406: Fictional Food Comes Alive with Celina Baljeet Basra

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0:31I think I wanted to create a moment where the idea of coming together, building something out of a community could shine through, even if it's not fully realized in the end, and if in the end it is not possible, because it mostly isn't. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel. Selena Baljeet Basra is the Berlin-based author of Happy, a sweet and surreal postmodern novel released last year. It follows a young man named Happy from his family cabbage farm in Punjab to his clandestine journey to Europe and the food service jobs he works along the way. I've never read a book quite like Happy, and it's so fun to have Selena on the show to talk about untraditional food writing, her favorite restaurants in Berlin, and more.

1:33selena baljeet basra this is taste thank you for coming on the podcast thank you so much for inviting me i'm so happy to talk to you today i'm so happy whenever i get to talk to a novelist about their book because it's like the ultimate two-person book club where I can just find out all of the answers instead of just speculating about things. And Happy is one of my favorite books that I've read in a while. I can't say I've read anything quite like it before. Oh, my God. Thank you so much. Always feels so good to hear things like these. Yeah, I would imagine after spending a lot of time writing something, especially a book that plays with format in so many different ways, that it's gratifying to hear that.

2:14And I guess to start, I'm curious to know about how food literally fuels your writing. Do you have any favorite writing snacks or meals that you turn to? Oh, for sure. My best writing window is usually in the early morning, the first rush of coffee. However, sandwiches are important. And luckily, my partner works in food. And when I was writing Happy, it was partly during the pandemic, he started a little picnic catering, mainly for friends. And friends of friends. And I got to be the guinea pig for the dishes. Mostly schnitten, which is basically a German word for sandwich, which you can also use if you find a person hot.

2:57Schnitte. So that's what he does, like sandwiches, open sandwiches. And, yeah, that was lovely. Also, there was a place just opposite our past apartment called Barra. And it's actually pretty fancy. But they did a fried chicken sandwich at the time for lunch. and that was just perfect. So yeah, coffee and sandwiches. I love that. I can imagine sandwiches are good because you can kind of commit to them with both hands and then be done with them. I find that I like to eat, you know, grapes or popcorn or kind of like small bites as motivation when I'm working on something. That's great too. I want to know a little more about this sandwich business because you're based in Berlin and I I think that when I think about Berlin in the summer, it's a lot of picnicking that's involved.

3:46I'm curious if you have a favorite sandwich that's on the lineup right now. Oh, you know, I think the sandwiches I loved are mostly not done anymore. There was a time during the pandemic, probably happened in New York too, when really good food places did a sort of cheaper sandwich for lunch because they were closed, but they could do takeaway. so there was really a renaissance of the lovely sandwich at the time and I was lucky it was just during the time I was writing Happy and yes my partner he's called Bjorn and he does a sort of catering a little catering business called Zuffensnack and so he does drinks and sandwiches but right now I love the sandwiches I love Deluxe it's a sort of it's a brunch place relatively new one year old just turned one year uh it's called by it's done by Edwina and Bayou and they do sort of foods from their childhood in Australia and American South and they make lovely sandwiches always this home-cooked feel to them so I love going there right now um and it's named after the study song I love to look and to be like my my daughter um ever since she was born she has been falling asleep to paradise by Shade.

5:08So Shade has a sort of special place in our hearts right now. Oh, I love that. I feel like Shade is my go-to cooking music sometimes because it's like a chill enough vibe that I don't feel frazzled, but it also has the momentum for myself. That's true. That's true. Yeah. It's perfect for cooking. So can you tell me where did the idea for your book, Happy, come from and how did it kind of develop as you were working on it? Yeah, it did percolate for quite some time. In fact, I think I was a teenager when I first had an idea for Happy. And I've been trying to write this story for many years, like actually almost 20 years.

5:52So I have many sort of hopeful beginnings, start away on old hard drives. And there have been many sort of iterations. Sometimes I've just been finishing Virginia Move the Waves. So it was quite nature, you know, based on observations of nature and a bit more melancholy. And so I tried out many different angles. And only when I wrote the prologue, the letter of application, Sir Happy's letter of application to be a shepherd in Sardinia, I sort of found his voice and I tapped into his voice. And then I sort of found a way to write the book finally, to try to walk in his shoes, although I couldn't.

