A couple of weeks back when I entered the building, the
lights had gone out. But the generator was working and hence the lifts were
working. I got in and I saw that a foreigner was also in the life with me. On
my floor, of the four flats, two were self-occupied and the other two were on
rent. Jasmine and I are hardly there at home most of the time to even socialize
with too many people in building. But we had noticed that one of the flats had
a foreigner staying. We greeted each other in the lift and she asked if the
lights were out. I said ya, but I guess they will be back. She was wondering if
this was a regular affair and if these cuts last long. I explained that these are
rare and are normally resolved fast. We kept on talking and then on our floor, I
spoke to Jasmine and Jasmine lent her a candle and a match box to keep handy. We
then called her over for dinner and …. We were friends.
We have been hanging out whenever she and us are free. We have
been exchanging notes, cultures and various points of information. I have been
explaining our history and she has been explaining hers. We chat and exchange recipes.
That’s what Jasmine and I believe in completely. The more you meet people from
other cultures, you share information and you share values, you only get
richer. You must have an endless curiosity and if you are lucky you get
response from that end as well. Andy is perfect in that sense. She is patient and
loves to answer and ask questions. We learnt so much about her life in France
and London. Jispa gets exposed to so much more than only Indian culture. Yesterday
thanks to her I relived my marriage, my college and a lot of my childhood. Thanks
to that Jispa relived it as well. There is so much inside of us that sometimes
is lost or left inside just for the want of the right question.
I have never understood why we opposed marriages and unions
across caste and language lines. We always were believed that the same will
lead to a dilution of our own values and beliefs that we hold so close to our
heart. I just don’t understand that. Jasmine is a kutchi. That is as close to a
gujju like as can be while being different. Still I love the fact that she is
different. Her traditions and customs are different and I try to understand her
traditional food and how it is different from ours. My sense is that since they
come from a harsher climate than mine they tend be different in a sparse sense
as compared to the gujju food.
Of course while you are looking at the food, it is important
to make the distinction between food that is traditional and food that is
thanks to living in the city. One thing I have always maintained is that we are
losing texture in the food we eat. Everything is down to the lowest possibly
squichy food. We make everything soft and easy to swallow. Possibly a fast urban lifestyle does not give us enough
time to chew, possibly because when we are eating e are generally talking to
other people and that gives us limited time to chew or possibly we just gotten
lazy. But food is losing all granularity and texture. Look at the most popular
foods we have – idli, dosa, pasta, margehita pizza, pav bhaji, burger, panner
and roomali roti. Nothing is worth chewing it must be soft and smashed. Yesterday
Andy made us dinner. She was wondering what to give us as I have a unique
constraint – I am vegan. The vegetarian is the easy bit but not having cheese
or butter is the crazy bit. I have been doing a fair amount of thinking on
this. Lactose intolerant is a human trait and so how is it that we survived
with this gene if we ate so much lactose. My theory is that lactose in our
diets came about only recently. If you look at the recipes that grand mom made;
the regular everyday recipes, not the special day recipes; they would largely
be lactose free. So when Andy was thinking I told her to think of stuff that her
grand mom made for her on an everyday basis. She did realize that cheese, which
is an integral part of French cuisine today was not so much in her grandmom’s
cuisine. And she made the most basic of deserts for us. The desert was la tarte
aux pommes. – apple tart. No need of cheese, milk or butter. That was the boring
everyday tart that they grew up on.
She made us some spaghetti with pesto sauce. Her sauce was
crunchy, which was a far cry from the creamy one we eat at the restaurants in Mumbai.
And then I asked her about the spaghetti – it was less soft than the ones we
had. We would simply boil it till they are soft like a jelly. She says she
learnt it form her mom and Italian friends. In fact it would be harder. There –
the fast food nation had adopted and way to add cheese/ butter and make the food
soft.
This lactose intolerance is a boon in some ways. I now look at
food in a way I have never ever seen it. I have to watch everything I eat and
that has led me to new thinking. I was never that interested in food or its origins
or its history. Now I am trying to consume (no pun intended) as much as I can
about it. Food interesting tells us as much about human behavior as anything else.
Just some excerpts from stuff I saw online – don’t believe
anything completely but – here is something I found that kind of works with my
claim that dairy is a modern day intervention that is not necessarily good for
you.
“When it comes to
dairy and the Paleo diet, some debates pop-up and dairy definitely is in a grey
zone.In the strict Paleo sense, dairy of any form was not consumed in the
paleolithic era, other than human milk in infancy of course. It just wasn’t
very practical to milk wild game. The mere fact that something wasn’t consumed during the paleolithic era doesn’t
make it bad, but experience as shown us that it’s unfortunatly often the case.
Dairy is no exception.”
but also do bear in mind –
The Paleolithic diet
is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed diet of Paleolithic humans.
