Paper short abstract:

I explore how nutritionally informed dietary orders, which prohibit my Indian participants with diabetes from eating mangoes (a fruit of sacred, political and gustatory importance) have their origins in the ‘disgust’ viscerally performed and politically instituted by British colonizers in reaction to cultural eating practices.

Paper long abstract:

In Hyderabad, for my interlocutors, who are middle-class employed professionals diagnosed with diabetes, the mango, a fruit of sacred, political and gustatory importance, is prohibited. According to Indian biomedical doctors, they taste ‘too sweet’, despite their glycemic indices being within acceptable limits [1]. Mangoes are thus enacted as dangerous and seductive, capable of tipping blood sugars into imbalance. Why are mangoes dangerous and how does ‘taste’ threaten? In this paper, I explore how nutritionally informed dietary orders, which restrict mango consumption for diabetes, have their origins in a performativity of ‘taste’, instituted by British colonizers in reaction to cultural eating practices. Colonial ‘disgust’ which was viscerally expressed and rhetorically disseminated against mangoes and the ways in which they were eaten — by licking, slurping and using one’s bare hands — helped to establish a sensual comportment of ‘how to eat’, where the definition of ‘taste’, particularly of ‘sweetness’ emerged as seductive and dangerous and liable to moral policing. Despite their dilemmas surrounding dietary restrictions, my participants continue to eat mangoes as they embody an expansive notion of ‘taste’; an immeasurability in the ‘how to eat’ that is tied to seasonality, memory, joy and pleasure (Warin and Dennis 2005). Through their practices, they demonstrate the power of situating ‘taste’ beyond the physical sensorium, in pushing against the subjectification processes elicited by colonial disgust and normative dietary agendas.

[1] At or below 55 on a scale of 100, which is below the threshold glycaemic index that would cause a blood sugar spike.

Warin, M. and Dennis, S. (2005) ‘Threads of memory: Reproducing the cypress tree through sensual consumption’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(1–2), pp. 159–170. doi: 10.1080/07256860500074367.