6:34And the event itself, and I don't want to spoil, but are we allowed to spoil? Yeah, I think we can spoil at least a little bit. Yeah, okay. So it was sort of based on an event in my extended family, an uncle of mine who passed away while working as a shepherd in Italy. and my father had a few sort of relatives and friends from his village who came to Italy not by the books and worked in the food industry, in the leather industry, in the milk cow sort of food industry to make grandpa danities or a shepherd in that case and so this death where the causes of death were never determined. It was something that as a kid I couldn't quite shake off I wanted to solve this mystery.

7:28I wanted to understand in a way. So it's a way of trying to understand something, which as a kid to me was so unfathomable. So yeah, that was the sort of origin of the first idea for Happy. But then it sort of changed form, of course. I studied art history. I worked in the arts. I traveled. So all of this sort of universe of sort of a constellation of references went into it. Yeah, I think that's really evident just from reading it because there are so many different perspectives that the book is written from and also Happy has so many different jobs in the food service industry, so to speak. He starts out as a cabbage farmer in India.

8:10He becomes a server in an Italian fried fish restaurant. He becomes a radish farmer in Europe. How did you approach the research for all of those different sections in the book? Yeah, as I said, connecting to the origin of the story, there were tales of things I heard from these jobs. My father is from Punjab and he, at that point, that was in the 90s when it happened, had been living in Germany for quite some time. And he also had many different jobs. He worked at a factory as a gardener, a taxi driver by night. He helped out his brother who owned an Italian restaurant called Presto Presto. Great name.

8:53Amazing name. And for a year, he also tried his luck with an Indian fast food place called Nafala, which failed miserably. It was one of those places because I think he tried to copy how other Indian food places at the time did it, which weren't really very good, as I would say now, because they also serve pizza, they serve fries. sort of you know and um I think they always used the same menu of things so yeah it was always empty and still when I'm in my hometown I think it's now a mobile phone shop it's close to the train station the central train station it's still so sad because I love the optimism of opening this food place and I love doing the phone service because we did delivery too um so yeah that was part of it was really just my life my family and then of course lots of research and being in Italy sort of seeing how who worked at these restaurants in the back of the kitchens and then researching lots and lots of research and talking to people um and it's been an interest of mine for quite some time the politics of work particularly in the food industry also my curatorial work.

10:08So all of that sort of came into the book. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I found the Italy chapters to be particularly interesting because as you said, there is this kind of dynamic between who is working in the back of the restaurant and then who is the face of the restaurant. And I think certainly a place like Italy that's so known for their cultural cuisine and it's such a point of pride and happy who so desperately just wants to be a part of all of it, but who, you know, his optimism is kind of always being attempted to be tempered by the situation that he's in. And he's still kind of is persevering through all of that.

10:46How did you think about writing like an eternally optimistic character who is faced with settings that maybe are in conflict with his outlook on the world? Yeah, that's interesting. It was never because I wanted to make these bleak conditions and sort of topics lighter for me or the reader, but it was sort of looking at a psyche and a personality who's looking for the light whenever it can. Also how we tend to sort of repress bad stuff, how we get used as human beings, get used to really the worst of living conditions. You get used to so much. And it was just, yeah, looking at someone who puts on a happy, you know, literally working in the service industries, you do have to put on a happy face.

11:36But also not facing what's really happening for a long time. But that's also just a survival strategy. I sort of for me, I always argue that you may, you're allowed to, you're allowed to and to be an escapist and to disappear in stories. I think someone once told my mother, I read too much as a child and I don't live in the real world. But I think it's OK to do that as a survival mechanism for a while, at least. But yeah. Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, some of it is escapist and some of it is, I think, him romanticizing things around him in the world that are worth being romanticized.

12:19It's special to be able to look at things in those kinds of eyes. And I feel like your book also is kind of romanticizing interesting things. There's like a whole section that's written like from the perspective of being a puff of cotton candy. How do you approach like getting in the head of a food or something that's an inanimate object? Like in India, at any beach or in front of the cinemas, like there's an omnipresence of these cotton candies that are packaged in plastic and are sort of arranged in a big balloon form. And someone is holding them up on a stick and it's very present in the sort of urban, like if you look around in cities.

