There was a time when hunger in Dhaka had a kind of innocence to it. You didn’t “order” food. You waited for it. You didn’t scroll through options. You trusted memory, smell, habit, and whatever your mother decided was today’s fate. A plate of dal-bhaat with a single fried hilsa wasn’t curated; it was destiny. Cold rice with leftover aloo bhorta at noon wasn’t convenient; it was childhood, sweat, and school bells echoing in the background.
Food, then, wasn’t a choice. It was a relationship, and like most arranged relationships, it somehow worked better than expected.
That era is over. Not because we outgrew it, but because we replaced it with an app that promises everything and delivers almost enough. The murder weapon wasn’t technology alone. It was a 60% discount, a free delivery coupon, and the comforting lie that you could always do better than your last meal.
The arranged marriage
The old relationship with food in this country was not glamorous. It was arranged.
You ate what your mother made, what the season allowed, what the bazaar had left by the time your father got there. There was no courtship, no browsing, no swiping. Khichuri arrived on a rainy afternoon like an old friend who never asked if you were ready, and because you had no choice, you fell in love anyway.
The bhaji was never just bhaji. It was Tuesday’s bhaji, cooked in yesterday’s oil, eaten under a wobbling ceiling fan that sounded like it had given up on life years ago. It had context, memory and personality.
Now we have options. Hundreds of them. As any Bangladeshi auntie will tell you, while watching her nephews remain single into alarming adulthood, too many options are not freedom. It is paralysis wearing a smile.
Tinder, Bumble, Foodpanda
We now approach food the way we approach everything else we’ve managed to complicate beyond repair with infinite scrolling and zero commitment.
Open any food app on a Friday night in Dhaka, and you will witness the modern diner in their most tragic form: tired, indecisive, not even particularly hungry, scrolling through 200 restaurants like they are solving a moral dilemma.
Kacchi from Fakruddin? Or that new Banani place a food blogger once called “life-changing” between filtered selfies? Noodles or nihari? Something “Thai fusion” that costs too much and arrives looking like a polite disappointment?
Forty-five minutes later, they order the same kacchi they always do. The ritual was never about variety. It was about the illusion that something better might exist just one scroll away.
That is what the apps sold us: not food, but possibility. And possibility, when infinite, eventually makes satisfaction impossible.
The hollow hype
Here is something new in Dhaka: a queue that has nothing to do with taste. Somewhere in Dhanmondi, a line forms outside a shop selling bun kebab. Not because it is exceptional, but because someone with enough followers once stood there, looked emotionally overwhelmed, and wrote: “speechless.”
That one word did more than decades of taste buds ever could. Meanwhile, the fuchka seller outside Azimpur gate continues his nineteen-year streak of selling out by 5 pm. No captions. No reels. Just consistency, lime, tamarind, and memory. Real food rarely trends. It simply survives.
Emptiness on a full stomach
The cruellest irony is this: we have never had more food, and never felt less satisfied.
Our grandmothers made panta bhaat from leftovers, poured cold water over it, added a green chilli and mustard oil, and ate it before the fields woke up. There were no reviews. No ratings. No debate about whether something else might be better. Only eating. Only enough.
We, on the other hand, finish an order, feel vaguely underwhelmed, and reopen the app not for hunger, but for hope. Dessert might fix it. Something sweet might complete the experience.
It never does. Because the food didn’t change. We did. We turned meals into transactions, hunger into browsing, and dinner into a decision-making crisis. And now, surrounded by more choices than any generation before us, we still sit with the same question, glowing on a screen: What should I eat?
