Food is not about calories

For years, I have told anyone who would listen to me to eat fruits and not merely drink fruit juice.  For multiple reasons: Juices typically have added sugar; fruits supply fibers too; and eating fruits make the jaw and teeth work.

Of course, rare is a person who listens to me.

Food (and ill health) is not merely about calories.  It is about a whole lot more.  It is about sugars. It is about timeliness.  It is about fiber intake.  It is about, ... well, you get the point.

However, people seem to want some kind of an easy bottom-line, and "calories" meet that want.  I have  even reminded students, a lot, that all calories are not created equal.  The calories from a soda are not the same as calories from an apple.  Yet, the focus is increasingly on calories.

It is well past the time to kill the idea of food calories! Consider, for instance, how the calorie calculation messes things up:

Calorie counts are based on how much heat a foodstuff gives off when it burns in an oven. But the human body is far more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory it surrenders its calories within seconds. By contrast, the real-life journey from dinner plate to toilet bowl takes on average about a day, but can range from eight to 80 hours depending on the person. A calorie of carbohydrate and a calorie of protein both have the same amount of stored energy, so they perform identically in an oven. But put those calories into real bodies and they behave quite differently. And we are still learning new insights: American researchers discovered last year that, for more than a century, we’ve been exaggerating by about 20% the number of calories we absorb from almonds.

If people listened to me, then they would systematically think about what they eat, and also think about the cultural culinary traditions that sustained people.  Like the green jackfruit, for instance.

Food researchers are trumpeting the potential for jackfruit to become a staple crop on a warming planet. “The thing about jackfruit is that it’s huge – one of the biggest tree fruits in the world,” said Danielle Nierenberg, president of the Food Tank, a Washington DC-based food study institute. “It’s large enough that families can eat one fruit for a long time. It takes relatively little care, doesn’t need a lot of irrigation and is resilient to pests and disease. So if we’re thinking of foods for the future, jackfruit is what we should be thinking about.”

In the global existence of ours, imagine incorporating into our lives the food traditions that have sustained cultures throughout the world.  We could easily have healthy foods that are also tasty, and we could at the same time have a remarkable variety of foods.  Instead of adopting such good things from around the world, we seem to be hell bent on getting hooked on to the bad habits that the modern food industry brainwashes us about. What is the point of being "educated" when we cannot seem to take care of our own selves?

Traditions, when the times they are a-changin'

Consider the following sentence:

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

What an awesome definition of tradition, right?

But, there is way more to that sentence.

What happens to the glorious Tamil literature that followed the rules of the sophisticated grammar that involved the mythical Agastya and the real life Nakkirar?  Do the old canons get thrown out?  Will a new grammar have to be created?  What about the tradition?

It is in this context, writes David Shulman, that Peraciriyar (the great teacher) took on the challenge of "defining, defending, and explicating the classical Tamil past."  Centuries have passed since the Sangam literature, and the times they are a-changin' in the 13th century.  Poets are experimenting, and Peraciriyar thinks and writes about marapu:

Tradition means making poetry while adhering to usage (valakku) as befits the refined culture (nakarikam) of particular people in a particular time and place.

Even as I read that sentence, I was struck by how contemporary the issue is.  Shulman adds:

Let's say that actual speech changes over time [...]; does this mean we need a new grammar in each new period?

That question is relevant even today.

Languages and cultures do not stay stagnant.  If they do, perhaps they will perish.  The Tamil of today is vastly different from the Sangam Tamil, from Nammalvar's Tamil, from Peraciriyar's Tamil ... even from Kannadasan's poetry.  What happens to tradition when the times they are a-changin'?

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

A verse from Pukalenti's Nalavenpa and Shulman's commentary appeal to me a lot--even though my traditions are far removed from Peraciriyar's:

I, too, think that everyone should see the world as it is.

Those bloody women!

I grew up in an India that seems so much like a different planet altogether.  In that old India, I grew up with women--young and middle-aged alike--practically disappearing for three days from the main areas of the home.  In grandmas' homes, they were cast away to the farthest end, far away from the street entrance.  As a kid, I got to see them only if I was tasked with taking food for them.

In the industrial town where we lived as a nuclear family, mother was exiled upstairs.  She used the bathroom there, slept there, and never came down for three days.  Even worse, not only was she not in the kitchen cooking those tasty foods, a neighbor woman brought us food or came over and cooked.  Sometimes, father cooked dinner--the only couple of dishes that he knew how to make.

