US academic Tom Nichols calls Indian food 'terrible' on Twitter; Zomato responds: 'good time to launch the dislike button'

On 23 November, academic specialist on international affairs and professor at the US Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School Tom Nichols created a storm on social media with a tweet saying, “Indian food is terrible and we pretend it isn’t.” Nichols’ tweet was in response to a certain Jon Becker who had put out a tweet on 19 November saying: “Please quote tweet this with your most controversial food opinion, I love controversial food opinions.”

The tweet received mixed responses, some agreeing with him about not liking Indian food, others insinuating he did not understand it, or that his palate wasn’t developed. On 25 November, Zomato India also responded to the tweet saying it is time Twitter launched the ‘dislike’ button:

After receiving a wide range of responses on social media throughout the day, he replied to a few of these tweets:

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He also commented that in contrast, Afghan food was one of his favourites and that he liked Chinese food:

Later, he also tweeted in response to all the outrage and the general direction the conversation had taken, saying: “But 24 hours of outrage about whether it’s racist to tease Americans about whether they *really* like Indian food from one comment in response to a call for controversial food takes is about as crazy as Twitter gets. Also, Led Zeppelin still sucks. /3x”

Nichols followed this up with another tweet, this time about Korean cuisine which he said he also did “not get”.