A Bake Sale for Humanity
Text by Vidya Balachander | Photographs by Neysa Mendes
Originally published in Whetstone Magazine V08
From an individual’s effort to raise funds for Covid relief, #BakeforIndia became a nationwide hashtag. Photograph by Neysa Mendes
What can a chocolate tart do?
That was the unlikely question that Neysa Mendes found herself thinking about earlier this year. The food stylist, baker and recipe developer from Mumbai was seeking a way to channel her simmering rage at the state of affairs in India. In early March, a devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic began sweeping through the country. Although it had been long predicted, the ferocity of the wave—likened to a tsunami—brought an already-buckling medical system to its knees.
With hospitals in most major Indian cities overrun and amid a dire shortage of oxygen for the critically ill, desperate families scoured Twitter and other social media for help. Even by the grim standards of a global pandemic, India’s second wave was particularly brutal and unremitting, exposing the woeful lack of preparedness of the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. (By official estimates, more than 200,000 people died of Covid-19 in India between March and May 2021, although this is widely thought to be an underrepresentation of the real death toll).
What could a chocolate tart do to quell this seemingly unstoppable tide of sorrow?
Mendes didn’t have the answer to that question then, but she knew that she had to find out.
“I was just very, very angry,” she tells me over a phone call. “I was so angry at the government and the systems. Despite going through this for a year, we found ourselves in this place again. I have learned that when I feel so strongly about something, I can’t sit [around]. I just have to do something, no matter what that is.”
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Around the same time, cookbook author Saee Koranne-Khandekar, also based in Mumbai, felt a similar pull to contribute in some way. With her whole family, including her husband and three children, having tested positive for the virus in January, Koranne-Khandekar’s urgency to mobilize resources was at least partially fuelled by her own memories of negotiating the labyrinthine medical system.
“Testing Covid positive and dealing with the hospitalization and the mental trauma of it all is something that sends chills down my spine even six months later, and the horror stories of low oxygen supply, unavailability of medicine and help in general really haunted me,” she tells me. “The decision to turn that discomfort into something that raised funds for the cause seemed natural.”
Koranne-Khandekar decided to do what comes naturally to her. As an avid cook, baker and author of three cookbooks, she figured that the most effective way to reach out to her “tribe” was through food. “I thought for a while about a subject that would have the maximum appeal, and zeroed in on baking, based on the messages I get through Instagram and on my email,” she says. She joined forces with a small, two-person team, including an editor and designer, who both offered their services for free.
Two weeks later, she announced her fundraiser on social media. Anyone who contributed more than the very modest amount of Rs 500 (or $6) would receive a free copy of her e-book From my Oven, a compendium of recipes, tips and tricks on how to make the most of one’s oven, designed specifically for the home baker. The proceeds would go to Snehalaya, an organization working to facilitate healthcare services in some of India’s most underdeveloped rural areas.
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Mendes’ made-to-order dark chocolate tarts sold out in record time. Photograph by Neysa Mendes
Having already acquired a loyal fan following for her luscious, made-to-order dark chocolate tarts in Mumbai, Mendes decided that she would start by selling a couple of tarts and donating the proceeds to a charitable organization working in the field of Covid relief.
Inspired by the fundraising bake sales that she had seen while growing up in Saudi Arabia, she decided to call her initiative Bake for India. When she posted about it on Instagram, she was hoping to motivate a few other people to also volunteer their time and talents to raise money for this urgent cause. “I am a bit of a cheerleader—I am very happy to help people build something,” she tells me. Besides, this seemed like a step forward when wading through a quagmire of grief. No sooner had she posted about it on Instagram than her tarts sold out. “I said I would do 10 tarts, but I ended up doing 12,” she says.
Within a few hours, a bakery in Pune, a city near Mumbai, reached out to Mendes to ask if it could follow her blueprint to organize a bake sale of its own. By the end of the day, 10 more bakeries had approached her.
