More than an Indian meal
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According to Buettner's examination, British love for "Indian" food is a window into both a multicultural embrace and colonial longing. Boutique multiculturalism enables Britons to enjoy, say, Indian food while still rejecting Indian people. The selective nature of this integration is illustrated by chicken tikka masala, a dish adjusted for the British palate. Integration often reshapes rather than genuinely incorporates.
"Going for an Indian", therefore, became for many young British men a performance of masculinity and of colonial nostalgia. This ritual is heavily male and blue-collar, Buettner says, including daring one another to consume spicy food and horseplay. These restaurants echoed colonial power structures with patrons treating South Asian waitstaff 'in a servile manner' as if reinforcing a feeling of British supremacy. So it went beyond just eating a meal — going for an Indian meant a nostalgic sort of male bonding associated with Britain's imperial heyday.
This relationship between food and power reflects the ways in which British society has often embraced diversity but has simultaneously excluded the stories and experiences of immigrant groups from those much-celebrated new additions to British culture. The fact that there such widespread consumption of "Indian" food is itself a sign of the version of multiculturalism that is celebrated in a tokenistic sense, whilst the truly diverse flavors and cultural aspects that they stem from, are treated that much more agreeably (through British seasoning). This renders food as both a connection and its erasure — revealing the problematic, yet idyllic, relationship Britons have with their identity against their colonial past.