As people who live in cities, we can do plenty!
▶Find out where your food comes from: Talk to your vegetable vendor or supermarket manager and ask them to ensure their food is sourced responsibly.
▶When possible, buy produce straight from farmers. A lot of cities now have real farmers’ markets where they invite farmers to come and sell produce.
▶Grow your own food on your window sill, balcony or terrace. Tomatoes, herbs, root vegetables grow very easily and taste yummier if you’ve grown them yourself.
▶Oh come on, we don’t have all the answers. You come up with some as well.
Fresh from the field
Move over Old MacDonald who had a farm, e-i-e-i-o.
It’s time to meet some real, happy farmers who are growing organic, diverse, and fairly-traded produce, e-i-e-i-yo.
Visit a seed fest
Every year, farmers gather across different parts of the country to exhibit and exchange their local seeds at seed fests. For instance, at the Fair Trade Alliance Kerala’s (FTAK) annual seed fest, farmers come from four districts of Kerala and set up stalls to display their seeds.
When I visited the seed fest in 2015, I met one farmer who had come from the Wayanad district where he grows twenty-six kinds of chillies. Sunni, another organic farmer said that since 2005 he had switched to organic farming, and now his personal health had improved. Shobhana Ravi is also from Wayanad and said by participating in such events she has become more confident as a woman farmer.
According to the FTAK co-founder Tomy Mathew, the farmers come together not only to exchange local and organic seeds, but as a form of climate adaptation. Farmers preserve local varieties of seeds that are native to Kerala, which means they don’t need to buy expensive ones from seed companies. Alongside their cash crops of cashewnuts, coconut and coffee, they grow potato, brinjal, chillies, peas and fruits so that they have enough food at all times to eat.
The farmers don’t believe in growing only one plant variety (that’s called mono cropping). Instead they grow everything together, which is good for the soil and does not deplete it of nutrients. The excess food they grow they sell in the market. That way, even if their crop fails because of an erratic monsoon, they have food to eat, even if they have lesser money.
A bank of seeds
Nabita Goud is a farmer and a banker in Bhimdanga village in Odisha’s Kalahandi district. Confused? That’s because she actually manages a seed bank in her village. Nabita is a Seed Guardian at the Maa Lankeshwari Seed Bank and is one of eighteen Seed Guardians who are part of Chetna Organic’s seed conservation project in five villages in Odisha. Seed banks, like the one she manages, conserve a variety of seeds.
A seed bank operates just like a bank! A farmer can ‘withdraw’ a kilo of seed and has to repay the loan with one-and-a-half kilo of seed after harvest. How cool is that? In India, farmers traditionally saved their seeds to sow after every harvest.
Nabita’s seed bank is in a small room inside a hut. It’s lined with rows of neatly labelled earthen pots and jars to protect them from climatic conditions. There are varieties of millets, ladies finger, pumpkin, and red gram seeds, along with cotton. Nabita and her neighbours don’t need to buy expensive seeds from the market anymore. And all because of this community effort!
Huh fact of the day
There’s a seed bank in the Arctic called the Svalvard Global Seed Vault and it stores over 8,30,000 varieties of seeds from almost every country in the world. Recently, scientists made a withdrawal from the seed bank to retrieve precious wheat, barley, and grasses seeds (that’s because of the civil war going on in Syria). They have a very cool website where you can make a virtual visit of the vault. Check out https://www.croptrust.org/what-we-do/svalbard-global-seed-vault/.
IS THERE A WAY TO KNOW WHO GREW OUR FOOD AND WHERE IT CAME FROM?
Sometimes you buy a packet of tea, coffee or chocolate and it has a label of certification by Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance, or by UTZ, which is an organic body.
It means that the product has ingredients sourced from a farm which met certain social, environmental, and economic criteria and was checked by these certification agencies. It often tells you where the food was grown as well.
For example, when you see the Fairtrade Mark, it means that the farmers got paid a fair price for their produce (most of the time they don’t, unfortunately) and they got an extra amount of money called the Fairtrade Premium to invest back in their farms or communities. Fairtrade also has strict standards to help prevent environmental abuse, human trafficking, child labour and forced labour.
The Rainforest Alliance seal shows that those farms and forests, from which the ingredients came from, met environmental, social and economic standards.
Organic means that no pesticide was used while growing the produce.
It’s all about a clean, good supply chain—from farm to table.
APART FROM PESTICIDES, OUR FOOD SYSTEM IS GETTING MORE AND PROCESSED. UMMM, SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE PROCESSED FOODS?
Food processing is done to prevent food from going bad at a natural pace. We have always treated food to various processes at home to preserve them—think about pickling raw mango or lemons so that they can stay edible for a long time, or how the Egyptians cured fish with salt so they could carry it on their long journeys.
RACK YOUR BRAINS
Ask your parents for examples of different ways of preserving food at home.