The mystery deepened when my sister too started this routine.  What the hell was going on?

One day, like many times before, I was given a grocery list that I was supposed to take to the store.  As I always did, I scanned the list.  An item there was new: "Sanitary napkins."

Curious I have forever been.  I asked my mother what that was.  Even before mother could reply, my sister jumped in with "shut up!"

Later on, of course, the biology textbook and fellow students helped solve the puzzle.  I then understood why there was a raggedy piece of cloth in the upstairs bathroom that we kids were told to avoid--it served as reusable sanitary napkins.

It was a different world back then.  I have no idea why people refer to the past as "the good old days."  There could not have been anything good in women being treated as outcasts for three days a month, leave alone their second-class treatment the rest of the time!

Despite the changes that have happened, I doubt that there is open and educational talk about periods.  Not only with girls and women, but also with boys and men.  Instead, it is increasingly about the products that can be sold to "help" girls and women.  I am not confident by any means that the old cultural stigma about menstruation, and females, has gone away.

The outsize attention paid to products reduces menstruation to a hygiene issue when it should be much more. The monthly shedding of the uterine lining is part of a cycle that lasts, on average, for 40 years. It is a vital marker of health and a pivotal developmental milestone for half the world’s population.
Menarche [the first menstrual period] should be a prime opportunity to begin a girl’s lifelong authentic engagement with her body. Instead, we hand her a pad and teach her to put it up her sleeve when she goes to the bathroom.

It is a strange world!

America too, where mothers socialized "their daughters to keep tidy and discreet"!

Even now, American girls are socialized to see menstruation, and more generally, their bodies, as problems to be solved through use of the “right” products. Today, we are exporting this view around the world.

Yep!

Challenging the social stigma and disgust directed at the female body must be our main mission — in the developing world and everywhere else.

Amen, sister!

I'm leavin' on a jet plane ... Oh babe, I hate to go

When I read this essay, of course I had to tweet about it; after all, have I not bugged this poor guy,  and others, for years now with my commentaries on the meaning of life!

The author writes:

One day I will die. So will you.
...
So, take a moment to think about the mythologies informing your purpose. I’ll reflect on mine, too. The universe, however, won’t. And that might be the most meaningful distinction of all.

As I have often noted here, the cosmos--I prefer that word to "universe"--doesn't care about you or me or about anything.  It just is.  We come and go.  We are born. And then we die.  We have to make meaning out of the reality that our parents had sex, and the wriggly sperms rushed towards the eggs in order to make us happen.  We also have to make meaning out of the reality that our parents die, our friends die, and that it is only a matter of time before we, too, die.  Throughout all these, the cosmos is just there.  That is it.

Cultures developed myths to help people through their existential angst.  And, for whatever reason, plenty of people cling to their favorite myths as "the truth" while making fun of other myths.  But, all those are myths.  The husband of a cousin of mine relates an encounter almost every time we meet.  He--an atheist now after having been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family--once asked his friend to explain the Hindu mythology, especially about the god Krishna.  The friend told him, "it is not a myth.  He is my god."

Cultures have developed traditions to help people deal with the loss when their loved ones die.  Leave the dead to the vultures; bury, cremate, ... Just as religions have evolved, these end-of-life traditions can also evolve, right?

A latest example is from the old country:

Antim Udan Moksha Airport in Gujarat, the first of its kind in India, puts the departing souls of the dead cremated here on international flights to the heaven for ultimate salvation or moksha: freedom from the cycle of birth and death.

Located in Gujarat’s Bardoli on the banks of Mindhola River, the crematorium is modeled on an airport and equipped with two giant replicas of aircraft. The airplane replicas at Antim Udan Moksha Airport in Gujarat are named Moksha (salvation) airlines and Swarga (heaven) airlines 

What’s the most interesting about Antim Udan Moksha Airport in Gujarat is the airport-like announcement which is made to guide funeral parties on entry into the crematorium and instruct them where to keep the body, how to proceed for cremation, etc. 

There is very little difference between the announcement made at the crematorium and that at airports as well as in planes.  What makes the crematorium more like an airport is the typical noise that an aircraft makes while taking off. A similar noise is created when dead bodies are placed in furnace at Antim Udan Moksha Airport

Whatever it takes to make meaning of the death of a person.  We humans have always struggled to figure out our existence, and this is perhaps the latest interpretation.  I am sure there will be many more.  I don't think the day is far away when, for instance, the ashes of a cremated one are taken to the Moon or Mars.

