BY TARA NARAYAN

HEY, LIFE has its moments. Friends were coming home for an evening and said they’re bringing over their daughter and one-year-old granddaughter who’re based in the U S of A and were visiting… by the way, their granddaughter only eats organic food! What a lucky granddaughter, I thought… please bring her over, but won’t she eat my home-spun kichadi-kadi or kichadi-fresh curd which I was planning to make, by way of some comfort vegetarian food? No, no, explained the doting grandmother, her American daughter has brought along a suitcase full of the American “Nature’s Promise” food for infants and for dinner that evening Naira was going to have “Organic Pasta Primavera” and then her bedtime is 7.30 pm sharp, “But she won’t sleep at your place…we’ll have to have dinner by 8 pm and then rush home to put the baby to sleep!” All of it made me laugh and I’m always grateful for some laughter in my life! So much fuss over a baby, I exclaimed, like no mother ever produced a baby before!

Well, I suppose it’s not a joke to have a baby in the countries of the West anymore (in urban India too!). Women marry later and later and have babies in their 30s and 40s, and often metro couples lead such a hectic life that they can’t imagine cluttering up their life with child rearing. Babies have to be planned in between careers and domestic duties and when the time is ideal and everything is perfect…like life can ever be that perfect. But to stay with little Naira, she arrived, as pretty as a wind flower and interested in her surroundings. I thought she was the sanest of us all! Of course, given half a chance she would have brought everything down on to the floor but that just called for keeping a constant eye on her.

And what do you know, after her bottled Nature’s Promise “Organic Pasta Primavera” she wanted to nibble at the methi chakli I’d put out with the drinks…and by way of dessert she accepted a chocolate biscuit but was only interested in the chocolate part of it and not the biscuit within. And doting grandmamma gushed, “You should see how she just loves the wild organic honey I got from you…in fact, she won’t touch the commercial version now!” Buy more wild honey from me! I said.

WHAT’S ORGANIC?

ALL of which left me thinking as later, much later after they had departed, I studied the labelling on the empty Nature’s Promise bottle in the sink. Ingredients listed: “Water, organic carrots, organic sweet potatoes, organic macaroni product, organic durum wheat flour, organic tomato paste, organic brown rice flour, organic sunflower oil.” And, of course, “With no artificial colors, flavours or preservatives your baby might just learn how to ask for seconds!” The contents could be heated up in the microwave … and leftovers stored in the fridge for no more than two days. Everything may be listed as “organic” I’d tried telling grandmother dear but if it’s processed food, it’s processed food and there’s not a spark of life in it, it’s worse than cooked food…and this is cooked, processed and microwaved! No animal of the animal kingdom eats like the way we do and the rest of it…she told me to shut up, she was only the grandmother and not the mother!

So what is organic food? It’s food grown in organic rich earth with organic manure - both increasingly hard to find given our civilisation’s cold-blooded exploitation, humiliation and torture of Mother Earth. It’s what’s you buy today for cooking today as minimally as possible in your own kitchen for baby’s feed and wise mothers don’t add salt, sugar or oil, to their baby’s feed! Only corrupted moronic adults make a habit of eating cooked, processed, packaged foods and drinks! (Sigh) Much of the food we eat today qualifies as high glycemic, acid-creating, refined carbohydrates, proteins, fats…food at a pinch but I must remind you that cooked food has no enzyme values at all and several vitamins give up their ghost in the process of cooking itself…how you cook also makes a difference for the better or worse!

Babies are best fed on mother’s milk and frankly since baby Naira is still being breastfed by a loving mother I guess that’s what’s keeping her ticking…otherwise, if you’re asking me, she’s still in need of quality nutrition from fresh foods and to hell with all the convenient state-of-the-art bottled organic food costing a bomb! Hey, there’s more energy in a mashed organically grown elchi banana or apple than any con Nature’s Promise “Organic Pasta Primavera”!

PRACTICE

SOMEONE will invariably ask me if I practice what I preach. Honey, that’s immaterial! But if you practice 50 percent and more of what I preach here you will be the beneficiary, not me, okay. I tend to eat and drink a mélange of deadweight food for all kinds of reasons, but that’s the tragedy of my life, not yours…on the other hand if you succeed in eating enough vitally alive food to keep your RBC count consistently high and healthy (and your WBC count consistently low), the more will be your energy quota and life is all about energy, no…ooo???

All of this reminds me that a colleague who was in Mumbai brought back a most interesting gift presentation e.g. a packet of freshly snipped or bit size dry fruit…whole golden raisins, almonds, walnut halves, quartered apricots and figs, caju halves… I put it all into a bottle on the table at home and even the hubby helped himself in a hungry moment! Just a handful of convenient to eat dry fruit…filling and delicious, better than any chunky pastries or cakes or mithai from the market place. Fresh fruit and dry fruit is really the most superlatively good snack of them all.

So, henceforth, I think it’s a good idea to make my own mix of fresh dry fruit, snip it into an assorted bhel of sorts and keep it conveniently close by so that instead of reaching out for a packet of cookies or biscuits one reaches out for some dry fruit when hunger strikes! A handful of dry fruit can be a very satisfying snack for kids and adults alike…take my tip if you like! Some dry fruit stores do keep mixed fruit packets but I’m never sure if the walnuts or almonds in them are fresh and crisp…ready made packs may come with 50 percent dry date or khajur pieces!

WHITE RADDISH

AND to round of for this week hey, look at the piles of fresh slender white radish coming into the market these so called wintry days. It’s the season to eat mulo or white radish or daikon as it’s called in the countries of the east where radishes of all kinds are taken seriously…radish or “lo bak” in Cantonese are indigenous to China. In the old days in village India I remember eating sliced white radish tossed in salt and lemon juice and radish chopped fine with leaves and stuffed in bhakri. You may finely grate radish and toss it in some good dark soy sauce and serve it as a relish…radishes can be sweet, savoury or pungent.

This is to say eat white radish! It makes for a good digestive with fried or heavy food. Combine finely grated white radish with finely grated carrot and see how it makes a picture pretty and tempting enough to eat…in China they say carrot adds a yang balance to the ying radish, a perfect male and female combo! Radish is also weight-losing food. Dot it with a dot of tamari soy sauce (if you can get the original version from Japan) and eat it at the end of a meal…or toss a grated radish and carrot salad with gomashio and enjoy. Gomashio is a seasoned sea salt and sesame seed mix…take 15 tablespoons of white or black or brown sesame seeds and a tablespoon of Goa’s wonderful sea salt, roast each item lightly over slow heat and then crush together and store for use as a sprinkler over salads, soups, etcetera. Gomashio can make many an austere dish come alive…it’s the Japanese version of our chaat masala.