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)