Yes, take a moment to think about the mythologies informing your purpose.

Mind your manners. Table manners, that is.

Way back, in the prehistoric era before the internet, when I was mentally getting ready to come to the US for graduate studies, I spent quite a bit of time at the library in the American consulate.  I was certain that I would have quite some problems transitioning to life in America and wanted to get a head-start.  If only I hadn't been a commie-sympathizing teenager--I could have prepared right from my younger years then! ;)

One of the books advised that we should not be shocked to see Americans not only holding the forks in their right hands but if they used that to also cut food to small pieces.  As one who had only eaten with my hands, and maybe a spoon on occasions, I couldn't understand what the fuss was all about.  Americans are practical, that book said.  Aha; I felt comforted that my transition on this issue at least might not be that rough.

How far I have come since then.

Lunch served on a banana leaf, at niece's wedding

Table manners are cultural and contextual.  Wait a second.  For many years, we didn't even have a dining table--as was the cultural tradition, we sat on the floor.  And, even after we got a table and chairs at home, floor was the norm at grandmas' homes.  And in the tradition there, men and boys--sometimes young girls too--sat down and ate first, and then women--young and old--ate.  How atrocious, right?

So, table manners in that tradition were very different from what I read in the book, which made it clear that American manners are different from those in Europe.  Good thing I was not going to Europe!  Somewhere along the way, after humans settled down to have dinners, I suppose they found other people's habits to be annoying.  And they started developing rules:

Throughout history, there have also been good rules, important reminders of things we often forget. The very first book of manners, a papyrus by the Egyptian Ptahhotep around 2350 B.C., included the sound guidances to wait to be served by your host, and to resist staring. In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, there is “Eat as it becometh a man, those things which are set before thee; and devour not, lest thou be hated.” Erasmus says not to lick your fingers, but use a napkin, and to give up your seat to an elder. Brunetto Latini, whom Dante learned from and then satirized, wrote in his poem “Tesoretto” that good manners should always be there, even when no one else is.

America itself has changed over the years that I have been here.  Now, I feel like I am one conservative fuddy-duddy when I feel appalled at the table manners, or lack thereof.  It is a postmodernist anything goes anymore.

In the democratic present, perhaps the way to distinguish useful etiquette from frippery is to discern which rules help us be good rather than seem good. Serving others first is plainly charitable. Filling companions’ glasses, waiting to eat, giving another the last of the stew, chewing with a closed mouth — each is a basic acknowledgment of togetherness.

 Yes, that is what I too refer to--those simple acts.  But, when kids grow up with a drive-through eating habits, or mindlessly swallowing food while being entertained by the television, well, is it any surprise that there is very little respect for food itself, leave alone table manners!

True courtesy will instinctively check faddish manners at the door in the interest of kindness — which is the root from which the entire family tree of courteous behavior, from the noble Egyptian’s papyrus on, has sprung.

Courtesy?  In today's world?  Hah!

It will be a sad day when "Sanitas Per Escam" becomes"Health via Soylent"

The vegetable vendor is one of the many un-American experiences when visiting with the parents in the old country.  Pushing his cart, he bellows the names of the vegetables he has to sell.  He is so loud that sometimes I can hear him over the phone if I happen to call my parents at the time he is hawking his goods.

He brings the vegetables to people.  Round the corner from where my parents live is a modern supermarket that sells vegetables and more.  The old and the new coexist in the old country.  But, as with many other aspects of life, the vendor pushing his cart is also becoming a rarity.

Here in my adopted country, cities like where I live feature Saturday Markets, through the growing season and when the weather is not atrocious--here, it is from early spring until mid-fall.  Instead of vendors pushing their carts along the neighborhood streets, they congregate at a place.  

The Saturday Market is a diversion from the routine, which is to get the supplies from supermarkets.   "[Buying] food can even be enjoyed as a leisure pursuit, rather than a daily chore"

In generations gone by, before the ubiquity of refrigeration and food preservatives, people were forced to go shopping every day – visiting half-a-dozen different shops to get what they needed for a single family meal. ... The arrival of supermarkets in the Fifties and Sixties was revolutionary. For the first time in history, ordinary people had access to an array of exotic foods from around the world, never before available under one roof. And, what’s more, it was affordable; large chains were able to buy mass-produced food in such bulk that food producers were lining up to offer them the lowest prices possible.

