Rice Flour Flower--India

Foodie just looked through photos taken by her niece,  a teacher,who recently spent four months exploring India. She turned up a few food tales along the way for her eccentric relations at The FOOD Museum. Here's one--  in India's southernmost state, Tamilnadu,  she encountered women drawing a flower in rice flour every morning, as a kind of welcome mat at the entrance to their homes. These "kolams" are evidently always done by women, and they are done as a blessing but also a literal offering of food to insects and other small crawly critters who relish rice flour. In return, the small beings bless the household.

Google informs us that the flower is probably a pumpkin flower, and that a wad of cow dung often forms the center.But Foodie wonders about this as the pumpkin, and all squashes, are natives of the Americas.... ( No issue with the cow dung!)

Comments

[bibliochef]

Look at the mormons -- they are "only" about 150 years old or so and they're pretty entrenched globally.. . .

[Cynthia]

Anthropologists often report on items of Western origin, including manufactured items, becoming elements of religious beliefs or rituals in cultures all over the world, often as soon as they appear, or at least within a generation. And going the other way, there were Old World items adopted into the New World so rapidly that anthropologists have mistakenly believed that these introduced plants or foods must have been indigenous, because how could they be so completely integrated into a culture so soon after contact with the outside.

So, depending on how intriguing or useful the thing is, sure, things can become religious icons in anywhere from the same day to one generation later. By 400 years, we're talking "forever."

[foodie]

yes--that's why I wonder how the pumpkin flower could become a religious icon in just about 400 years..

[Bibliochef]

Didn't squash, like tomatoes and potatoes, moved from the western hemisphere a few centuries ago? See a great book called CURRY recently published by Lizzie Collingham. . . .