When industrial food processing was introduced, it caught on fast. It also helped transport food during war time to serve military needs. After the war ended, the practice caught on fast with civilians, too. Canned tomatoes, milk in tetra packs, yoghurt in shiny containers with a not-easy-to-peel-away-despite-what-the-manufacturers-claim lid, what’s not to love?
Today, a lot of the processing involves refined ingredients which are not very nutritious or they have added chemicals. Processed foods often add salt, sugar or fat, all those yummy things your taste buds loves but are pretty bad for your body. Does that mean you give up everything you like? No! For example, French fries made fresh at home are better for you than the ones that come out of a frozen packet.
Chew on this
Azodicarbonamide may sound like a complex spell, destined to confound young potion makers, or like someone just sneezed. But it’s the name of an additive that manufacturers add to bread to make it look whiter. Food activist Vani Hari, who lives in North Carolina, pointed out that the same additive is used to make yoga mats and can be problematic for humans. Yikes!
Become a label decoder
While buying something processed or packaged, you need to know the ingredients. After all, it’s going into your tummy. For that, you need to become a Label Decoder.
The small print on the back of a food packet tells you a lot about what ingredients it is made out of. They are often confusing and read like Greek or Latin. But no worries, there is a way of understanding the meaning behind a food label.
Look at a label—it can be of a biscuit or chips packet or a chocolate wrapper. Now divide the ingredients into two parts. You may need to use the Internet to figure some of the names out.
So how much of your food was grown in a farm or created in a lab?
Chew on this
How many ingredients does your morning breakfast cereal have, or your afternoon cookie? In comparison, how many ingredients does your yoghurt or homemade nankhatai have? Would it be difficult to eat food that have five or less processed ingredients?
RACK YOUR BRAINS
Food activist Michael Pollan says some clever things in his pretty cool book, Food Rules. The book is full of food rules (hope you guessed that by the name).
It includes the following impressive rules:
Rule No. 19: ‘If it’s a plant, eat it.
If it was made in a plant, don’t.’
Rule 36: ‘Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the colour of your milk.’
Then there’s nutritionist Rujuta
Diwekar, who says a little amount of ghee in your diet is good for you. So that’s her food rule.
Can you use your common sense to make your own food rules?
TO DO OR NOT TO DO,
THAT’S REALLY UP TO YOU
ACTION 1
Take a Food Survey
Conduct a food survey of your friends and family to find out what they eat. After all, you are what you eat.
Identify friends and family members who fall in the following age groups:
80+: Super Senior
60+: Senior
35+: Middle-aged
25+: Not-so-young
Your age and +: Young
They could be in the same city or in different parts of India, or even abroad. In fact, the more diverse your sample size (the number of people you interview are called samples!), the more interesting your answers.
Interview people from each group to learn about their food habits.
You can ask questions such as:
What kind of food did they eat while growing up?
What was a usual meal when they were growing up? Ask about breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner.
Was dessert an everyday occurrence or was it a treat for special occasions?
What was their idea of a splendid meal?
Where did they eat most of their meals?
How have their eating habits changed over the years?
What kind of food/lifestyle-related illnesses were common as they grew up? Have those changed over time?
Did they get seasonal fruits and vegetables only during seasons or through the year?
Come up with your own questions now. Don’t be lazy.
Now compare the answers with each age group. Are there any huge differences in diet (you have to think like a scientist, so talk like one too)? Were food habits simpler back then, or now? Could you identify any trend right now for food—like Italian cuisine or cupcakes? Were the answers what you expected or were there any surprises in there?
ACTION 2
Make a Food Map of your kitchen
Your house is most probably a sum of the entire world.
Okay, that’s a confusing line.
Today, with food travelling across countries, it’s as easy to buy a kiwi from Australia, as it is to get spinach from your local farmer. There’s a term for this—Food Miles. It is the distance your food travels—from the time it’s grown, to the factory where it is processed and packed, and then shipped to the final consumer, that is you. Transportation burns a lot of fossil fuel, causing a lot of pollution because of the distance it has travelled—by plane, road, rail, and even ship.
How do you figure out how much your food has travelled to come to your kitchen? Start by calculating the miles, or in our case kilometres, that each food item has travelled.
To make it a less crazy task, choose five categories such as fruits, dry fruits, chocolates, vegetables, dairy etc.
Include place of origin—that is where it was grown. For chocolate, it could be that the cacao was grown in Ghana. Next, it went to Switzerland for processing to be made into chocolate at a chocolate factory. Then, it was packaged and shipped across to Mumbai to be sold. If you’re wondering where to look for this information, for packaged food items, look at the label—it includes details of the manufacturing process.
If it’s a perishable food such as potato or strawberry, you will need to ask your vegetable or fruit seller where it comes from.
