▶ №45911
At the end of the visit, Prakash, the guide who got in touch with the factory, decided to surprise me: he cooked me a picnic!
“Andrea, you have to try my chicken curry,” he says. We sit on a plastic sheet that he has laid out in a dirt road in front of the factory and he starts preparing the meal. “I didn’t bring the cutlery. We’ll eat with our hands, as we Indians do!”
He lights up the cow dung cakes and puts a stove on them. “I’ll even let you taste our traditional bread”, he adds. “It is cooked directly in the fire”. He kneads some wheat rolls and puts them to cook directly into cow dung cakes. As the hot weather confuses my senses, I realize I’m about to eat bread and poop.
Prakash offers me a can of hot beer, which I swill to cloud my mind!
I would rather cut off my hand than refuse the invitation, so I find myself eating an exceptional chicken curry, surrounded by thousands of flies feasting between my fingers, on my face, attaching to my socks and obviously walking inside my plate. Prakash is so happy to be able to show me his cooking skills that I eat everything. Even sandwiches cooked in cow dung.
Do I like them? I wouldn’t feel like saying it, but they feed more than a billion people so I respect them! Before each bite, I remove the embers from the crust and convince myself that it can not hurt me: I am protected by the benevolence of Indian cows.
