When we come to this world, the first thing we demand is Food. This food comes from the person who cares the most about us, and as we grow older these people only prepare food for us for two major goals. The first one, this food should help us to grow and support our long-term health, and the second is that we should enjoy it while eating and it should be tasty at the same time.
In our Indian traditions, food is part of our history, cultural heritage, and our celebrations.
But over time, we as a society have gotten busier and we’ve started to rely on industries somewhere far away to produce, prepare, and package food for us. When food is produced commercially by a big company, the main priority is usually related to making a profit. Their first priority is to make their food products really tasty, often addictively tasty. These companies need their consumers to be brand loyal and to consume more of their food products. For many of these companies, our long-term health is not at the top of their priority list. The classic examples of these kinds of ultra-processed foods are commercially produced bread and breakfast cereals which are our common staples.
With each progressing day, the market is flooding with these ultra-refined products made from inexpensive base materials. While processing the majority of the nutrients are destroyed and lots of preservatives are added so that they last longer on supermarket shelves. Then sugar, fat, salt, and different flavorings are added to enhance the taste of these products, and to give us a seemingly wide variety of options, synthetic nutrients are even sometimes added so that the products can be marketed as so-called healthy.
When a father makes a chapatti for his daughter, he won’t allow her to eat it the next day because he knows that it might be rotten due to the action of moulds and fungus whereas the same moulds don’t want to eat the processed food sitting on plates for a longer period. If the microbes choose not to eat processed food, we should question ourselves, is it really good for us?
There are a lot of studies that have shown that eating this kind of ultra-processed food can lead to health problems. The food we eat each and every day has a major impact n our health and when we hand that responsibility over to an industry with commercial interests we’re separating ourselves from the source of our food and accepting certain health risks.
By getting closer to the source of our food and paying a bit more attention to where our food comes from and how it’s prepared, we can automatically start to have a significant and sustainable impact on our health. So let us join hands and learn about our food system which is our cultural heritage and be vocal about our cooking skills, locally grown produce, and homemade food. It is the biggest luxury we can possess.