How the H-1B visa changed American food culture forever

“Bombay Based Now US Settled Lauva Patel boy MS Computer Science (US) H-1B Visa, 27/ 6 ft arriving November for marriage.” This matrimonial ad ran in The Times of India on October 24, 1993. It was one of the first mentions in the newspaper of the H-1B visa, which has been roiling relations between Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s MAGA maniacs since December.

The H-1B visa category was created in 1990 to allow US employers to get specialist workers because, as Gaurav Sabnis notes in Scroll, their demand for tech workers is far more than the US can provide. When the category was created, H-1B visas were projected as the short-term fix for this problem. They are explicitly temporary and, if terminated, holders must return to their home country.

Musk and his fellow technocrats support bringing highly skilled foreign workers to the US. But anti-immigration zealots note how huge numbers, particularly from India, have used H-1B visas to get a toehold into the citizenship process. Once in the US, these temporary workers become irreplaceable and their employers eventually sponsor their green cards for permanent residency. In this view, the H-1B category is a Trojan Horse for migrants and Trump must end it, as he promised in the past. Trump himself seems to be wavering between Musk’s view – “We need smart people,” he told a reporter – and his desire for dramatic decisions with which to kick off his presidency.

As that early matrimonial ad indicates, the promise of a more permanent move was always implicit in the H-1B visa, at least to the applicants. It was not just the visa holder moving, but often the spouse as well. Right at the outset, the H-1B programme had anticipated this and its solution was to ban spouses from working. Any hint that a spouse might be looking to work in the US would be grounds to deny the visa.

The H-1B visa was not gendered, but in its early years, the vast majority of applicants were men. (Some Indian women would go to work as nurses under the parallel H-1A visa scheme). This meant that a very large number of Indian women – usually well-educated and with existing careers in India – went to the US, only to just sit at home, as mandated by the H-1B visa rules.

The expectation from their families was, of course, that they would have children and rear them. Before that, they would take care of the home for their husbands and, above all, cook. It did not matter that many of these women, previously focused on education and a career, had not done much cooking back in India. Once in the US, they had a husband to feed and time on their hands, so they were suddenly thrust back into traditional roles for Indian women.

Radhika MB’s Visa Wives is a detailed study of their experiences, made personal by the fact that the author herself moved to the US in 2011 after her husband got a job there. The stories vary widely, ranging from wives who found the move liberating to those who could not adjust and drifted into depression and sickness, even requiring a return to India. Most fall somewhere in between, but one constant is the importance of food.

It would start with the packing. Vanitha, one of the visa wives, travelled in the pre-9/11 days, “when pickles were still allowed in hand baggage. She carried about 10 kg of different varieties of pickle – mango, methi (fenugreek), gongura, tomato, imli (raw tamarind), among others. Masalas and chutney podis were part of her luggage too.” A pressure cooker was a must. Radhika notes that they are available in US stores “but they are nothing like the little one you use in your Indian kitchen”.

Once in the US, culture shock often really hit while shopping for vegetables. Translating the prices into rupees was traumatic at first, but there was the relief at finding familiar Indian vegetables like hara chana (green chickpeas), kanda (elephant yam), dosakai (Madras cucumber) and avarekai (flat beans), even if they came in frozen form. Indians who went to the US in the 1970s had it much harder. My uncle, a doctor, told me how groups of Indians made joint trips every few months from the distant towns they worked in to the few stores like Kalustyans in New York City which stocked desi ingredients.

Point of entry

The H-1B wave has changed all that, making stores selling Indian food a viable proposition across the US. The Patel Brothers chain now has over 50 stores in 20 states where customers can either shop in person or order online for delivery from their nearest branch. Similar stores can be found at other locations with large Indian clusters. “The only things you can’t find at Indian stores are your mom and dad. Everything else they manage to stock,” Radhika quotes one visa wife as saying.