Cheat tip: Visit http://www.foodmiles.com/ to calculate the miles of your food in a jiffy. It even gives you fun facts about the sort of transportation that was used to transport your food and how much carbon would that create.
Once you have your food miles calculated, plot these onto a world map. Connect each point with lines, and get a world view of how much your food has travelled. Talk about jet lag.
Not all food miles are bad. Say, something is grown sustainably in a far-away country—tomatoes grow in Maharashtra in open fields, which means they use less carbon as compared to tomatoes grown in Sweden. Why is that? Because those tomatoes are grown in greenhouses, which are heated by fossil fuels and they need a lot of fertilizers that release nitrogen oxide in the air. Then it’s possible that it’s better for the Swedes to get tomatoes from India.
ACTION 3
Food forms
When rice is cooked at home, it becomes this fragrant bowl of long strands of white rice. But before that, it’s a kind of paddy! It has to be processed before it looks like the rice we eat.
Can you trace the process from seed to edible food for some of your favourite food items? You can use the table for reference or make a drawing of the stages of processing to understand how your food has changed or kept its form.
Some foods will have less processing steps—such as potatoes if you’re making fries at home. But if you’re buying frozen fries from the supermarket, that will add many more steps.
ACTION 4
A veggie for each season
If you have done Action I, then you may already know that in The Days of Yore, your grandparents used to eat food according to the season.
My grandmother, for one, would look forward to winter. That’s because it was an excuse to layer up on ghee-laden foods such as godpapdi, which is a barfi-like sweet dish with jaggery and wheat flour. It isn’t really suitable for summers because it’s too hot then.
For my mother, summers were reserved for pouring watermelon juice in ice trays and making them into sorbets, before sorbet became gourmet ice cream parlour foods. And mum just refuses to eat spinach during the monsoon because she says they are full of worms and germs.
Similarly, a lot of people don’t eat fish during the rainy season because it’s breeding time for the fish and that’s when they are best left alone.
See, more food rules!
Reason seasonal foods1 rock:
•Vegetables and fruits are most flavourful during the right season. Alphonso mangoes are best eaten in May. Those that appear in March are not that sweet or tasty.
•If you’re eating seasonal produce, it’s most probably locally grown and you’re supporting local farmers. For instance, eating strawberries from Mahabaleshwar during winter or purple, squishy jamuns as the monsoon sets in.
•Some people ripen bananas2 artificially with scary, harmful chemicals such as calcium carbide to make sure it’s available around the year. It’s simpler to eat it when it is in season.
•Fruits and veggies are cheaper when they are available seasonally.
Can you make up a seasonal food calendar? Talk to a farmer, to grandparents, veggie seller, and make a list of edibles according to the season and the place you live.
Seasonal Calendar
You can make a colourful calendar and put it up on the fridge.
When it’s hot, good to eat:
But avoid:
When it’s cold, good to eat:
But avoid:
When it’s raining, good to eat:
But avoid:
ACTION 5
Start a Sniff Diary
All said and done, food is about taste. If it doesn’t taste good, you just won’t eat it. Unless your parents make you, because it is good for you. Of course, everyone has different food tastes—some like those bitter karelas, some the squelchy laukis and others can’t stand stringy bhindi.
For long, scientists thought there were four tastes, and then came along Umami—a pleasant, savoury taste that can come from shiitake mushrooms, fermented fish, meats, and Marmite. Can you think of foods that taste the following?
Type
Example
Sweet
Sour
Salty
Bitter
Umami
To taste food, and truly appreciate it, you need to use your senses. Ever seen a professional chef at work? They don’t cook by taste alone. That would be quite horrid, them dipping a finger into your food all the time. Rather they use their sense of touch, smell and sight to improvise a recipe. I
n fact, a study conducted by the Taste and Smell Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital showed that people without the sense of smell had problems cooking and eating1.
Anosmia is the inability to perceive smells. Imagine not being to smell someone farting (a good thing) or eating a piece of stale bread but not able to make that out, because you can’t smell it (not good).
When was the last time you distinctly remember smelling something apart from polluting fumes, petrol and paint?
The sense of smell is a powerful one, as much as the sense of taste, sight and sound. But as you grow older, your olfactory (smelling) powers start to reduce. But you can exercise your sense of smell! Here are a few experiments to get you sniffing away.
EXPERIMENT 1
Blind man’s bluff
Enlist the help of a friend, adult, or sibling. Take turns to blindfold each other, and hold food items in front of the respective noses. Smell different kinds of food (throw in non-food items to confuse each other) and try to identify them. Here are a few suggestions:
•Bulb of garlic
•Onion
•Strong cheese
•Saffron
•Chocolate
•Tea
•Coffee
•Pencil shavings
•An old book
•Add your own item
How many items can you identify just by smelling them?
So You Want to Know About the Environment Page 4