Unless you're a gourmet chef or a serious food faddist, you don't actually need to cook in Manhattan, says the writer.

REUTERS

Don't cook ... get gourmet meals home delivered instead.

MOST of the readers of this newspaper, I venture to suggest — and certainly this must be true of an overwhelming majority of its male readers — have never actually had cook themselves a meal from scratch. The readers of The Hindu hail from a socio-economic stratum that is used to full-time domestic help in the kitchen, and even those among you whom society expects to feed the rest (by which, in an acknowledgment of politically-incorrect Indian reality, I mean the women) play a largely supervisory role in the process. It's the hired help who do the actual hot and sweaty work (for which I hope your grateful families duly give you the credit.)

I'm not being gratuitously offensive — just making the point that the average educated middle-class Indian tends to be a bit handicapped in the culinary self-help department. When someone of that ilk, like myself (who grew up an only son in India, never bothering to step into the kitchen except to ask when dinner would be ready) finds himself living in the West, the handicap can be acute indeed. There are no servants, and in most Western cities restaurants are prohibitively expensive, so unless you can cook for yourself you are really in trouble. My former wife, a first-rate intellectual whose only attempt at cooking a dish before marriage was marred by her complete unawareness of the need for salt, became an expert chef because she had to — when we moved to Geneva.

Finding myself single again and living in the West could easily have been calamitous. Fortunately for me I am living in the one place on the planet where this need not be a problem — New York City, and more specifically the island of Manhattan.

Unless you're a gourmet chef or a serious food faddist, you don't actually need to cook in Manhattan. It's not just that there are tens of thousands of restaurants and eateries on the island, the largest concentration of commercial kitchens per square mile on the face of the globe. It's that many of them are affordable, and they pretty much all deliver. In Manhattan, I cook with my dialling finger.

Within a 10-block radius of my own virgin oven lie two Indian restaurants, three Mexican, four Japanese, five Italian and not-even-the-Mayor-knows-how-many Chinese. "Fast free delivery" is their slogan, even if "fast" is a relative term (I've once waited an hour, but it was snowing) and "free" overlooks the generous tips my conscience prompts me to give the perspiring bicyclist at my door. But "delivery" is the key word. The lack of time or culinary talent never obliges a denizen of Manhattan's apartment buildings to go hungry.

Sure, there's a negative side. You can't always synchronise your meal with the start of the latest episode of your favourite television show; it might arrive just as the plot is taking a crucial turn, and you could miss the key twist just as you are fishing for your wallet at the door. (But since I hardly ever have the time to watch television, this does not affect me greatly.) Sometimes, if you are on the losing end of a long delivery list, your minestrone might be tepid or your sautéed bok choy soggy. And the delivery boys, frontier entrepreneurs to a man, might busy themselves slipping unsolicited flyers under your neighbours' doors, thereby risking a ban on their establishment by your building's management.

But the key problem is the obvious one: you can never be entirely sure what you're getting, and a lot of it could go directly to your waistline. For some Chinese takeaways, "no MSG" is an aspiration, not a promise. An Italian menu that offers "low-fat dressing" might give you a salad swimming in oil. Who knows what that delicious aloo gobhi was cooked in, or whether the raita is made from low-fat yoghurt? Diallers can't really afford to diet: telephoning for dinner is rarely wise for anyone who's counting her calories.

My friend Cath is too lazy (or, as she prefers to put it in New Yorkese, too stressed out) to cook. But she was beginning to bloat on the fat-laden fare being delivered in generous portions to her door. "If I have to choose between starvation and eating too much of the wrong food," she moaned as she wobbled miserably on the scales, "starvation will lose every time."

The Manhattan solution? A firm that delivers gourmet Zone diet meals to her door, overnight. Every morning Cath awakes to find a black zippered bag outside her apartment door containing three Zone meals and two snacks to tide her through the day. The food comes in tiny plastic containers, in quantities barely adequate to ward off malnutrition, and the entrées need microwaving, but Cath is ecstatic. For $35 a day she gets the five dollars' worth of calories she needs, and she doesn't even have to think about what to order: she has no choice but to trust the Zone chefs. Since her main objective is to lose weight, the fact that she dislikes (and discards) half the stuff they send actually works in her favour. Her dress size has been shrinking along with her bank balance.

Sounds like the perfect Manhattan marriage of convenience and consumerism. Except that there's such a thing as too much success. Cath's been losing weight on the Zone plan — and losing, and losing. Last month's new jeans are already swimming around her waist. But she doesn't know how to stop. If she gave up the plan, she'd lose control of her diet. Besides, she loves waking up to those little black Zone bags every morning.

So Cath's decided to have it both ways. The Zone keeps coming — but so, most evenings, does a scrumptious dessert from one of the restaurants in her neighbourhood. The last time I spoke to her she was musing over her delivery choices: baklava from the Turkish Ali Baba, or tiramisu from Tre Pomodori? Her diet may be in jeopardy, but her faith in Manhattan's choices is unshaken. The lard delivers what the Zone taketh away ....