Meher Varma’s Bad Table Manners

Here's a behind-the-scenes glimpse at this Whetstone Radio Collective podcast that takes an intimate look at food in South Asia.

For cultural anthropologist and food writer Meher

Varma, talking about food seriously means going beyond good etiquette.

“While I love glamorous cooking shows and glossy cookbooks, I wanted to disrupt the formality around dining,” she says. “Good conversations begin when good manners collapse.”

Spurred by this desire to “talk, really talk” about food—an emotive and often divisive issue—in South Asia, Varma’s podcast is called Bad Table Manners.

The show had a strong debut in India on streaming platforms like Spotify, making it clear that listeners in this part of the world have an insatiable appetite for chatting about food.

The first season of Bad Table Manners is situated within the Indian context. Each episode of the podcast explores a hyper-local issue, ranging from the shrinking abundance of India’s marine life to the importance of eggs in India’s mid-day meal scheme; and from the lingering imprint of Partition on Delhi’s food to the thorny connections between food and caste.

While each of these episodes offered its own revelations, Varma says she was most challenged by the one that explored food and caste identities. “The episode ‘Where There Are No Butchers, There are Cinnamon Buns’ was certainly the most challenging to record and script,” said Varma. “I grappled with my positionality throughout (and still do) and constantly questioned what gave me the right to represent a casteoppressed group in English. Fortunately, my guests were able to help me think through these self-reflexive questions, and working together on the conversation, way before it was recorded, made for a much richer, honest episode.”

In Season 2 of Bad Table Manners, Varma hopes to expand the scope of her research to South Asia at large. Like season 1, the topics will be “...bathed in antho-water,” as Varma puts it.

“I am an anthropologist first, and a food enthusiast second,” she said. “I can't really talk about a meal without thinking about the labour in the kitchen that produced it, or walk into a supermarket without thinking about culturally shaped notions of taste. It’s just the way my brain is wired I guess, but thankfully, Bad Table Manners showed me that there’s an audience out there for this approach.”

The complete first season of Bad Table Manners is available on all major podcast streaming platforms. Visit whetstonemagazine.com/radio to learn more about the network.