Little Boxes of Love

I went to Mumbai in mid December partly to visit the Navdanya outlet there and partly to learn more about the Dabbawallas. The Dabbawallas are a caste of people from a village near Pune, a city not far from Mumbai. They have the formidable task of delivering home cooked lunches to office workers all over Mumbai. (The word Dabbawalla actually means “one who carries a box’”.) Thanks to these guys, most people in Mumbai don’t have to carry their lunch on the overcrowded commuter trains and don’t have to rely on expensive lunches or fast food. Commuters usually leave their homes at about 7am to get to work. At around 9am, the Dabbawalla will arrive at their house to pick up a tiffin (metal lunch box) packed with their lunch, usually cooked at home by the wife. Through a complicated relay involving at least 4 different people for each lunch, several bicycles, trains, and a lot of balancing on the head, this lunch gets to the office of its rightful owner at about noon, just in time for lunch. After lunch, the process goes in reverse as the tiffins are picked up from the offices and returned home before worker gets there. A lot of the time they are carried on huge trays balanced on the head of the Dabbawalla, who somehow fits himself into the local trains. Most of the Dabbawallas are illiterate, so they use a system of coloured symbols to identify where each tiffin should go. The most amazing thing is that every lunch gets to the right place every day. The Dabbawallas deliver about 200,000 tiffins throughout Mumbai every day, with almost no errors. They are so accurate that they have become an international phenomenon in the management world, and have been studied by everyone from Stanford Business School to The Economist.

The Dabbawallas have grown into a huge operation of 5000 people, all from the same poor caste and mostly from the same village. They have organized into Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust, which functions as an insurance policy for the men and their families. They are able to get low interest loans to keep them from being indebted to the local moneylenders and assistance with health care. The Dabbawallas have changed with the times as well. Traditionally, the meals were cooked by the housewife and delivered to her husband. Now, with changing families and workforce, about a quarter of the tiffins are delivered to women. With no wife at home to cook, many meals are prepared by mothers or grandmothers, even if they live in a different house. Bachelors and other people without a cook at home can even arrange a tiffin service; their tiffin is filled by another family. They can find someone from their own region of India who cooks the kind of food they like, and pay them to cook a lunch for them every day, which is delivered by the Dabbawallas. They even deliver home cooked meals from mom to a lot of schoolchildren.

After spending so much time in Delhi where fast food and instant meals seem to have infiltrated the local food culture so strongly, I was amazing to see this system still so prevalent in the huge modern city of Mumbai. Why were people still wanting home cooked meals in a country where packaged food and take-out has become a major status symbol? Why Mumbai and nowhere else? To answer my questions, I went straight to the source, Raghunath Medge, president of the Dabbawalla Trust. Mr. Medge, who has become somewhat of an international phenomena, spoke to me with the help of a translator. He promptly handed me a business card and a copy of a thick report on their operations. He’s used to this sort of thing by now – his group has been studied, he’s been to Prince Charles’ wedding, and he’s been to Torino, Italy for Terra Madre (the biannual gathering of the Slow Food Movement that I hope to attend this year). Turns out not only are people sticking with the system, their business is actually increasing.

Part of the success of the Dabbawallas is location, location, location. The extensive local train system in Mumbai is what allows them to function. Tiffins are picked in the neighbourhoods up by a man on a bicycle, who brings them to a central location for sorting, and they are divided among other Dabbawallas who take them downtown by train. No other city in India has sufficiently reliable transport system to allow such a process to work.

But, there has to be more than that. People obviously want home cooked meals. Mr. Medge told me that people just like the regularity of the system. They know their lunch will come every day. They know who has made it and what goes into it – the kind of oil used, the cooking methods, whether it’s veg, pure veg, or non-veg. Whoever is cooking it knows preferences, food habits, dietary restrictions for health concerns. Plus, people know this food is healthier than what they can get in a fast food place or on the street, and they can get variety. Even in offices with canteens, people still use tiffins because they don’t want to eat the same food every day. What was really interesting – and something that is so striking against North American thought – is that people like to get their tiffins because they know the food inside was made with care by someone they know, usually a family member. The Sweater Man from the Delhi-Mumbai train, after overhearing our conversation about Dabbawallas, started talking about his own use of the tiffin service. He liked that it kept him connected to his wife. She knows exactly what he likes and doesn’t like. She makes healthier food than he can get outside. And she cooks with love. Love. Can you imagine your average business man on the morning subway talking openly about the love his wife puts into making his lunch? He talked about the strong connection that is kept through the food. He finds the food tastes better if it’s made by someone he cares about, especially for him. He likes to know where his food has come from, what’s been done to it, and how it’s been prepared. If he is not feeling well and doesn’t eat all his food, his wife will know because the tiffin will arrive back home with leftovers.

For all the things I’ve seen that are indicate India is going the way of the fast food culture, I find things like this that remind me India is different. Food is important to people here in a way that just doesn’t happen in North America. People really care about it, and they care about what they eat. Partly I think it might be the strong family ties that still prevail in society, but there is something beyond that. Food is a big deal in Indian culture, and it’s hard to imagine that connection to food that I worry about so much completely disappearing here.