With the reach of the initiative rapidly widening, Mendes decided to corral all the individual bake sales under the hashtag #BakeforIndia. She also instituted a detailed set of guidelines for participants, including the stipulation that they sell at least 10 units of each product, donate 100 percent of proceeds to a charity of their choice and follow all Covid-related safety precautions in the kitchen.
To maintain a sense of cohesiveness and accountability, Mendes spent long nights checking receipts, ensuring that donations had been made and reiterating the guidelines to home bakers, commercial bakeries and restaurants from across the country who wanted to chip in.
In the span of just over a month, Bake for India swelled into a mass movement—one largely powered by brownies, cupcakes and tarts, which are often blamed for epidemics of other kinds. United under one broad umbrella, more than 150 bake sales took place across the country and overseas. From home bakers in small towns in India to a trained pastry chef in Paris, and from a Japanese chocolatier to a 12-year-old who baked 100 cookie-cakes in a single weekend, the participants encompassed a wide swath of hobbyists and professionals. Several kids expressed interest in it too. “One baker wrote to me and said that her 6-year- old daughter wanted to do something, but that she could only do lemon cakes,” Mendes says.
Even if this was a story about money alone, it would still be remarkable—Mendes estimates that the initiative raised approximately Rs 25,00,000 ($33,500) in total. Spearheaded by Koranne-Khandekar’s efforts, contributions towards From my Oven raised more than Rs 12,00,000 ($16,100) for Snehalaya.
But numbers rarely tell the whole story. The overwhelming success of a bake sale and an e-book on baking—widely regarded as honorable but rarely perceived as an assertion of agency—in the middle of what is being called India’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in a century, is a story about so much more than statistics. Pitted against the inescapable magnitude of a continuing tragedy, it is an octave marking itself on the scale of human resilience.
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Food and its ability to prevent, alleviate or exacerbate disease has always been an important consideration that has shaped the evolution of Indian cuisine since ancient times. As food historian Colleen Taylor Sen notes in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India, “In India, food and medicine have been virtually interchangeable. All foods have properties that exert an influence on the body and mind—including foods that are otherwise prohibited.”
It would be fair to say that in the earliest iterations of Indian cuisine, which were heavily influenced by Ayurveda, a significantly greater emphasis was laid on the therapeutic or harmful effects of certain foods or combination of foods than on their flavor. In his paper How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India, the renowned Indian- American anthropologist, Dr. Arjun Appadurai, notes that in preindustrial, precolonial times, “cooking in India is deeply embedded in moral and medical beliefs and prescriptions.”
As Appadurai writes, it was only in the post-colonial period that Indian cuisine took a “gustatory approach” to cuisine— one driven by flavors, and not just by the moral or medicinal considerations of its constituent elements. On the one hand, this deep preoccupation with the medicinal qualities of food can be seen as the influence of Ayurvedic thought. But on the other hand, the lingering association could also perhaps be attributed to India’s long history of dealing with mass outbreaks of disease.
There is relatively sparse information available about pandemics in the ancient period. However, archaeological evidence suggests that the prevalence of disease was an accepted fact of life. For instance, the Hindu goddess Sitala Devi was worshipped specifically for her ability to both cause and cure smallpox. As journalist Bibek Bhattacharya noted in an evocative piece on India’s “epidemic goddesses” in April 2020, the widespread proliferation of statues of Hariti, a goddess also believed to protect against smallpox, is further proof of the memory of India’s past pandemics captured in folklore.
The devastating impact of modern-day pandemics are much better remembered. Between 1817 and 1920, we know that the world suffered three deadly pandemics—cholera, plague and influenza—and more than 70 million people were killed by them. Approximately 40 million people are believed to have perished in India alone, which found itself at the epicenter. Calling this period the “Age of Pandemics,” professor and researcher Dr. Chinmay Tumbe writes in his book Age of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World, that the suffering caused by it had a profound bearing on the world at large. “The quest to control the pandemics transformed medical science. Public health systems were revolutionized, cutting down mortality in some parts of the world and laying the foundations for it to happen after 1920 in the other parts,” writes Tumbe.
