FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Economist and Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee's latest book—Chhaunk—examines the interesting space at the intersection of food and economics

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Abhijit Banerjee, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT and the 2019 Nobel laureate in economic sciences, created quite a stir when he published a cookbook, Cooking to Save Your Life, in 2021, revealing a hitherto unknown facet of his personality, far removed from the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. With his latest book, Chhaunk, he marries what one can safely presume are two of his greatest interests—food and economics. While based on a monthly newspaper column he has been writing for the past two years, the book has the pieces arranged into three neat themes: ‘Economics and Psychology’, ‘Economics and Culture’, and ‘Economics and Social Policy’, with each section getting a fresh introduction. The columns were accompanied by his trade-mark recipes; for the book, many new ones have been added, which should keep Banerjee’s fan base sated for a while. The evocative illustrations are by the talented Cheyenne Olivier, who has also illustrated Banerjee’s previous book, as well as his wife Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics for Kids. Banerjee tackles a diversity of subjects in Chhaunk, from the intensely personal, like reminiscing about his mother who passed away in November 2023—‘I miss her all the time’—to weightier concerns like inequality, nutrition and, of course, climate change. It’s all peppered with interesting trivia, like the mention of the medieval “feast of the chest-nuts, organised at the behest of Pope Cesare Borgia, where a hundred prostitutes were present”.