Peasant and Poor Man's Cuisine

TimMakins

When wandering the villages and railway stations of India, I see the poorer people cooking on little stoves or fires, and making their daily meal from a minimum of resources.

Often, this meal consists of rotis - presumably with wholemeal flour. There may be some dhal cooked with spices. Some raw chillis. A few vegetables, cooked with a little oil, and a few spices.

I would be interested to hear how this diet meets the requirements for human survival. People survive on this, so it must be sufficient for their needs. Has it been analysed for nutrition? What would be a simple way to improve it? Are you a dietician who can comment?

I have been a vegetarian all my life, and often eat food like this at home. The rotis and dhal are a great base for a meal, though I often wonder just how much dhal you need to meet protein requirements. I feel that Indians tend to overcook their vegetables too much, and that little or no cooking would be better nutritionally, as long as cleanliness is achieved.

I often add curd/yoghurt to my meal as well, but suspect this is not always an option for the poorer people in India. Can they/we manage without it?

Moving towards the south of India, more rice is eaten, as a replacement for wheat. I am surprised that the rice is white rice. Why don't people eat brown rice, the unpolished form, that has many more vitamins and nutrients in?

I'm interested to hear everyone's thoughts on these questions.

Tim in Ireland.

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jyotirmoy

Dear Tim,
We have poor, poorer, even more poorer & so on. You will find families surviving on home made rotis & pickle travelling 72 hours in a train. There are tribal people who survives on seeds of grass & other shrubs during the hot summer months.
Now coming to over cooking of vegetables yes you are right. Recipes developed according to the environment. In tropical weather bacterias thrive & food becomes rancid soon, so use of spices & what you termed as overcooking came in.
Curd is now affordable to a large population. India is now one of the largest milk producing nations. Curd helps to retain & nourish the intestinal flora.
The rice processing is mechanised & done by a group of mills & they produce polished rice so Indians eat them. Rich people in the metros have access to brown rice, organic vegetables etc. but a common man in India eats what he can afford & is easily available.
Traditional snacks are being elbowed out by multinational brands with their Helium filled plastic pouches. Common men are wasting their hard earned money on rubbish. Sharbets have disappeared colas are in. Good? Yes we are progressing earning more every day. Bad? No taker here!

rangss

In Tamil Nadu, a staple vegetable is the drum-stick or Moringa. These have high nutritional value and are cheap. In fact every house has one tree...even in the slums.

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Digital Drifter

This might take thread into a tangent....

But this question has been asked before except that it was bait-n-switch tactic to introduce GM crop into India.

See

http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en...ce+india&meta=

just scan the links for a few times on google itself

& then see, Greenpeace

http://www.greenpeace.org/india/pres...-technical-fai

Hmmm.....

So, what starts out as a valid and valuable insight into beating malnutrition(Indians in certain areas are protein deficient) gets turned into the above.

So, the poor are

Malnourished
underfed
starved
VAD
protein deficient

Your/their vocab has increased but they're still hungry!

Technically, most people soon figure out what's healthy for them in the darwinian sense but in the Indian context, the purchasing power determines your health. Even a pregnant woman breaking stones for a living knows that if she drinks milk, her child will be healther but she has to earn that.

Somehow, that there is a just God somewhere....

Anyways, Tim you're right. The GOI tried Soya, everyone literally puked it out; confirmed in a way by scientists who said Indians sorta dont have the right 'guts' to digest that stuff.

I tried it for a few days, soyameal, soyamilk, soya tetrapack juices and unfailingly puked it all out. This when I was a kid in the 80s.

Back to Sambar, Rasam & curd white rice.

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