All these H-1B-enabled factors have come together to influence how Indian food is becoming more familiar and available in the US. One of the most common ways for a country’s cuisine to enter another country is with working-class migrants or refugees, two groups who find selling food a quick and relatively easy way to make money. They focus on easy, crowd-pleasing dishes, made with whatever ingredients they can get, even when not entirely authentic. In the process, new dishes are invented, like chicken tikka masala or the super-hot vindaloo and phal curries served in British curry houses.

A hybrid cuisine develops, like Punjabi-Chinese or Mexican-American, whose popularity dominates all views of the original cuisine. For decades, the food in British Indian restaurants was seen to represent all subcontinental cuisines, despite the huge regional differences in Indian food. British Indian restaurants were staffed mostly by men, whose families came later and did not work in the restaurant (but did work in other businesses like corner shops). British Chinese restaurants were more likely to see whole families working behind the counter, wives serving customers or keeping track as cashiers, while their husbands cooked.

There are other ways in which cuisines become popular, such as corporate-led restaurants like Taco Bell (Mexican food) or Jollibees (Filipino food) or through elite groups, like royalty or hipsters, whose love for a particular style of cooking popularises and makes such food aspirational (for instance, the Italian cuisine brought by Catherine de Medici to France in the 16th century, which transformed French cuisine, or the hipster obsession with flat whites and other aspects of coffee culture).

The H-1B visa facilitated a new model where visa wives developed and perfected traditional food from their regional Indian communities and then found ways to make it more available, through potlucks, local fairs and, eventually even restaurants. Combined with the easier availability of regional Indian ingredients, this is making a far more diverse Indian cuisine available in the US than was the case with, for example, Chinese-American or Mexican-American food.

Indian restaurants in the US may still be broadly grouped into categories like South Indian, Punjabi or Gujarati (as they are in India), but there is still likely to be more diversity available, especially if you include home catering options offered by the visa wives. As a contrast, Indian food in Canada tends to be dominated by Punjabi and Caribbean Indian cuisine, both with roots in working-class immigration without H-1B style restrictions on spouses working.

Food habits

Anita Jaisinghani always wanted to go to culinary school, but her parents steered her firmly towards sciences. Her own route to the US was a bit circuitous. An early marriage was followed by a few years in Canada, where she studied and worked in microbiology, as her husband worked several jobs while hoping to land the tech gig he really wanted. Finally, when this happened, the family moved to the US with Jaisinghani, now a visa wife, having to stop working.

Jainsinghani had maintained an interest in cooking, using her husband and two kids as “unsuspecting subjects of my relentless cooking experiments,” she writes in her cookbook Masala: Recipes from India, the Land of Spices. This was not just Indian food, since she happily used access to ingredients and recipes from around the world as part of her experimentation. But she could see how poorly Indian food was represented in restaurants in Canada and the US, and that made her think of filling the gap.

In Houston, where her family came to live, Jaisinghani started catering from home along with a Moroccan friend. Then she started selling fresh chutneys at local markets and followed this by taking a leap and doing a stint at a well-known restaurant to learn the ropes. Ultimately, she went on to open two successful restaurants, Indika and Pondicheri. When her first place was featured in the Houston Chronicle, she showed it to her father (her mother had died earlier). “Is this really your place? Are people paying for your cooking,” he asked in amazement. He is now very proud of her success in the food world.

Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, saw this pattern many times while researching his book The Migrant’s Table, about food habits in Bengali-American households. “Most of the women in my sample of 126 households were (a) substantially underemployed for their education credentials due to their visa status and (b) as a result both had a little more time and higher expectations about cooking and taking care of the family,” he said.

The food they cooked was, initially, quite conservative, traditional Bengali style “macher jhaal, masoorer daal, rice, and a sauté of greens, for dinner”. But Ray notes that once they had children and got into routines of taking their kids to school and participating in activities with other parents, the women became exposed to American foods far more than their husbands, “who imagined that Americans ate hamburgers, hot dogs, salads and pizzas, almost exclusively, which is all commercial lunch dishes”.

