Eating Well - Part 3

"Langanam parama aushadam", my beloved great aunt Chiththi would say whenever one of us would mention feeling bloated or unwell. This wonderful woman who had never studied beyond ninth standard at school, married young, raised a brood of her own before adopting another ten when her sister-in-law passed away, with the kindest and gentlest of outlook on life had a simple remedy to fix any minor digestive ailment. Fast, for it's the best medicine. I can say with some degree of certainty that she had never heard of intermittent fasting but knew what would fix a system that was probably groaning from being overworked. Give it a break and it should sort itself out. It is the equivalent of asking 'have you tried switching it off and on?', when something doesn't work. Whatever happened to such sound common sense?

Every day I see people discarding intuition and common sense in favour of unquestioned and dubious nutritional advice. It's probably something that's been creeping on us for a while now. Back in the nineties, all of a sudden rice-eating families like mine in Chennai switched en masse to chapathi/roti for the evening meal as it was touted as the healthier option. Overnight rice which we had always eaten was a bad guy, the staple of our house had fallen out of favour and in its place was the interloper wheat. This meant poor women spending a lot longer in the kitchen making individual rotis when in the past they would have finished sooner by making rice in one go. 

Increasingly I find people around me getting worried and anxious about the food they eat. I say I had potato curry and rice and someone remarks that it's carbs on carbs. I tell someone that I am a vegetarian and they ask how I am getting my protein. I add some salad to my plate and someone remarks that it's good to get some micronutrients in. While I don't deny that eating a balanced meal is important, what I see happening (first hand, admittedly) is that people are losing the joys of eating and instead are overwhelmed by confusion and cacophonous and conflicting nutritional advice that borders on fear mongering and thrives on demonising food that people have grown up eating. 

Years ago I came across a term called 'orthorexia' which describes a kind of eating disorder characterised by obsession with healthy eating. Everyday I see more and more people who are obsessed with healthy eating. Those who measure every morsel on their plate or dissect every dish into its nutritional components. It's never just bonda but something with carbs or starch. It's never pesarattu but something with 9 grams of protein per 100 grams. What a sure fire way of messing up relationships with food!

Most people have a reasonable understanding of what constitutes good food (cooked from scratch, fresh, simple) and what doesn't (comes out of a packet, bears no resemblance to its origin, has lots of spurious ingredients). Most people also seem to have outsourced our inherent common sense to others who claim to know better with abject disregard for our individual history, our preference and our origins. My recipe for eating well? Put the phone away, cook what you like, eat in moderation and share with those you love. Something my darling Chiththi would wholeheartedly approve of. 

(concluded)

Eating Well - Part 2

 I was 35 when I first saw a photo of my maternal grandmother who had been dead for decades at that point. I began asking my mother questions about her mother and since she was just four at that time, she had just a fleeting recollection of her mother but there was one thing she would always recall. My mother would always mention the milagu kuzhambu her mother had made even as she was bleeding profusely before climbing into the waiting ambulance never to return home again. Ever since that recollection, each time  I make milagu kuzhambu I find myself thinking about that 27-year old Ramalakshmi who had contracted tetanus in a botched abortion and died a painful death leaving behind five young children. In some ways it is that invisible thread that holds us together. A thin sliver of molten brown pepper sauce that flows across generations to bind us in its common humanity. 

It is a small comfort to know that this woman from whom I have descended would have made this very dish just days before her death. That she too would have soaked some tamarind pods in warm water, heated sesame oil in a stone pot, toasted chana and urad dals in it before adding dried red chillies, curry leaves and the eponymous peppercorn and some asafoetida before emptying into a pestle and mortar where the mixture would have been pounded coarsely. The pot would have remained on the wood fire stove where she would have added some more oil, thrown mustard seeds, waited for them to pop before scooping out the ground paste and tossing them into the pot. She would have given it a quick stir and then added in the tamarind extract. She would have stirred the sauce briefly and covered it as it came to a boil. Using a piece of hand cloth, she would have removed the pot from the fire, added salt and possibly a thumb of jaggery to bring out the fiery pepperiness. 

In my mind I then imagine her wiping her sauce-stained hand on her saree - a gesture my mother remembered vividly given that at four years of age her mother's hands was what appeared to her at eye level - before wobbling into the ambulance unaware of the fate that awaited her. It is some consolation that I make this milagu kuzhambu as Ramalakshmi would have made it as her mother before her and her mother before that, and countless women before that for hundreds of years whose names are long forgotten. We are somehow united across time in this enduring act of feeding our families. 

Food is about history, it's about stories. It is about Ramalakshmi and Shyamala and Abhirami standing in our respective kitchens thinking about our grandmothers and our grandchildren and nourishing them with love as the main ingredient as only we can. To reduce it to mere nutrients is to ignore all the richness it stands for and that would be tragic.

Eating Well - Part 1

Nearly all of my fondest memories are linked to food. When I look back on my growing years the highlights inevitably inextricably involve food. Be it the dinners on the terrace under a full moon during the holidays when we had kai sadam where we sat around in a circle around an aunt who would roll mounds of rice and place them in our extended hand. Or that summer when we all spent a fortnight or so in Madurai eating mangoes with the juice trickling down our elbows as we raced to lick it before it dripped to the ground. Even the years when my sons were young my fondest stories of them somehow relate to food. Like the time I beat eggs and milk together, seasoned it and it rose so well in the oven that we named it 'wow' and it is now firmly a part of our family lexicon. When I first moved to the UK, food was also how I made friends. I would offer dishes to neighbours and school mums and in an instant a rapport would be established. In short, food is how I communicate, it is how I connect. 

When I think of people, I often think of a meal we shared or a dish they cooked for me (can there be a more definite action that communicates love than to be cooked for?). Some years ago, for a birthday a dear friend sent me a message about how we both loved food and how so many of our conversations were about food. I had no idea I did that and I was delighted that she had noticed and thought to point it out to me. 

Over the years I have never stopped to think of the components that make the meal. I don't pause mid-mouthful to wonder if there is enough fibre in the sambar sadam or if the aviyal would go towards contributing to my daily protein intake. I do not look at yogurt and satisfy myself that I am getting the requisite calcium. What a travesty that would be and a real thief of joy of eating. I do not read a book against a checklist to see if it is intellectually stimulating or if it nourishes my imagination, so why would I do that to the plate of food in front of me?