Even in the old country, mother does not buy vegetables every single day from that vendor, or from the supermarket, thanks to the fridge at home.  It is a different world there, here, and everywhere.

But, I suppose even buying groceries in order to cook at home is becoming rarer anymore.  Fancy kitchens seem to be more for decorative purposes than for cooking at home, it feels like.  It is also a phenomenal piece of evidence on the choices we have, without being restricted to eat at home after spending hours working with primary ingredients.  As Rachel Laudan noted:

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Even though cooking at home is easier with pre-processed ingredients, so that people like me can jump into a step 6 of the process, apparently quite a few think that cooking at home is a time consuming chore.  Why?

According to the researchers, the answer has to do with a reduction of mental effort. ‘Perhaps the most important and clear-cut effect of packaged foods is that they reduce the complexity of meal planning,’ they write. ‘The family chef can invest less time thinking about the week’s meals.’
In other words, in a world where nearly 100,000 new food and drink products are added to supermarket shelves each year, convenience food offers a valuable freedom from decision-making – a signposted shortcut through the bewildering cornucopia and competing claims of the contemporary food environment.

And, therefore, there are even folks even now who would rather chug synthesized "nutrition."  Even though I intellectually and emotionally understand the changes that have happened even within my lifetime thus far, reading about "Soylent," a few months ago, in "the end of food" made me highly uncomfortable, to say the least.  

Soylent has been heralded by the press as “the end of food,” which is a somewhat bleak prospect. It conjures up visions of a world devoid of pizza parlors and taco stands—our kitchens stocked with beige powder instead of banana bread, our spaghetti nights and ice-cream socials replaced by evenings sipping sludge. But, Rhinehart says, that’s not exactly his vision. “Most of people’s meals are forgotten,” he told me. He imagines that, in the future, “we’ll see a separation between our meals for utility and function, and our meals for experience and socialization.”

When the author of that piece lived a three-day weekend essentially on Soylent, she realized how much eating is more than merely about food:

You begin to realize how much of your day revolves around food. Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we’re constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. On Saturday, I woke up and sipped a glass of Soylent. What to do? Breakfast wasn’t an issue. Neither was lunch. I had work to do, but I didn’t want to do it, so I went out for coffee. On the way there, I passed my neighborhood bagel place, where I saw someone ordering my usual breakfast: a bagel with butter. I watched with envy. I wasn’t hungry, and I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

Eating is not merely about food.  It is about relationships of various kinds:

With the people from whom we buy the groceries.

With the people who share meals with us.

With people who listen to our stories about dining experiences.

Oh well, maybe this is more evidence that I am becoming an old curmudgeon!  

The train staff were worse than my aunts!

One of the most charming aspects of the train rides in India: the rhythmic "tadak, tadak" punctuated by lengthy whistle sounds from the engine.  A lifetime of memories associated with those sounds.  But, sitting inside the air-conditioned "executive class" I could hear very little of the "tadak, tadak" and not even a faint whistle sound.

Which is why I walked over to stand by the door for a few minutes and take in those sounds.  The happiness from listening to that was simply priceless.

"Tadak, tadak."

Perhaps I stood there with a big grin on my face.  The on-board railway catering staff--two guys in their late twenties--smiled back at me.  And this time I consciously smiled at them.

"Coffee, tea, sir?" asked one.  I nodded a negative.

"Tadak, tadak."

They continued to go about their business.  Noticing that I was kind of squished in by the door, thanks to the food crates stacked up there, one of the staff cleared up everything from near the other door and motioned me to take up that better real estate.

I liked those two guys.  They were systematically taking care of things and with pleasant demeanors.  I wanted to take photographs of those two, but was not sure how much it would be an imposition, and an exercise of economic privilege, if I were to ask them.  I wimped out.

"What if I took photographs of the coach, and in that process included them in the shot?" I thought to myself.  After all, the coach is a public space.

"Tadak, tadak."

I worry that I overthink things.  Maybe life is far too simpler than what I make it out to be.  But then such thinking is the only way I can exist.

I took out my camera and framed a shot of the coach through the glass door.  And clicked when one of them appeared in the view.  A little more of "tadak, tadak" and soon, I was back in my seat.  A couple of hours later, the train rolled into the station platform and my task was to locate the argumentative Indian.

