Just food

As somebody who's proudly single, I often check out the supermarket shelves for stuff that is good to eat and that make my meals interesting. I also happen to be a 'foodie' and stirring up a wokful of meats and veggies is my speciality.

What pains me is how Patna has shrunk from a pretty cosmopolitan city to an insular, inward town. It's amazing what you can know about the nature of a place just by looking at what's on offer on supermarket shelves.

Just a decade ago it was so easy to walk into Roshan Brothers for bacon, ham, and fresh sausages. Today what's on offer are a few mangy cans of stuff that are twice as costly and have half the taste. I have been reduced to importing a kilo or two of bacon from Khub Chand's in Delhi.

These spanking new 'supermarkets' hardly have any non-vegertarian processed food. When they started out they displayed a couple of shelves with processed sea-food: sardines, squid soup and the like, but now they've disappeared. It's difficult for one to locate a pack of chicken flavoured noodles, for heaven's sake!

Of course, we do have access to a better range of [processed] cheeses, and one can actually discover the odd jar of marmite, now and again.

Now Sikkim... there's tiny Gangtok with a vast range of interesting food- from Giouda cheese, to prawn chips to pork products!