Midnight's Children- Food

Although this post may say more about my healthy appetite than 'Midnight's Children', one aspect of the novel that I found particularly noteworthy was Rushdie's use of food as an extension of the personalities and events in the novel. The most memorable of these being the 'chutnification of history' or the 'pickling of time' which Saleem uses to describe his method of writing, with its unreliability in terms of salient details, scattered chronology and textual inaccuracies, etc. This, and the other references to food in the novel, such as Mary Pereira stirring the 'guilt of her heart' into the pickles or Aunt Alia's 'birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord' not only re-iterates the power of the senses in the novel but also points to the differing literary tastes that inform Rushdie's narrative, such as Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Arabian Nights' and Rushdie's endeavours to combine these different flavours within his narrative framework.