A Time When Food was Medicine!

Ah those were the times!

When the very food eaten served as medicine!

Dear Ruchika, I am writing this post for you…

Not long ago, about 20 years back, when your mother Rekha woke up in the middle of the night, complaining of a stomach condition, we did not have to run and find a doctor in the middle of the night. This is what most of the people do today when put under similar circumstances! A handful of fenugreek seed with a glass of buttermilk was all it took to put her back to sleep.

The reason why I could figure out the instant medicine for her in the kitchen was because earlier everyone was trained to develop a keen eye to find the common everyday ailments. However, I do sympathize with your generation of today, where it is near impossible to figure out what goes into the food which is put into the body, let alone the ailments! It is worrying that nowadays people rarely cook the food they eat by themselves, failing to understand the serious implications that unconscious eating can present. When I was a child, I vividly remember my mother personally going to our farm to pick the right vegetables for the family. Moreover, she wouldn’t allow any other person to handle them as she knew that vegetables were living produce and that the very way you handle them can alter their nutrient profile. Eventually, when I was married off to your grandfather, I ran every day to be the first person to buy vegetables from the subji wala, before others grappled with them!

Moreover, every meal which my mother fed me was designed in a manner such that it was replete with most nutrients that one’s body requires on a daily basis. Served on a banana leaf, the most conducive medium to transfer the nutrients from piping hot food to our system, every meal started with a sweet to aid digestion. Next, every standard meal paired up a dahl with rice followed by three to four vegetable servings and ended with a millet porridge or buttermilk. The permutations and combinations in which every component of the meal was arranged to complement each other was indeed genius. Today modern science is proving for food to benefit our body, it should be paired up in the right manner. For example, iron and calcium should never be taken together as the latter hinders the absorption of both the nutrients. Also, iron and vitamin C complement each other’s assimilation by the body. It was realizing this that my mother made the best spinach curry, topped with a dash of lemon and tamarind juice.

I know these things have lost the meaning these days because of the modern lifestyle. But, we can be more conscious of what we eat and how we can heal the ailments by kitchen ingredients. It would be great if you can learn from our old ways which had both sense and value in them. I am preparing a list of homemade recipes and common remedies for you to try out when you come home for your Summer Break…..

 Yours truly,

 Granny