13:00And I wanted to look at a real cotton candy maker. And to be honest, to have these different voices that may be, you know, food talking or a tree or an object is just part of the idea that Happy or the story of Happy could only be told in a scattered way and by including many different voices. because I did grapple with a question how I could write a story that was in a way set close to me, close to my heart, but I didn't experience the story. I didn't walk in his shoes, but how could I? So I was always very hesitant, but this helped me sort of to allow myself to have the story reflected from all these voices, all these things, and it was just lots of fun too, to be honest.

13:49I think you create these energy stations for you as a writer to keep going, like the things that are just so much fun to write that, you know, and they keep you going. So the food writing from the perspective of food was definitely some of this. Yeah, I can imagine. I feel like reading this book, I just got the distinct impression that you love to eat just by the food writing and how often it appears and how well it's done. what like food moment in the book do you most want to eat right now? It will always be the sugar rotis because it's like, it's not something you get in a restaurant. Even the good ones that have like Tom cook style food or because it's a thing you make at home and it's children's food.

14:38It's, you know, it's also so cheap to make. And I remember my, my father taught sort of taught my German mother how to cook basic Punjabi stuff and food and rooties and a sugar rootie is basically just a sugary, a sugar filled paratha. And, um, so when you, you have it, like, especially if it's still warm with yogurt, like cold yogurt, and it's, uh, it's, I would always go for the sugar rooties. Yeah. I think that was my first thing that I was reading in the book that made me so hungry while I was reading. Uh, I love the idea of eating them with, with cold yogurt. That sounds like a really nice flavor texture contrast.

15:16I think the other one that I really wanted to eat was the Montarne. Is it a deep fried pizza that he's eating in Naples? Yeah, it is. He's eating it in Rome, but I think it's more from Naples from the south. But it's, yeah, that's amazing. It's my partner when we traveled to Italy whenever he just loved it so much and they sort of stayed with me. I love it too, but it's like, wow, it really, it's very heavy, but it's amazing. Just like a donut-y deep fried pizza. And it's also cheap. So I always was thinking about things that Happy can eat, right, that are not expensive and, you know, make you good if you're hungry and keep you satisfied for a while.

15:56And this is definitely one of those foods, a montanara. Yeah, definitely. I remember in the book, he is describing it. And I love how he's saying, like, as a Punjabi who eats so much fried food, He's so impressed with the level of how deep pride this is. And also it kind of fits into his Italian fantasy that he has this moment when he's walking to work in the morning and he can stop and buy something with all of the other locals and feel like he has made it to Europe before he goes and works his job in this restaurant. I felt like it symbolized so much and also just sounded like such a hefty and intimidating breakfast for someone to have.

16:35Oh, yeah. like a purchase in a country that you've never visited before it does make you feel so proud especially if you practice a little sentence before like maybe you practice a little bit of italian and you you order your first food and everybody can relate to that but for him in particular it makes you come into existence in a way right if you i mean that's a bad thing about capitalism that we think we are what we buy but in that case it's like it's you know he You're purchasing something to eat and feeling like the locals and having your little place that you return to. That's something so beautiful.

17:11Yeah, definitely. I remember when I was in Paris last summer rehearsing how to order my coffee and croissant in the street for like five minutes. And then, of course, they switched to English as soon as I did it. But I, you know, when I was ordering, I felt like I had a beret on my head and that I was like totally Parisian in that moment. I do think it's like, you know, that's the other side of food service is that it's your way of interacting with people that live in a place and kind of practicing an element of what it feels like to spend time somewhere. Of course. That's so beautiful about it.

17:44Yeah, definitely. So I know we're talking a little bit about the food writing you've done in the book. I find myself always very interested in kind of unconventional food writing or food writing that's being done by fiction writers, people like outside of just the food media industry. What do you think is the secret to good food writing? Oh, wow. That's an interesting question. I mean, if you truly love something, true love and adoration helps maybe. and not discriminating. I love it if people can write beautifully about really mundane food. Recently, I had to write a short text about Tütensuppe, like instant soup and the feeling of a childhood where you didn't only have good or elevated fancy foods, but you can have an emotional connection to any kind of food.

18:39We all know that. And yeah, I feel in general, it's interesting because I've been thinking about also like bad reviews of a book or a dish or a restaurant. I feel like everything, you know, even that is done better if you know how to love something, like really love something too. Otherwise it gets all like so cold and airless. And so, yeah, I don't know. Do you happen to be thinking of the Lauren Euler Book Forum review by chance? No, not at all. No, no, no, no, no. I'm so sorry. No, we don't need to get into that. But I do think there is an art to criticism that is grounded from the perspective of wanting something to be good or having good, you know, things that you're comparing something to.

