Food occasions
Four food days observed in India, from World Pulses Day to World Food Day, with dates and messages that say something about what people actually eat.
World Pulses Day on 10 February, International Tea Day on 21 May, World Food Day on 16 October and National Popcorn Day, which is an American observance in January that has drifted into international use.
Two of them have an unusually strong Indian connection. India is the world's largest producer and consumer of pulses, so World Pulses Day is effectively a day about dal. And the UN's International Day of Tea in May was adopted after a long push from tea-producing countries including India, which is why it sits in May rather than on the older 15 December date some producers still keep.
Writing about food
This is the easiest category to write well in, because food is specific by nature. The mistake is going abstract: "food brings us together" tells the reader nothing.
Name the dish, the household, the person who made it. A message about your grandmother's sambar powder, the exact proportions of which nobody wrote down, is worth more than any number of sentences about culinary heritage.
The serious half
World Food Day marks the founding of the FAO and is about hunger, not cuisine. In India that means the Public Distribution System, the mid-day meal scheme and the Global Hunger Index argument that flares up each October.
If you are writing on that day, a message about food waste in your own kitchen, or about a local kitchen worth supporting, fits better than a photograph of a restaurant meal.
Most of the big eating happens on the festival days anyway, where the food is usually the point.