Thursday, November 30, 2017

Mama says there'll be days like this ...

Every visit to India, I shamelessly ask my mother to make some of my favorite dishes.  Of course, everything that she cooked was divine.  But, even there, we all had our own favorites.

A few years ago, I asked if she could make keppa-dosai (கேப்பை தோசை).  Mother's reply was not what I expected.  She said that it was not easy as it was when we were young to get the needed keppai.  And the couple of times she tried, apparently it did not pass her quality standards.

It has been a long, long time--decades actually--since I had keppa-dosai.  Some day, when I am old, maybe I will have a moment like in Ratatouille!

It is millet that I am talking about.  Yep, millet.  As kids, my brother and I loved drinking Ragimalt, which was an industrial millet concoction that was a much better alternative to Bournvita.  My grandmother thought it was hilarious that we were so much into what she referred to as keppai-kanji (கேப்பை கஞ்சி).

That millet was in India long before the "English vegetables" arrived.  Long before the polished white rice.  Long before granulated white sugar.

In the process of rapidly modernizing, we are also rapidly losing our agrobiodiversity; it is declining in many countries:
Generally, agrobiodiversity is significantly lower in wealthy nations, where the industrial food system pushes toward genetic uniformity.
The wealthier we get, the more we gravitate towards inexpensive sources of calories, continuing along the direction in which we started moving ever since we invented agriculture.
Global shifts of urbanization, migration, markets and climate can potentially be compatible with agrobiodiversity, but other powerful forces are undermining it. The imperatives of producing food at lower cost and higher yield clash with efforts to raise high-quality food and protect the environment. The future of agrobiodiversity hangs in the balance.
It hangs in the balance, for certain.

4 comments:

Ramesh said...

I was scratching my head at keppai dosai at the beginning of the post. Hadn't heard of that term. Then I realised it was what we called Kevuru dosai.

Your mother must come to Karnataka. Home of Ragi. Next time I come to your place, I'll carry some of the finest Ragi for her :)

Ravi Rajagopalan said...

Have you read "Poor Economics" by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Biswas? They found that as wealth increases, poor people start eating junk. When disposable incomes are low, poor people eat finger millet and ragi and jowar and all these wonderful, low glycaemic index, high protein grains. Once incomes rise spending changes to wheat, then white flour and all sorts of high-sugar food. The reason is simple. These are packaged and sold as "prosperous people's food". A packet of Lays is expensive relative to the actual value of food inside the bag. Polished rice is expensive. The perception market forces create is that these foods are now affordable, so people fall for it. This is an observed behavioural phenomenon backed by rigourous empirical research at the Poverty Action Lab in MIT. The solution is to make these healthy foods attractive as rich people's food. Just an observation as I eat quinoa-flavoured pongal followed by ragi idli.

Sriram Khé said...

Yes, I used that book in one of my classes one year.
In addition to the points that you make, they also note about human behavior. We irrationally make decisions.

Now, I have to be careful when I write the following sentences, given that you two are MBA chaps ;)
We have an entire industry that is all about brainwashing people to pursue a lot of bad things. A great number of talented, creative, and analytical young men and women pursue careers in advertising/marketing, which almost always is about telling people that smoking cigarette is cool, or eating chips and drinking soda or wearing expensive clothes is a sign of having arrived, or ... When you write that "people fall for it" well, it is not easy for people to resist such targeted and slick marketing.
Harry Frankfurt wrote in "On Bullshit" that anytime anybody is trying to sell something, well, they will bullshit. We live in a world where the more we are educated, the more we get better at bullshit, instead of the original (and only purpose) of education which is about the pursuit of truth.

Sriram Khé said...

Oh, keppai is also referred to as kezhvaragu in Tamil ... which is your Kevuru, I think.