Travel and Food Talk Times: Thali in the Indian state of Gujarat

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I love traveling. I do travel but not a lot owing to schedule and cost constraints. Yet the Travel channels come in picture as they provide us a glimpse of many local, national and International places. We get to see their cultures, their cuisines, customs, glimpses of history of Kings and Queens, places, Forts and Monuments and even battles of yore. Some days back, I was watching this program where the host on this show on a channel named as Travel XP was going to various places in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Now this state has a culture of people eating multiple foodstuffs like vegetables of different kinds, pulses, a few sweet delicacies made of things like sugar and Gram flour, or of sweetened rice etc. The kind of things in the thali varies from place to place within Gujarat. For e.g- a Thali in a place like Porbandar would be different from that in Rajkot to that of Kutch. It depends somewhat upon the weather, and kind of occupation of the people. In the program, I also learnt how this "Thali" system originated. Well long time back, much before refrigerators, in places in this state, food of various kinds used to be made for lunch and dinner. Now, somehow it was not considered good to store the food that reached someone's plate to be stored if not eaten, as it was considered "Jhootha"(impure as it had reached hand and mouth). So, the Thali concept of small quantities of each thing came into being. This way, people would get to eat a "variety" of things in "small" quantities and wastage would be almost zero. How interesting it is that we have had such customs, but over a period of time, we tend to miss the knowledge as to why such customs were started. Some people follow the customs blindly without knowing a thought as to why they originated and there are people who tend to blindly protest when such customs are being followed too diligently and imposed sometimes. Do share your views. Picture: taken of the show on Travel channel- Travel XP when watching the TV show.