Unsaturated Fad
Every diet comes with recommendations of health benefits,
purificatory potential and ancestral appeal, but misses the one that seems most
intrinsic to food — flavour
So are you on keto? Or, maybe gluten-free? Avoiding
dairy? Eating ancient grains? Or, perhaps just eating that black-fleshed
Kadaknath chicken that the Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Jhabua has written about to
the Board of Control for Cricket in India, recommending Virat Kohli eats it
rather than be, as he is now, vegan (and doesn’t seem to be doing too badly on
that in Australia)? Maybe you are not exactly calling them notoriously
hard-to-keep New Year resolutions, but the start of a calendar year always
seems a good time to consider making dietary changes. And every year there
seems to be a new set of foods and diets that are in fashion, though a little
examination shows that most are old ideas in new packaging. The high-fat,
low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (keto), for example, seems to be the latest iteration
of the Paleo and, before that, the Atkins diet. The reasons given for the
efficacy of the diet can vary. Paleo was said to be a return to how our cavemen
ancestors ate. Keto, which has a rather surprising origin in a highly specific
diet for epilepsy patients, has a theory built on controlling glucose in the
blood. Most of these diets have some such niche medical justification which
their devotees can become remarkably knowledgeable about. This is not to say
that such diets can’t work. With the possible exception of the Tapeworm Diet,
which, yes, advocated swallowing tapeworm eggs to give your own friendly,
body-consuming parasite, almost any diet has some potential to help those
following it, if only by making them more mindful about the food they eat. Not
every diet works for everyone, but perhaps the benefit of repeated waves of
diet fads is that they can help people find a long-term pattern of eating that
works for their bodies.
Grain Gains
These seasonal diet fads also have the benefit of
bringing attention to otherwise neglected ingredients. India has a wealth of
millets and pseudo-cereals like buckwheat and amaranth, most of them with
long-standing usage as staple foods in different parts of the country, or for
consumption during religious rituals like upvas fasts. These have been
sidelined by rice and wheat, seen as desirable grains for more prosperous
consumers, and also promoted by government policies that encourage farmers to
focus on these two grains, which are also the only ones given consistent
procurement support. These other grains had become, as an excellent book on
them published by Navdanya dubbed them, Bhoole Bisre Anaj (lost and forgotten
foods) until they were resurrected by gluten-free and alkaline diets. They are
now known as ancient grains, a term that is rather more market-friendly, if not
entirely clear — does that mean that rice and wheat aren’t ancient? Supermarket
now have gluten-free granola and hip restaurants offer porridges, pancakes and
even pizzas made from ancient grains. Greater choice in food is always a
benefit, even if the ostensible reason for it can be queried. Some scepticism
can be raised, for example, on whether gluten is really such a major problem
for all the people claiming allergies to it — but it unquestionably is a
problem for the small group of people suffering from celiac disease, whose
gluten intolerance is medically proven and who now have a much larger and
easier-to-access range of foods. Lactose intolerance is another condition whose
sudden upsurge seems surprising. A small number of people appear to be severely
lactose intolerant, while a larger group has a spectrum of intolerance where,
at one end, milk might cause just mild discomfort. (It’s been suggested that
such mild discomfort can be helped by eating something with the milk, which
could give medical validation to the classic cookies and milk combination!)
These levels of lactose intolerance might not seem to justify the rise in
dairy-free milks made from almond, soybean, coconut, hazelnut, hemp, oats and
other oily plant sources. (Milk is an emulsion of dairy fats and water.
Plant-based milks create similar emulsions by forcibly extracting their fats in
combination with water, as with making coconut milk at home.) The real problem
with milk might not be lactose intolerance, but all the cruelties of dairying,
like the forcible separation of calves from their mothers, and the
controversies resulting from the government’s gau rakshak programme.
Plant-based milks offer a long-term solution to the dilemmas of dairying, and
the spectre of lactose intolerance can serve as a convenient catalyst.
Kadaknath chicken, whose sudden visibility was one of the food surprises of
last year, is a (slightly dubious) solution to a similar problem. Chicken is
one of the fastest-growing food sources in India. It is politically safe,
offers protein to our still severely protein-deficient country, can be scaled
up rapidly in production and retail and is easily cooked and consumed.
Many Indians who don’t eat other meats are starting
to eat chicken.
But all this comes with horrific hidden costs.
Industrial production of chicken is achieved through broilers that lead
entirely unnatural lives, pumped with growth hormones (they are generally
killed in two months, which is shorter than the growing season of most plants)
and antibiotics to overcome the diseases that come from over-crowded cages in
which they are raised (antibiotics also help with weight gain). The cruelty is
terrible, and so are the medical issues for consumers, as those hormones and
antibiotics find their way onto our plates.
