are scattered around the park. Scan them with the Elysium app, and your phone transforms the park with realistic food and drinks, courtesy augmented reality (AR). Click on an item and it’s delivered to your spot in the park free of charge.

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It’s that time of year again when you set a New Year’s resolution. You establish it with the best of intentions, staying consistent for a few weeks, but then give up.

So what will it be this year? A new hobby, playing an instrument, exercising or perhaps staying off our phones and gadgets for two hours daily?

This year, I propose that we switch things up a bit. Let’s keep our resolutions at bay and celebrate health differently. This New Year, let’s ‘Celebrate a World of Flavours’.

Trying different flavours of the world enhances one’s palate and knowledge about one’s own food culture as well as various other culinary traditions. Every cuisine offers dishes which incorporate foods from every food group. This allows you to try new dishes from across the globe while also ensuring you receive a range of nutrients needed for good health.

Here are a few ways to embrace global cultures and cuisines when planning your meals and snack throughout the year.

Bring the world to your table

Vary your meals to include favourites from around the world. Healthful options are available, even if time is limited. Online videos, cookbooks, and recipes from chefs around the world can guide you through the process of cooking.

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In the mornings, I would wake up to the smell of parathas being fried. I was mesmerized by the transforming of potatoes, radishes and cauliflower into stiff and flat circles of flour. Sour lassi with it was nothing less than icing on the cake. Still not satisfied, I would beg grandma to take me to “the place where they kept fryums in gunny bags”, and buy about a kilo of bhujias and other street food. There was no match for the afternoons I spent eating those fryums, unconcerned about my skin breaking out.

When it was time to leave, and my parents came to pick me up, grandma would always give me a few crystals of mishri, probably as good luck for my ride back home. Of all the things I ate, those foggy grains are the ones I remember exclusively, perhaps because they reflected the simplicity and sweetness of days gone by.

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Since my wife has gone to New York to see our daughter, I’m on my own, and quite often treat myself to ordering food from hotels nearby. This morning was spicy vadas which I’d got out of bed dreaming about! The hotel sends me a lot of sambar, which from previous occasions I’ve found reappear later on my table along with my dinner or lunch. The sambar, though tasting good with the hotel food, doesn’t go well with the food cooked at home, maybe because it’s a tad sweet, and my tooth, though in love with all things sweet, still prefers rice without tasting syrupy sweet!

“Throw the rest of the sambar away!” I told my cook, when she came later in the day, “I don’t want it!”

She looked at me strangely, then asked, “May I take it home and use it, sir?”

And she did.

And as she walked away, holding the sambar in a vessel she had borrowed, there was a deep sense of guilt within me as I seemed to hear the sambar whisper back at me, “You see, Bob, what you wanted to waste is somebody’s meal.”

“Yes,” I whispered back to my retreating sambar, “There’s a lesson I’ve learned today.”

It’s about how much we waste. Ever so often I go to the buffet at a wedding and fill my plate, thinking that it doesn’t matter. “Anyway my host is paying by the plate!” It’s just a matter of time before my eyes start looking around, not for more food, but trying to locate the bin where I can very quietly dispose of my plate still laden with leftovers. And very quietly, I tiptoe to the bin and in one swift motion, so others won’t notice how greedily I’d filled my plate, I throw the plate in! Behind me, I notice others coming with plates half full, and after I’ve gone, doing the same thing.

Have you ever sat at a bay window at a restaurant, and seen the waiter hurriedly shooing away urchins or their parents, before you notice them staring hungrily at your plate?

Maybe the next time I waste, I need to feel those hungry pair of eyes on me, and know that my wasted portions could well be his or her meal for the whole day.

I realize it’s not just about food as I look at the torn shirt of the one who collects my garbage and remember how some of my shirts and pants, out of fashion now, lie unused and unremembered in some closet.

“I’m meant to be eaten, Bob!” shouts my sambar joyfully in my imagination, from the plates of a happy family.

As I finish this piece, I remember Gandhiji; his thoughtfulness when his slipper came off while he was boarding a train. He quickly threw his other slipper out saying, “Let some poor person benefit by having a pair!”

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