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Thanks, Blogadda, for picking my post for the Spicy Saturday posts!
Although, I am not exactly a health food fanatic, i have been taking some interest in health foods along with some of my acquaintances. I get my regular dose of information about what we ought to eat and what we ought to avoid via email forwards. Such emails, however, do not stop me from digging into my favourite Bengali sweets or fried foods. All these messages do, is to tell me that eating fresh fruits, dry fruits, raw vegetables would do us a great deal of good, unlike binge eating and gorging on fast foods like burgers, samosas or doughnuts – and – you guessed, it my favourite Bengali sweets!
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a unique life-improvement corporate program conducted in-house by our company, in which an iota of “realisation” occurred – that God had arranged to produce fruits, vegetables for us to savour in its purest forms. I guess it must’ve been some primitive Stone Age man who invented fire and forced his wife to cook his meal for him! Calling us to shun processed foods, cooked foods and returning back to nature, Urging us to turn into “Vegans”, who eat only raw foods was just one aspect of the many beneficial aspects of life that this unique, useful and enlightening course offered – like pranayam and meditation.
Although one could completely agree with the thought process, it was quite a task to completely give up biscuits, cakes, sweets and more important the home-made meals cooked so lovingly at home! All that one achieved was to increase the proportion of fresh fruits and raw vegetables in our meals and observe a one-day-in-a-week vegan diet to “detoxify” ourselves. While rest of the week one merrily “toxified” to one’s heart’s content!
But looking around, we find many people around us becoming more conscious of their diet and seek to bring about some rewarding lifestyle changes to lead a better life. Take the plight of one such friend, who has largely switched to a fresh fruits diet. “We don’t get any green bananas these days”, he mentioned to me, “Only yellow bananas!”
“You mean the Velchi variety?” I asked.
“No – the yellow as in the ‘golden yellow’ variety. The ones which we initially thought to be some superior form evolved by the laws of evolution - and we even paid a premium for them! They turned out to be ripened using some chemical, perhaps calcium carbide, by scrupulous traders to make a fast buck. So I cannot eat bananas anymore!”
“Cant eat apples either – they apply wax and some toxic red colour to make them attractive”. Soon enough, we got several email forwards telling us how fruits are being pre-maturely ripened using toxic chemicals or waxed and coloured! These mails went around the world a dozen times…
So now the entire universe knows about these malpractices! But there haven’t been any reports of any crack downs on fruit vendors or wholesalers. On the contrary this recent TOI Study about Honey containing a number of antibiotics is another blow to those who may want to use Honey instead of Sugar to sweeten their lives! So what can we expect in future? Steroids in milk? (So our athletes can give an excuse of unknowing consuming some undisclosed ingredients when they test positive at dope tests?) Or maybe aphrodisiacs in eggs? Or better still, we may learn about some secret ingredient providing longevity found in our favourite brand of whisky?
Jokes apart, the question that comes to our mind is: Have the regulators, namely our Food and Drug Administration, lost the plot? Or have they lost their soul - and the very purpose of their existence? Even hard-nosed advocates of government deregulation would bend to their knees, begging them for better regulatory measures. After all it is a matter of our health – which is above everything else in life, isn’t it?!
No wonder we read about citizen activist groups exposing milk adulteration rackets, that dodge these regulators so easily! Apparently, the only way to go for those really concerned by these developments is to follow the footsteps of those, who have already being concerned about the pesticides used in growing vegetables, taken to rural lands to grow vegetables in their own farms and even offer “organic farm produce” to citizens willing to pay a premium for good old natural veggies. One such initiative from Vandana Shiva is NavaDanya.
For Heaven’s sake – let us get what we choose to have. Hey we call ourselves a democracy! Even if we really want to be toxified – let us choose our own toxins – and get us the very same toxins we ordered for – not any other!