It is based on several controversial premises, the most important of which are:
first, that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture,
which marked the end of the Paleolithic era, around 15,000 years ago; second,
that modern humans are adapted to the diet or diets of the Paleolithic period;
and third, that it is possible for modern science to discern what such diets consisted
of.
and I have maintained that we now have more of buffalo and
cow milk but I do remember stories of Goat milk being had by families. That’s why
even vegetarians had goats in their houses. Read this –
There
are other alternatives: take goat's milk, for example. Patients with diarrhea,
asthma, bloating and irritability may be suffering from the most common food
allergy: cow's milk. Goat's milk is a natural alternative to cow milk and can
comfortably be consumed by many patients who suffer from cow milk allergies or
sensitivity.
Although goat milk, like cow's milk and
human milk, contains lactose, many people with lactose intolerance can drink
goat milk. Why? It has been hypothesized that the reason lies in goat milk's
superior digestibility. Goat milk is more completely and easily absorbed than
cow's milk, leaving less undigested residue behind in the colon to quite
literally ferment and cause the uncomfortable symptoms of lactose intolerance.
It may also be that the patient is not
lactose intolerant at all, but instead is one of the 1-in-10 people who are
allergic to the major protein of cow's milk ... alpha S1 casein protein. The
symptoms are almost identical to those of lactose intolerance. Both goat milk
and human milk lack this offending protein.
The digestibility of goat milk can be
attributed to its casein curd, which is both softer and smaller than that
produced by bovine milk. The smaller and softer the curd, the more easily
accepted by the human digestive system.
Of course – there is no absolute truth in anything. There are
only theories and counter theories. But it’s nice to know a little more about
something I previously never did bother too much about. Fun its is. So yes –
problems in life are also fun. It’s what you make out of it :)
And yes – some more fun on cheese… this is from the book –
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.
The following is an extract from a book summary I read online.
Our story begins in
the 1930’s when the United States government first began subsidizing the
country’s dairy industry (loc. 3049). This it did because the government felt
that the dairy industry was “vital to the nation’s health” (loc. 3049). The
specifics of this subsidization program were that the government would set
price supports on dairy products, and also buy up any excess dairy products
that the producers were unable to sell on the market (loc. 3051). As Moss explains,
“the dairies didn’t have to bother with the normal commercial concerns in
selling food. They didn’t have to mess… with any of the marketing tactics
deployed by food manufacturers to boost consumption. The government simply
bought as much as the dairies could make” (loc. 3053).
Now, in the 1950’s,
milk was beginning to be seen as a fatty product (loc. 3032). And with this
realization, milk sales began to suffer (loc. 3036). What’s more, those who did
continue to buy milk were increasingly switching to the low fat varieties (2%,
1%, and even skim) (loc. 3033). The stripping of milk-fat from whole milk was
leaving the milk producers with a whole lot of excess milkfat. This wasn’t such
a big problem for the milk producers, though, because they were able to use the
excess milkfat to make cheese, which was also protected under the government
subsidy (loc. 3053-59).
This was a problem for
the government, though, because they suddenly found themselves buying up more
cheese than they knew what to do with. As Moss explains, “these government
purchases hummed along rather quietly until 1981… By that point, there were so
many operators sending so much excess milk and milkfat to cheese makers that
the government was buying more cheese than it could ever give away. This
cheese, along with surplus butter and dried milk, accumulated into a stack that
weighed 1.9 billion pounds, and it cost taxpayers $4 billion a year… The
storage fees alone were running upwards of $1 million a day. It grew so large,
in fact, that the government began secreting it away in caverns and a vast,
abandoned limestone mine near Kansas City” (loc. 3064).
The End of the Dairy
Subsidies, and the Beginning of the Dairy Marketing Campaign
The mountain of
milkfat continued to grow until the early 1980’s, which is when Ronald Regan
came to power. Regan, of course, was not such a fan of government subsidies,
and so the program was axed (loc. 3077). Nevertheless, the Regan administration
was concerned about how this move would affect the dairy producers. So, in lieu
of continuing subsidies, the government set up a program to help sell all the
excess cheese. Specifically, the government required all dairy producers to
chip in a certain amount to a new fund that would be used to market and
advertise cheese to Americans (loc. 3086). As Moss explains, “under [the] plan,
the government allowed a special assessment to be levied on every milk producer
in the country, with the money to be spent on marketing schemes that were aimed
at making milk and cheese more alluring” (loc. 3085).
And guess what? It
worked! Not only did Americans start buying more cheese, they also warmed to
products that featured cheese among their ingredients (loc. 3139-66). And as
they did, their consumption of cheese went up and up. As the author notes,
“where Americans, on average, were eating 11 pounds of cheese a year in 1970,
they were up to 18 pounds in 1980, 25 pounds by 1990, 30 pounds in 2000, and 33
pounds by 2007, when the rates dipped in the recession before resuming their surge”
(loc. 3186).
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