India

By Wendy Gordon

I recently returned from a month-long trip to India full of tales to tell and about ten pounds heavier. Yes, the food was delicious, so delicious that our family now cooks and eats Indian food several times a week.

This is not to say that India is a nutritional paradise. Most significantly, there are millions of Indians who do not get enough to eat. Poverty exists at a depth unknown in the United States or Europe. Sanitation often leaves a lot to be desired, making it difficult to eat raw fruits and vegetables with impunity. White bread, if you can afford it, is preferred to whole grain, and white rice to brown (though I must admit the white jasmine rice absorbs Indian spices more effectively). There's all that ghee, dripping off the chapattis, making the sauces silky and smooth and adding tons of calories and saturated fat. The hot weather and the limited availability of tap water often leads to the consumption of gallons of sweet beverages.

Nevertheless, there's a lot we Americans could learn from the Indian way of eating.

Cows are sacred in India. Protected culturally by religious belief and legally by a "Cattle Preservation Act", they wander the streets garlanded with marigolds and do not wind up on people's plates. Some people (primarily Sikhs and Muslims, but some Hindus as well) do eat lamb and chicken, and fish is common in coastal regions. Even then, animal protein plays a secondary role. Indian vegetarian cooking is among the most sophisticated in the world. While in the West "vegetarianism" too often descends into an unhealthy morass of pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches, in India grains, legumes, vegetables and dairy products offer seemingly endless combinations.

Spices are a significant enough facet of foods to make nutritional contributions. Cinnamon, ginger, red chile pepper, yellow curry, cloves, coriander and turmeric are several common Indian spices known to contain heat-stable antioxidants.

India remains a Third World country. Despite the proliferation of the computer industry, it is primarily agricultural and most people live the same way they have for thousands of years: growing diverse crops organically; grinding their wheat on a stone wheel; gathering water at the well. Refrigeration and cooking facilities are limited even in the wealthiest of homes, so food is bought fresh every day from the local market. Supermarkets are rare (I was told they existed in the Delhi suburbs, but never saw one), and the limited infrastructure doesn't permit anything but seasonally-grown food. People make everything from scratch: bread, yogurt, paneer, ice cream. Agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto are doing their best to change this ancient system, but at the same time there is a growing environmental consciousness among the educated classes. During my weeks there I read both about a corporate effort (so far unsuccessful) to introduce genetically modified eggplant and about a former computer engineer who had returned to his ancestral village to grow organic crops. One can only hope the nascent environmental movement will beat out agribusiness, so (unlike here) there will be no need to reset a world view and relearn techniques that never should have been lost.

Perhaps most notably, India is not a fast food culture. Sure, there are plenty of snacks. Street vendors offer a plethora of fried goodies, and spicy potato chips line market shelves. But, there, food matters. It is not fuel to be gobbled behind the wheel of a car or in front of the TV set. It is something worth spending time to shop for, cook, eat, share with others and savor. It is a precious resource not to be taken for granted. We ate a meal of dal, vegetables and roti at the Delhi Sikh Temple, whose huge kitchen (staffed entirely by volunteers) serves food all day, every day, to anyone who wants to eat. We were dawdling over our food, not especially hungry and turned off by the flies buzzing about. "Finish your food," the cook instructed us sternly. "Do not waste." He meant it. The food, incidentally, was delicious.

Because hunger is not an abstract concept, Indians do not share America's obsession with slimness. My son is stocky, not overweight but not fitting neatly on a standard growth chart. At home he might get a lecture from the doctor. In India he got compliments: "He looks like the baby Krishna!"

It was rather refreshing.

Wendy Gordon lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a restaurant reviewer and freelance writer. She has an MS in Clinical Nutrition from the University of Chicago Medical School.