Butter chicken is a Hindi film staple.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

If there’s one thing Bollywood excels at — apart from dramatic love triangles, gravity-defying stunts, and melodramatic monologues —it’s shaping the way we eat. Yes, Bollywood, India’s unofficial Ministry of Food Propaganda, has managed to wield its glittery magic wand over our plates Think you are craving Hyderabadi Zafrani Pulao only because it’s delicious? Wrong. It is happening because Amitabh Bachchan waxed poetic about its flavours and described the recipe in Cheeni Kum.

Bollywood has a knack for turning ordinary dishes into cultural icons. Consider butter chicken, which was created to use up leftover tandoor chicken, but is now a superstar dish thanks to its repeated cameos in Bollywood dinner table scenes. If a non-vegetarian family in a Hindi movie is eating together, rest assured butter chicken takes centre stage, probably flanked by naan and emotional dialogues about family values.

We watched Omi Khurana in Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana struggle to figure out the secret ingredient in his daarji’s famous chicken curry. The movie showed how people bond over a hot kadhai of freshly cooked gravy. It might have been about relationships, but let’s be honest — the only takeaway was that opium makes chicken curry irresistible.

And then there’s biryani, the dish with more screen time than most item numbers. It’s omnipresent — whether it’s being cooked lovingly by a mother or gobbled down by villains while plotting their next heist. Meanwhile, poor khichdi languishes in obscurity, forever typecast as the food of the ailing or the broke.

Bollywood also loves to educate the masses about India’s regional cuisines. Well, sort of. According to Bollywood logic, Punjab thrives on butter chicken and lassi, Gujarat sustains itself on dhokla and fafda, South Indians survive on idli and sambar with swaying coconut trees in the background, and Goans have feni coursing through their veins.

And then there’s the Northeast. Sadly, for the film industry, it’s just a tribal belt where people live on trees, snack on snakes, and probably don’t have time for actual food because they are too busy with jungle chases and animal hunts. Why bother exploring the culinary traditions of the region when you can just throw in a costume and call it a day?

Regional nuance often takes a back seat to entertainment. In one particularly baffling movie, Bollywood showed a South Indian character eating Maggi with curd. My South Indian friends, who swear by their thayir sadam, still haven’t forgiven that film.

Bollywood doesn’t just influence Indian kitchens; it’s a culinary ambassador to the world. Cue the rise of Bollywood-themed restaurants abroad, where you pay a fortune for mediocre aloo parathas served with a side of disco lights and a Shah Rukh Khan playlist. These restaurants thrive on clichés. The walls are adorned with posters of Mughal-e-Azam, and the menus feature dishes such as Sholay Seekh Kebabs or DDLJ Dal Tadka. Here food isn’t a focus; you’re paying for the Bollywood experience. We can also blame Bollywood for inspiring chefs to combine unrelated dishes and slap a catchy, movie-inspired name on them: Gabbar’s Grilled Cheese or Dum Maaro Dumplings.

At its core, Bollywood is a dream factory, and it’s no surprise that food is one of its most effective tools for storytelling. Bollywood doesn’t depict food realistically; it romanticises it, turning every meal into a spectacle. And for better or worse, we can’t help but eat it up.

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