One of the most prominent Indian authors, Shashi Deshpande has commented on the prevalence of certain topics in contemporary Indian, especially diasporic, writing by saying: “Now we cannot have tigers and elephants so we have spices and grandmothers”. Grandmothers and spices had by the turn of the millennium become common literary tropes that bespoke of exoticism, although in the everyday Indian reality they were the most ordinary things. In this chapter I propose that by studying diasporic Indian literature we may investigate a phenomenon that remains habitually invisible, the ways in which the issues taken as ‘ordinary’ construct the ways in which we perceive the ‘other’. Food writing has become an important form of expression and contemporary literature uses food, kitchen and cooking both as tropes and subject. I interpret the significance of the kitchen and cooking in the wider context of cultural criticism and theory of the diaspora with special reference to poetry and fiction by Indian diasporic writers.