In fact, what the women were experiencing were the real dishes of everyday American home-cooking like “savory pot pies, cupcakes, stews, chowders, corn on the cob, pirogies, baked zitis, macaroni, casseroles, meatballs, etc…. This made them improvise to feed the children, if not their husbands, more hybrid cooking with chicken fingers, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with butter rather than mustard oil, casseroles, sandwiches, etc.” It is likely that many of their children demanded such foods in their lunches, rather than Indian food, to help them blend in more easily with their classmates.

Ray found his subjects adopting this hybrid approach – improvisatory and “American” for breakfasts and lunch, while traditional and Indian for dinner. “My argument from there was: that made them quintessentially modern subjects – not outdated characters with outmoded habits as nativists imagine them to be – with a hankering for tradition and for change, through the cycle of the day, the week, and the seasons.” They were accumulating food knowledge, both of how to make their traditional Indian foods and how to adapt them to American ingredients and tastes – using salmon instead of Indian fish, or making less spicy versions for American friends.

And they started sharing this knowledge. A key difference between the H-1B migrants and earlier migrants was access to a personal computer and the internet. This helped visa wives break their isolation, connecting first to family members and then other friends they made online, often to share recipes. Radhika writes about Malini who started putting her recipes online to help her sister-in-law, who had recently moved to Canada: “Phone calls were expensive in those days. ‘Why don’t you put your recipes on a blog? It would be easy for me to access,’ she suggested.”

Building relations

Blogging about food but also childcare, crafts and other domestic subjects was transformational for many visa wives. It put them in touch with others like them, a vital connection especially for those in places where there were not many other Indian families. It also gave them a sense of self-worth, as they built their writing and photography skills, and used feedback to hone their recipes to the type of food most in demand.

Their husbands were often supportive, seeing this as a way to create potentially marketable skills, while still remaining within the not-working rules of the visa. This was not exactly a relinquishment of control – Radhika notes that this kind of domestic blogging was non-threatening: “Would they be as comfortable if she were to blog about world politics and policy? Not sure. They freak out if she gives an interview about her life to publications. What if she says something that jeopardises their stay?” The H-1B shadow still loomed.

Bloggers started organising meetings and conventions that gave the visa wives a rare opportunity to travel for themselves, rather than with their families. It helped that some were organised by well-known personalities like chef Vikas Khanna who understood the wider importance of food media. “Cooking means freedom. It’s a freedom of thought, that you are not dependent,” he says in Radhika’s book. “For people who don’t travel much, don’t have a driver’s licence, who are stuck at home, cooking becomes one of the primary ways of spending evenings, and cooking shows become a delight.” Indian contestants started appearing on shows like MasterChef US. In 2015, Hetal Vasavada became the first vegetarian contestant on the show.

In 1993, just a few days before that H-1B matrimonial ad ran in The Times of India, the newspaper published an edit criticising the new visa rules as clearly discriminatory. The US wanted Indian skilled workers, but instead of allowing them in under the existing, broadly structured B1 business visa, it had created this restrictive new system which exploited skills, but did not give rights. “This is clearly a non-tariff barrier in the services sector and needs to be eliminated,” the edit said forcefully.

This was right, but not realistic. The US has always been deeply split over the question of migrants, both wanting them and extolling their value to the nation, but also suspicious and ready to raise the drawbridge at the prospect of more. As the holder of that early H-1B visa probably realised, it was best to take what was on offer and then use perseverance and ingenuity, of exactly the kind that the US claims to admire, to find a way in.

And their spouses even more, labouring under both hostility to migrants and patriarchal constraints, would use the particular constraints of H-1B rules to change their lives and American food culture. No matter how much Trump makes these rules even harder, that spirit is not likely to change. Over 30 years later, the woman who answered that ad and got married may still be alive, cooking up Gujarati food in the US, and inspiring many others to follow her path.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.