Nadiya Hussain can do better than fetishizing Bangladeshi food to sell it to the Western world
We have one message for Hussain: Stop.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Whenever you feel wronged by life, remember that there are people like Nadiya Hussain who have never tasted kalojam in life. Let that sink in.
This was in 2016, when The Great British Bake Off (2015) winner Hussain (in)famously claimed that “desserts aren’t a big feature of mealtimes in Bangladesh,” collectively shattering many hearts because it made us feel like we’d eaten post-dinner lies for an entire lifetime, and making us momentarily question ourselves.
On Tuesday, she was back at it again — this time with a “chai spiced Vermicelli.” The irony here is double because “chai” is not even a Bangladeshi flavor, and vermicelli is actually an extremely popular Bangladeshi dessert.
But the confusion is worsened yet, as she isn’t selling vermicelli as a dessert this time, but selling it with a tinge of the most recent Western obsession — chai!
In a video released by the BBC on Tuesday, Hussain smiles and cooks said dish while simultaneously destroying most Bangladeshis’ favorite childhood Eid dessert (vermicelli/shemai) — by describing it as “porridge, but the Bangladeshi version.”
Bangladeshis — at home or in the diaspora — are not having it:
“Bangladeshi cuisine is soooo amazing,” Namira Hossain, founder of Cookups, a community-based kitchen and catering service in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “There are some chefs out there trying to promote it. This lady is just a disgrace to everything.”
“Don’t say it’s BANGLADESHI PORRIDGE because it just ain’t so! I’m sorry but food is sacred to me — I love cooking, I love feeding, maybe not always eating! But it’s how I connect with my loved ones, it’s therapeutic and it tells stories of the past, people, filled with emotions, and so much more,” wrote Shahana Siddiqui, a Bangladeshi researcher based in Amsterdam. “I despise this Nadiya woman — she is a fraud and a disgrace to Bengali food and to be honest to baking!”
Here’s the thing about food: it can unify people, it can be therapeutic, and it’s very, very central to many people’s ideas of home. And in creating confusions like this, Hussain disrespects that sentiment.
Hussain could have taken this opportunity to teach folks about how actual shemai is cooked in Bangladesh. Don’t get us wrong, if she really wanted to share her chai-spiced vermicelli recipe — and she should be able to — at least do it without trying to sell it with the identity of a country it doesn’t belong to.
Because a confusion like this serves only one person — her. She gets to hold on to the narrative of a Bangladeshi Muslim heritage, while simultaneously selling her name using an ingredient that’s just popular in the western world and frankly, will get a lot of hits because of the SEO.
There are tons of Bangladeshi spices and flavors that the world has yet to taste. And Hussain, with thousands of followers on social media, is doing a disservice to Bangladeshi food and people when she uses these opportunities to capitalize on what the world seemingly wants (chai), instead of using it as an opportunity to share some of our unique tastes with the world.