But the influenza pandemic in India between 1918-1920, which was compounded by the worst recorded drought in the country’s history and a subsequent famine, also underscored the critical importance of food, nutrition and efficient food management systems during national crises. Eroded by colonial agricultural policies that bolstered British industrialization at the cost of food security for peasants, India’s food system was dealt a body blow by the famine. Tumbe suggests that, in turn, led to higher mortality caused by malnutrition and weakened immunity during the influenza pandemic. Then, as now, the availability and distribution of food remained an acute and urgent concern in India, particularly in the face of a pandemic.
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A poster that Dasgupta and her daughter created to advertise their menu. Image courtesy: Sanhita Dasgupta
If India’s first wave of Covid-19—marked by a hastily declared lockdown that left millions of migrant workers stranded without work or food— was a crisis of hunger, the second wave seems to have sparked a crisis of hope. With the most basic medical amenities such as hospital beds, ventilators and an assured supply of oxygen becoming richly contested resources, just getting by day to day became a morbid test of willpower. Faced with grinding uncertainty and months-long lockdowns that heightened a sense of isolation, New Delhi- based corporate lawyer Sanhita Dasgupta and her daughter Srishti Dasgupta Sensarma felt compelled to reach out to other people in the country’s capital.
In March 2020, bound by a shared concern for food security, particularly for the vulnerable, the mother-daughter duo started a venture called Gusto By Sanhita. Their culinary offerings included simple, usually one-pot meals, drawn from a variety of regional Indian and subcontinental cuisines. Mindful of the fact that home cooked, catered meals generally tended to favor carb-heavy ingredients such as rice and potatoes, Dasgupta decided to cook protein-rich, nonvegetarian meals. She opted not to put a price tag on her meals, instead preferring to let customers pay as they like.
During the first wave, Dasgupta cooked a rich chicken ghee roast from Mangalore, on the southwestern coast; Burmese curries influenced by her family’s heritage; and peppery Sri Lankan mutton chops, which she says was among her most popular dishes.
“[Recently], I cooked three fish curries—one was a Burmese curry with river fish and mango and everyone loved it,” she tells me. Cooking through the second wave has given them a heightened appreciation of the fact that comfort food cannot be reduced to a catchall adjective.
“When everything was out of [their] control, food was the only thing that seemed to give people a sense of familiarity,” says Dasgupta. “Comfort food provides security, stability, certainty [and] a memory of a better and safer time — especially in a time when nothing is secure, stable or certain.”
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How much cultural cache does a cupcake or a fish curry wield? That would be an interesting question in any context, but it acquires a greater heft against the backdrop of large-scale human suffering of the kind that India experienced during its second wave of Covid-19. Mendes said she was acutely conscious of the fact that she was posting about desserts and exhorting people to buy and eat them in the midst of abject bleakness.
“It felt very incongruous to be posting about dessert,” she tells me. “Even though we were fundraising, it felt hollow. In the face of such grief, how are you posting about dessert?”
And yet, as the groundswell of public support for Bake for India proves, in its most profound sense, comfort food can simply symbolize disrupting the debilitating discomfort of inertia.
“Not being able to do anything was taking a toll on my mental health,” says Ankita Gupta, a home baker who splits her time between Rohtak and Jammu in North India, and participated in the Bake for India fundraiser. “The chain made everyone stand for a cause, from the customer booking an order to the bakers themselves, to organizations already working proactively on the field.”
Perhaps, then, this is what a chocolate tart can do.
It reminds individuals that they are not alone, while also serving as a damning indictment of a state that abdicated its responsibilities. This is a feel-good story about food as a means of reclaiming power and agency from a hopeless situation. But it should also serve as a searing, never-to-be-forgotten mnemonic about how ordinary food, made by ordinary people, says more about a country’s moral fabric than those who are elected to power to define and defend it.