Forty-eight hours later, I was on the train, to get back to Chennai.  It was the same catering staff.  "Oh hey, thanks" I said to one of them when he handed me a water bottle and a wide grin.

A little while later he came to serve hot water and instant coffee.  I was dying for coffee, even if the horrible instant version.  "A double, sir" he said with a smile and a wink, as if he read my mind that I was drooling for coffee.  I noticed that he had handed the rest only one packet each.  Boy did I need that double pack!

Soon, I was by the door to listen to "tadak, tadak."  I returned to my seat.

The catering staff set about serving soup.  I was hungry enough that I could have eaten anything.  I finished the soup and the breadstick.

The other smiling guy asked me whether I would like more soup.  I moved my hands to indicate a no.  He asked me again, and I again smiled and vocalized a no.  As I moved my hand away from the bowl, he poured more soup into my bowl.  He smiled and said something in Hindi.

His hospitality reminded of how my aunts back in the day treated our "no."  When they asked whether we wanted more food, it was not a question but an expression of their intention to serve us some more.  There was no point saying no to them--if we covered the plate, they even served on top of our fingers!  I am glad that some old traditions have not died out.

"Tadak, tadak."


(An old one, as the train gained speed out of Sengottai, where grandmother lived)

‘The sari-clad golfers of Madras'

Excerpt from "Memories of Madras" at The Hindu:

SUMATHI RAGHUNATHAN: Born in 1935, she played golf in the 1970s and 1980s with distinction, winning The Addicts — an all-India tournament — one year and finishing runner-up in another. In addition, she has won many club-level golf tournaments.

In Praise of Fast Food ... well, not "fast food" itself ...

I like cooking. I do not have an extensive repertoire, but I do all right. The more I cook, the less I find foods at restaurants tasty anymore--particularly for the price they charge for the quality they offer. 

But, and despite this, I don't diss the extensive practice of eating food that somebody else has prepared: fast food in many variations. Because, as I tell my students when we discuss geographic patterns in agriculture and food, the "old ways" were also the times when women had pretty much no choice but to be cooks, or most men had no choice but to be farmers.

The story of economic progress has been one of walking away from such limited choices into exercising freedom in terms of what we want to do.

It is quite possible that my grandmother hand-made a lot more dishes and snacks than my mother did--and she made some wonderful sweets that I always, always, looked forward to.  And, yes, my sister makes way fewer eats than what my mother did.

But, the differences in terms of what my sister has done/does versus the previous generations of women, include everything from, say, my sister having a masters degree in the sciences ...

The productivity difference is also enormous. For instance, the electric rice grinder that mom bought about thirty years ago, which she still uses, gained her the two hours that she would have otherwise had to spend at the "aattukkal". (The large version of the mortar/pestle in the photo here.)  Now, both mom and sister have yet another choice--they can directly purchase from the grocery store the machine-mass-produced ready to cook ground mix!  It is their choice now, if they want to do anything the "old way" ... to be able to exercise that choice is freedom.

Freedom in our daily lives matter a lot.  These are not freedoms that a constitution can guarantee, but can only come from economic progress.  Thus, when I feel like having vadas while visiting India, mom does not have to slave in the hot kitchen and fry those delicious vadas and come out of the kitchen drenched in sweat--a two minute walk takes me to the restaurant where I can pick up any number of vadas I want.

So, why such thoughts?
It is not only because I think of food a lot :)

I have started thinking about the kind of topics that I would like to discuss with students, or at least keep them in my mental back-pocket, which I can then appropriately use in discussions. And I ran into this article (ht), which is a wonderful essay.  Even though to excerpt from that is a crime--it really needs to be read from the start to the end--well, here are the concluding observations:

If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that modern food allows us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old.

If we fail to understand how scant and monotonous most traditional diets were, we can misunderstand the “ethnic foods” we encounter in cookbooks, at restaurants, or on our travels. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multi­national corporations bent on selling trashy modern products—failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market. A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?”

If we assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food, we miss the fact that lots of industrial foods are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for 72 hours. And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to two convenience foods that even purists love, factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, fresh, and natural foods. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the processed staples—salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea—produced by food corporations.

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things: We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty delivered to us by (ironically) the global economy. Their ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving.

Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.

Yes!
I am already pumped up for my classes; I wonder if my students are ready as well :)