And what does it result in? Meat so tasteless that
chefs, who privately detest broiler chicken, even as they like the profits it
brings, call it the paneer of meats. Chefs will confess their personal
preference for desi chicken, raised with greater freedom to roam, more variety
in their diets (chickens are omnivores, but broilers are fed a standardised
diet, much of it based on unsustainably harvested fish meal). However, desi
chicken is tough and has less meat than broilers and few consumers see the
value of it.
Kadaknath chicken could bridge this gap. Because it
is visibly striking, consumers feel they are getting something different, and
the claims being made for its health benefits are further reinforcement. Some
of these claims sound questionable — for example, the claim that Kadaknath has
much more protein. Kadaknath is a kind of desi chicken, and like any
free-ranging, desi chicken it has less fat and more muscle than broilers, but
it isn’t clear how its protein is somehow concentrated.
As of now, at least, because of their small number
and high value, Kadaknath chickens are raised with space to roam and multiple
food sources to peck at, and their eggs, which are small and dark, are valued as
much as the meat. Kadaknath offers consumers a chance to have chicken as it
should be consumed — but there’s nothing stopping industrial farmers from
raising them broiler-style, and this could happen if we demand Kadaknath only
as black, “healthy” chicken, rather than as properly raised poultry.
Trust the Taste Buds
So, does it matter what diets we follow if the
ultimate results can be good, even if not intended? In just one way all these
diets seem rather sadly, and perhaps unnecessarily, failing. Every diet and fad
ingredient comes with copious recommendations of health benefits, purificatory
potential, ancestral appeal and every other value one could want, except the
one that might seem most intrinsic to food, and that is flavour. When it comes
to trendy diets, taste is the one aspect that doesn’t seem to be trusted.
All these diets start by approaching food with
suspicion. When food is examined with suspicion, and not from its fundamental
ability to provide sustenance and savour, then you are closing off the
essential reasons why we eat and limiting yourself to a clinical kind of
consumption that might lose some calories, at least initially, but doesn’t
build a great relationship with food. Many foods sold for specific diets can be
delicious, but how often will we really admit to wanting them? Diets make us
divide food into healthy = dull; and yummy = bad.
This could really be a mistake. For one, it is why
diets are notoriously short-lived. Anyone who seriously switches to millets may
end up realising why people prefer rice and wheat. There are many millets, each
with their own characteristics, but most are heavy to eat, or have to be eaten
hot, since they can cool to coarse (jowar) or chokingly jellylike (ragi)
consistencies. The awkward truth is that millets are often best eaten mixed
with rice or wheat, making them more palatable and easier to cook.
In his book The Doritos Effect, Mark
Schatzker explores the links between flavour and nutrition and comes to a
surprising conclusion — food that tastes better is often more nutritious.
Schatzker starts by looking at produce typically sold in supermarkets abroad,
which is selected for its looks (bright red tomatoes), ability to be
transported long distances without spoiling and low cost. Taste is a relatively
minor concern, which is why many food lovers prefer to shop in farmer’s markets
where they can get produce that isn’t as perfect looking, but which tastes way
better. This might seem like an indulgence, but when scientists have tested the
nutritional profile of these foods they nearly always score higher than
supermarket produce. Because they are not artificially sped to maturity, not
pumped with water and chemicals, and allowed to mature to peak condition, they
taste better, and also contain far more nutrients.
Schatzker’s book is an exploration of how this
relationship has been thrown out of gear by the science of flavouring, which
has found ways to trick our taste buds into craving foods, like the titular
Doritos, that hook us onto unhealthy foods. The really sad consequence is that
this has made us distrust taste — if I like this so much it can’t be good for
me. But Schatzker tracks down producers of chicken, tomatoes and other food
grown for its flavour and shows how it is generally more nutritious as well.
We need to trust our taste buds — and that might come
by training them to appreciate a diversity of flavours, rather than a lot of
just a few. Sugar provides a perhaps controversial example. It is now one of
the most demonised of foods, much as we crave it. But long before we developed
mass production of sugar and overdosed on it, sugar was a seasoning, like
spices, and used sparingly to help develop the overall flavour of a dish. It
isn’t uncommon in traditional Indian cooking to add small amounts of sugar this
way, and this gives us the sweetness we crave, but in a controlled way.
Diets also tend to prescribe us foods, rather than
really encouraging us to explore what is around us and which might work as
well. Almond milk is widely available because it is prescribed as the
alternative to dairy, but it is a product with considerable problems. It is an
ecologically draining crop, exacerbating droughts in California where most of
the world’s almonds come from, and adds further environmental costs in its shipping
— and it doesn’t even taste that good.
Cashew milk could count as a local product, given the
wide cultivation of cashew in India, where it grows on scrub lands where little
else grows. It is a product that provides huge amounts of employment in places
like Kerala, and has secondary benefits in the cashew apple. And cashew milk is
delicious in a way that almond milk is not, yet it is not being sold the same
way here since the diet diktats that we receive only talk about almond milk. It
is an example of a healthy, ethically sound and sustainable product that is
also really worth making part of our diet simply because it tastes so good.
Vikram Doctor
ETM6JUN19
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