Biryani and Economics
02–11–2018, Mumbai, India: Give me a one-serving-biryani-eating friend. All my friends say, ‘one more serving… one more serving’.
Good Morning Everyone. It’s The Friday Post on a pleasant Friday morning. I want to start this piece with some definitions, so let me just get them out of the way.
- One-handed economist: A mythical creature who has one, and only one, viewpoint on any economic subject.
- Diminishing Marginal Utility: All else equal, as consumption increases the marginal utility derived from each additional unit declines.
- Biryani: True Love. True Happiness. Also, a dish cooked with meat, rice, and spices.
The student of economics in me has always struggled to understand why the utility I derive out of eating biryani never diminishes. I can have biryani for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — and sometime in between these. I can have it every day and I will still crave for it. This is partly true for a lot of my foody friends too — we go to a restaurant, go through the menu, and then order biryani. This piece today is just going to be a rant about biryani, biryani, and more biryani. I guess I will throw in some economics as well.
Work has taken me to a lot of places. I approach every trip with one goal in mind — find a good biryani place. I must say I have been largely successful. (Except NCR. NCR sucks.) I have had some really amazing biryani encounters in some really quaint and nondescript places. My personal favourite was this eatery in Guntur called Subani Hotel. They had very strict timings during which they served biryani. The quantity was also limited. It was my first experience with what I later came to know was Nellore biryani and it left me in awe. Vijayawada, next door to Guntur, too had some amazing biryani. I was especially impressed with a place called Bismillah Dum Centre. It seemed like a dark seedy place but I still went inside based on recommendations. It turned out to be a good decision.
Bangalore and Mumbai have been, in general, not great. The local biryani styles haven’t impressed me so far. Karnataka has a lot of Ambur biryani joints but I find it lacking in a signature taste. Marathi biryani similarly lacks character and seems like a hurried concoction. I stick to Calcutta biryani while in Mumbai. There are some decent places but Bhojohori Manna is my current favourite. Bangalore is what I am taking a shine too. Some of the chains have good biryani there. Zaitoon group has good food in general but their mutton is succulent and sumptuous. I have also had good stuff in Ruchi’s. Meghana wasn’t as great as I expected it to be. Delhi, as I said, has been a disappointment. Even Paradise outlets somehow get it wrong there. A bigger challenge personally is finding halal food there. There are a lot of jhatka places and hence I am generally sceptical of where to eat. I have tried Karim’s and while their biryani is distinct, it’s not really great.
This is just a part of my Biryani ramblings, which would make a great section in its own right, I guess, and this now brings us to economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility suggests, as stated earlier, that the utility derived of every additional unit declines. For example, the last slice of a pizza — by the time you reach the last slice of pizza, you’re already full of pizza. The excitement you had for pizza is over now and your hunger has probably been satiated by now.
The five slices of pizza demonstrate the decreasing utility that is experienced upon the consumption of any good.
I expected the theory to be not without criticism — what in economics is? Economists, as Harry S. Truman rued, are always about the “other hand” — the counterexamples which disprove the theory they propound. While I could dismiss most of the major criticisms of the law of diminishing marginal utility which I read as not being applicable to biryani, I did find some of them to be factors behind my intense desire for biryani.
- The utility of products is relative. Even if the utility of biryani decreases, I guess it is still better for me than any other thing that I eat. In other words, we are not consuming in a single commodity model.
- The universal applicability of the law doesn’t hold. Biryani is not a divisible good, a basic assumption of the diminishing marginal utility theory.
- Emotional Value — something that we attach a lot to the dish. Having grown up thinking of biryani as a special occasion dish, I still cannot separate importance from biryani. Somehow, it triggers the same feelings in me that it used to when I was a child. I still think of it as something that we can have only when something good has happened. Perhaps, this is what explains for me the love for biryani most succinctly.
There you go. I have unified biryani with economics. The exercise, as always, has made me hungry and I will be back after having another serving of this dish. Till then, live long and prosper!
The author is a routine Engineer-MBA with a nine-to-undefined job and lives under the illusion that he can write. He also blogs here.
