Grandma knows best

Rujuta Diwekar needs no introduction. She's the nutritionist who vertically split the coffee-quaffing, high-tea-dribbling, broccoli brigade right down the centre by proclaiming such dissenting views: Ghee is good for you. Or, eat rice, it won't make you fat. Or, why bother with the air fryer... rending such kitchen gospel null and void. Moreover, she dared to voice them in her books: Don't lose your mind, lose your weight and Women and the weight loss tamasha that met with hearty success, while still comfortably dividing the 'chatterati' over crusted buns and cupcakes. Now, we wonder what her new book, Indian Superfoods will do for people constantly pondering food — which is, almost everyone.

So would a book on Indian superfoods be just about that? "Parts of the book are in every book I've written," she says, tucking her leg under her. We're in her bright and airy, glass partitioned office, which becomes a conference room with comfy chairs that suggest more tête-à-tête than meetings. "It's not just about superfoods, but also about the wisdom of eating local. Of bringing the value of our traditional oral knowledge back into our lives; not merely to stay healthy, but also to help the local economy and the global ecology."

So we're looking at the big picture now? How does that work for us sitting in Mumbai, sipping say, kokum juice (the new diva on the horizon). Ignoring the quip she clarifies, "Take quinoa for instance. We didn't know of it five years earlier. But today, it's such a buzzword we know it's a completely vegetarian protein. "But," she emphasises, "does it grow on your land? It's an import. Think of the humble khichdi, it's also a completely vegetarian protein. And you can trace its history 500 years into your family. It has worked for Indians. Even today after a long trip abroad, you yearn to come home to such comfort food. The grains and lentils grow abundantly and by eating local, you do your system a favour and also help the local agrarian economy flourish. The ecology is in balance. We are future-proofing our next generation just as our grandmas did for us." Which brings us to her ace mantra: grandma knows best. "Yes, she does, or did," she says, emphatically. Yes, we argue, but even grandmothers are prone to mistakes, no? Like giving us the heritage of ghee when we should be moving towards polyunsaturated fats such as olive oil? She knows which way this conversation is going, having gone that path before. "In the 60s, the food industry focussed on Greece, the birthplace of olives and said don't have olive oil, have seed oils, in the 70s they came to India and said don't have ghee have fruit-based oils. What becomes profitable turns into government policies, so if the US subsidies corn, then corn oil becomes popular and corn-oil evangelists will have people eating them in far away places. Earlier in Maharashtra, we ate groundnut and mustard oil. We've traded them for new ones. Your grandmother's wisdom was consistent, she didn't change it every five years."

"All that wisdom is available to us even today. Speak to any elderly woman and there's so much open data and transparency on any point you pick up—it's just that we haven't learned to take it as information of value. So yes, stick to ghee and groundnut oil." Groundnut still hasn't made the waves around the country and beyond because, as she says, we are a middle-income country with greater issues to face. And since we don't have the government backing a poor farmer, like other oil lobbies do, groundnut oil just doesn't make it to the fad list like olive and argan oil do. "It doesn't become prestige food. It's a poor man's food." So in Indian Superfoods, you'll be made to understand why ragi and millets, jackfruit and chickoo are kosher enough to make it to your fine-dining table. And also, how you should eat it. "Nachni was meant to be a roti or porridge, not a chip and definitely not a cup cake,'' she says. And in eating right, eating local you'll have personally played a small, but significant role in reducing farmer suicides, climate change and ecological balance.
 

(Indian Superfoods is available on the Juggernaut app)