19:27It is kind of sometimes satisfying to read a critical review if it's done well, I think. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And if there's also those both, like love and generosity, and then there can be harsh critique too. But yeah, I don't know. It must be grounded on something. So yeah, but I don't know the secret to good food writing. But I always love it if I encounter it by surprise and by people who are maybe not food food writers, but who just describe something so beautifully. And I'm definitely better at writing it. And describing it, I'm not so sure. But in writing, it sort of, you know, comes alive in a different way.

20:05I think the emotional connection that you're talking about is what is so special sometimes in food writing. If it is talking about how it makes you feel like not just using the word delicious, right, but the emotions that are coming up for you or the memories that are associated with it. Something that I love that you did in Happy is that you talked about memory in the context of the library of good smells that Happy has in his mind, which I thought was so sweet. And I'm curious what would be in your library of good smells? I love scents. Scents are so important to me. And of course, we all know the connection of scents and memory, how they can bring something back in an instant.

20:44And it's been written about a lot. And also as a curator, I work with olfactory artists because it's so great to create spaces, right? We all know walking into ESOP or any sort of store that uses sand as well, you can create a space. But I also like the memories of maybe smells that could be considered bad, like mothballs, for example. The factory my father worked at where they washed feathers and filled them into cushions. They were using mothballs quite heavily. But it's got this romantic sort of connection for me because for a while, he also was like the caretaker of the building of the factory.

21:22And we lived in an apartment close by, which sounds bad, but it wasn't because it was connected to a lot of greenery around. And we could go into the large storage halls, like after they closed down and rollerblade around. And it sounds a bit surreal, but the moss ball smell I really love. But then basmati rice cooking, that sort of powdery smell, I love that. And cardamom always right now in Berlin. Lilacs up in bloom. Bonfire, fire. And a fire in India also smells a bit different than a fire here. The skin of guavas, I think I also put this in the book. I really like the guava smell. I love a ripe guava.

22:07There's a grocery store by me that always has them. And I just kind of walk through the aisle and inhale deeply sometimes. Oh, yeah. And then, yeah, sort of these memories connected to like, I think I was dancing in London. It was 10 years ago. And there was a girl and she was really cool and she smelled really good. And I asked her what perfume she's wearing. She gave me the tester and I kept it forever. It was a tuberose, I think, Frederick Mel, kind of flower. And it was so, it's far too heavy. But it was so, yeah, it's just if the scent is connected to a situation and time in your life. I'm a big fan of that.

22:41Yeah, it could go on forever. I love this conversation around food and memory. I recently interviewed a food scientist, Dr. Ariel Johnson, on the podcast, and she told me that the part of your brain that processes scent is kind of snuggled up right next to the part of your brain that holds memory. And that's kind of this scientific reason as to why the two are so entwined. But I think also just if you're somebody that loves sensation, like it's easy for your brain to remember how something smelled or tasted in that moment and just kind of connect it to emotions as well, which is so cool. Absolutely.

23:18And as I said before, also including sort of bad smells or really strong smells in that. Like I worked with an artist, I interviewed an artist, Isabel Lewis, who worked with a sort of scent artist. She's quite renowned, Cisotulas. And they try to sort of capture the scent of, for example, Burkheim or science, like very abstract ideas, like so sweat. And she gave me a sample. It was so strong. I had to keep it wrapped in plastic in my postbox. But then the whole hallway smelled of the Burkheim scent, which was very intense. And so, yeah, it really followed me. What was the Burkheim scent? Was it like sweat and dirt?

24:03It was sweat, alcohol molecule, smoke dirt. Yeah, all that. It was amazing. But it was also very, yeah, strong. That's so interesting. When I was talking with Arielle, I was asking her about people who like the smell of gasoline, for example, which I think is also a very potent and maybe some people would say a bad smell. And she was just saying that, you know, maybe you've had positive experiences in a car before. It's a scent that you smell a lot growing up. But I think it also might be just how, you know, some people like are predisposed to not like cilantro. Like maybe some people just have the gene that gasoline really, really gets them going or something.

