the question I’m being asked the most lately is what got me
interested in the organic food movement in the first place, and what got us all started.
The answer takes me back to the time when I was a young adolescent. Dad was living away from our city as he was temporarily posted in a very remote
village in Orissa called Kantabaji. And whenever he came home to visit us, he
brought along small portions of groceries like pulses (musoor dal, moong dal,
chana dal, arhar dal etc), rice and millets from there. Strangely, these things
tasted way better than the dal, chawal and atta we were used to eating on a
daily basis. The fact that they tasted so much better blew my mind. I had never
given anything more than a passing thought to dal, which happens to be one of the
most commonplace of Indian cuisine, but THIS dal was so fabulously yummy, it
cultivated in me a new found appreciation of the humble dal!
It wasn’t technically an organic dal, but dad said that the cultivators
there were so very poor, they didn’t even have the money required to buy
chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and therefore, they cultivated food the
traditional Indian way. Which happened to be organic by default. And if this
was the real taste of food, why are we tampering it with half-baked science and
making it so dull and boring, stripping it of its nutrients and natural
wholesomeness?
I believe that the farmers that are still growing food this laborious and time consuming but healthier way
deserve to be paid a premium, and our children deserve to taste food the way it
is meant to taste like. not genetically altered or injected and sprayed with poisons. And that makes me an organic indian.
what makes you an organic indian?
No comments:
Post a Comment