What India Eats and What's Wrong With It

Tracing the contours of the ‘nutrition famine’ hitting those who think they eat well points at the cure: recovering the diversity in what we eat

- Salik Ahmad

Indians have been historically generous with holiness. nature, knowledge, fire, sex, kings, cows, you name it and our plural, freewheeling belief system has been magnanimous enough to host it within the sanctum. Food, too, found its space therein. The toil that went into the tilling of land, the sowing of seeds by weather-hardened hands, the satiating sight of a rich harvest—and foremost, its life-giving quality—all that must have prompted the sages to confer on food a status worthy of reverence.

But what we eat is no more holy. Our traditional dietary wisdom struggles to survive intact. At one level, there’s the destabilising encounter with modernity—which, for everyone in the world, has meant exposure to new, exotic things. The changes in food and food practices also owe to the value-free march of technology: chemical additives, preservatives, criminal levels of sugar and salt, plastic packaging, and yes, Frankenfood!

There’s also the flux of medical wisdom, notoriously the inexact science. We didn’t need GM popcorn or Big Mac burgers for one in five Indians to be obese: it was accomplished by refined flour replacing old grains like ragi or bajra or ethnic rice varieties, or the coup staged by zero-value refined oils on nutrient-rich ghee and more traditional cooking mediums. Our nutritional palette thinned perilously.