Even if most of us may not be ‘breakfast people’ in our daily lives, when we travel, we become scavengers for what new cultures eat in the morning; we go looking for the best coffee, the crispest dosas, the best bowl of breakfast noodles that a place has to offer.
One day, we sat talking about our favourite travel memories – and it emerged that all of them had to do with the first thing we ate in the morning. Think coffee and kaya toast in Singapore, pork noodles in Cambodia, a perfect nihari in Delhi, the best kachori in Rajasthan, a fish curry eaten at the docks in Goa – travel breakfasts formed solid, lasting memories in all our minds.
In everyday life, many of us at enthucutlet struggle to make it to a hearty breakfast everyday. (Except our editor-in-chief Roshni, who recommends tossing up quick things like miso oats, and an eggs, greens, and seeds salad, with hung yoghurt and crushed green chilli dressing). We all love breakfast on the road. So here’s presenting our third season, Will Travel For Breakfast; in which we see how travel intersects with the morning meal, and what these first meals tell us about new cultures, customs, and ourselves.
In this season, we think of ‘travel’ in different ways – not only as escapades to beautiful places, but also as migration, as movement between different parts of a large city, about leaving home for work, and making transit journeys that we take everyday in fast trains and underground metros – our appetites brewing in our minds.
Our writers in this season decode these themes too – when they write about the Mughlai breakfasts of Kolkata brought to the thriving cosmopolis by enterprising migrants, or when they think about how South-Asian breakfasts mutated as they moved across the world.
In Will Travel For Breakfast, we have meditations on recreating a beloved breakfast from Karachi in Delhi, and how borders live within us all. Sometimes breakfasts can be borderless – as in the case of the well-travelled Parsi breakfast that absorbs myriad influences to become a tradition unto itself. We have ruminations on beautiful breakfast sandwiches, and tireless street-food breakfast sellers in cities, for whom moving for breakfast is not indulgence, but also survival. In this season, writers think about breakfasts in poetry that’s been infused with dynamism and movement, and also about how traditional methods of breakfast in nomadic pastoralists communities can give us hints of ways of eating in the future. Breakfast is so many things to so many people – it is a way to participate in a community’s most sacred, and quotidien rituals; it is a path to finding out more about ourselves.
Before you dive into Season 3, consider the variety of meanings that travel can take, the diversity of foods that can feed us when in transit, going somewhere else, or returning to what may be most familiar to us.
Maybe when you read this, you are on a train to somewhere new, waiting in line for security check, or chewing time until a local arrives at the station, so you can head to work. If you are, we recommend getting yourself your breakfast of choice. It’ll only take a minute! And then, off you go.