Rude Food by Vir Sanghvi: A crunchy controversy

Ihave always believed that papad unites India. Gujaratis like myself will not eat rice unless we have papad to eat with it. Sindhis are known for their papad.

The fried papads of South India are justly famous for their flavour and their texture.

But papad also unites India and the UK. The Brits don’t call it papad, of course. They call it poppadom (with various different spellings) a corruption of the South Indian name. But it is now almost as English as chicken tikka masala.

In fact, its popularity predates chicken tikka masala by several decades. Way back in the 1970s, my father used to joke that soon, a typical English meal would consist of curry and rice with crushed pappadom sprinkled on it. I was only a child at the time and thought this was ridiculous, but now I think the old boy may have had a point.

One measure of how much poppadoms have been embraced by British popular culture is that they are often used for racial abuse. When Shilpa Shetty won the UK Big Brother, she was helped by the outpouring of sympathy that followed when her fellow contestant (the now late) Jade Goody, a C-list tabloid-type trashy ‘celebrity’ called her Shilpa Poppadom.

More recently, there has been criticism of a hit song called the Poppadom Song which, it is alleged, promotes racial stereotyping. (But not as much as it promotes crap music.)