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The people of Kolkata, for the most part live for food. They earn so that they can eat well and everything else comes later. Every person in the city- I mean every person who is privileged to have Bengali as her/his mother tongue, spend the largest chunk of their income on food at home and outside. Not just on themselves though. With the slightest provocation, these people invite relatives and friends to their homes and cook up sumptuous lunch and dinners to treat them.

The invitation habits of Kolkatans is another thing to be noted. Invitations here mean, the guest would arrive at the host’s place early in the morning and have breakfast there which would normally comprise luchi (a fried food resembling a puff made from white flour dough) and alu chochchori (potato curry) and sweets. A few hours later would come lunch which would compulsorily have rice, two or three types of fish fried as well as curried, goat meat and (or) chicken, chuntney, sweetened yoghurt (mishti doi) and more sweets.

The sweet tooth of these people are the strongest part of their constitutions it seems, given the amount of sugar they consume in everything. Their culture demands that the guest offer some sort of gift to their host. And this gift is almost always (without much exception) SWEETS. Whenever you see a well dressed person with or without family with boxes or earthen pots of sweets dangling from their hands, you know for sure that he is visiting a friend or kin for lunch. Nowadays however, these boxes of sweets are also accompanied often by bottles of aerated drinks and even ice-cream.

Dinner parties at home are also often organised but the preferred mode of gathering for these people still remain lunch parties since such parties extend up to long hours often beginning at dawn and ending late in the evenings. With the emergence of the technocratic IT professionals, the culture of eating out has also quite set in and is gradually sinking into the cultural fabric of the city. The food habits of Kolkatans now include Chinese, continental, Thai, Mexican, Lebanese, Mughlai, Italian, and all other sorts of cuisine cooked up in the world. With a remarkable increase in the scope of the taste buds of Bengalis, the cuisine of Kolkata is no more confined to Bengali food; anything edible is welcome as long as it appeals to their taste buds……a balanced diet????!!!! errr we’ll talk about that later; for now, may I have a second helping????….