24:41Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of this kind of like tension between good and bad experiences, it makes me think about the radish farm that Happy comes to at the end of the book in Europe, which is, you know, a really kind of brutal setting for him to be in. They don't have a lot of access to, you know, heat in the winter or food or all of these things. But it also is marked by these moments of joy, like the scrappy caravan kitchen that the migrant farmers set up for themselves. I'm curious about why you decided to include that as a scene. Like, how did you want to be sharing the struggle of the farmers and also this kind of moments of resiliency or even the kind of farms like Bari Kama that you mentioned at the end and the acknowledgements?

25:28I think I wanted to create a moment where the idea of coming together, building something out of a community could shine through, even if it's not fully realized in the end. And if in the end it is not possible, because it mostly isn't. Arikama, this initiative by Malini's farmers who left these exploitative working conditions to do their own thing, form a cooperative and sell their own produce on markets in Rome, do their own yogurt. That's such an amazing story. which was also born out of a real life uprising. I think in 2010 it was when there was sort of racist assault against some of the workers in the south of Italy, in the town that lived locally.

26:20And then there was this whole thing, which resulted in them actually, you know, finding a solution and autonomy, which is what you don't have because the way it's portrayed, because it also mirrors my research. It is so, you know, very strongly connected to mafia ties, the whole food industry, the caporelato, the whole system of, you know, food work and especially vegetables and fruits in Italy. And it's so hard to really get through and research. and people have to be quite mindful of their security, those people working in these areas. And so you don't know what's happening to you. You know, that's why the people organizing stuff are just called the coordinators, sort of faceless, nameless.

27:21Because also, I mean, real life conditions are often far bleaker than they are even in the book. And then there are some that, you know, are livable and there are people who go on to build a life and there are Punjabi, North Indian communities in Italy where it has changed a lot over the past 20 years, but then some weather conditions remain just as bleak. And so there's a whole spectrum of stories that went into it and a change is possible, as you can see in Barikama, but it's so rare. So, and the caravan kitchen is just a little light, just a little me imagining how it would be if, you know, it was just a little idea of how could it be, how could it work out for them?

28:12You know, what could be the beginning of autonomy and doing their own thing? Yeah, it's agency also for them, especially as people who don't have, you know, they're working with food that's being sent out to other people and then they have pretty little control over what they can actually be eating themselves. And I think that to be able to cook the food that you want to eat, maybe not everything you want to eat because the access to the ingredients is still quite limited, is actually quite a powerful moment of self-actualization for people, certainly in the book. Exactly. How do you cook your home food if you don't have the ingredients or even the shops?

28:47And when I grew up in Western Germany, like in a small town in the 90s, there was no Indian food store yet in the town we lived in. So we went to London to Tharsal to do our big Indian food shopping and big packs of basmati rice. And so and exactly, that's the old story of working in the food industry and producing delectable consumer goods that you yourself cannot consume. Yeah. Do you find yourself thinking about, you know, grocery shopping or going to restaurants differently now that you've written this book? oh you know what that's that's an interesting question because there are always times when I you know we order food boxes like from cooperatives um like vegetable and fruit and um before my daughter was born to try to cook more locally of course because that's always like the solution but then uh you have times when you are low on money you don't have a big budget and then you go back to shopping at maybe discounters and you know you know and you just look at where is your radish from where's the orange from and um and yeah so it's it's a different it's a constant struggle and I'm definitely I'm more mindful but I'm definitely one of those people who manage to really eat radically locally and um even sort of don't eat pepper because it's you know not grown locally or something because there are restaurants who work like that which is amazing and but um definitely it makes you more mindful because if you think about it every single time you actually can't buy it like you know yeah but that's the thing we as with meat and everything else we so often it's just a collective suppression um because we're so used to it and then sometimes when they're for instance in our local supermarket recently there was, I think, the fridge or the kühlhaus, the large fridge was broken.

30:40So the vegetable and food section was almost entirely empty. And I'm like, what's happening here? Like, I can't get this and that. And, you know, my daughter's favorite food. So you feel like immediately enraged and puzzled. And how can this be, you know, but that's actually, we should experience that far more often. Definitely. It's always interesting to try to make good choices in an imperfect system. I find myself, you know, in the grocery store debating, oh, is my local meat better or worse than the tofu made from soybeans grown halfway around the world? I find that like consumers are the people that are trying to make these impossible calculations when really like the larger corporations are probably not thinking about it at all.