When was the last time you went foraging for your lunch? When was the last time you truly had a farm-to-fork experience? In urban kitchens today, time and convenience dictate almost all our food choices. Our shelves, unlike our grandmother’s, are stacked high with packaged and processed foods, even though we’re well-aware of the importance of natural and seasonal produce.
Many rural communities in India though, continue to eat simple, healthy and fresh food. In villages along the periphery of the forests, for instance, it’s a common practice to forage for leaves, fruits, berries or herbs from the surrounding areas. As the seasons change, so do the delicacies on their plates. The knowledge of what’s edible (or not), and how to cook these delicious and nutritious ingredients, is passed down from generation to generation.
The Gond people of Madhya Pradesh make many such hyperlocal dishes throughout the year. Among them is the power-packed kicad roti. The process of making this atta roti is simple and almost therapeutic. And it’s so filling and nutritious that just one roti is often enough for a meal.
Tea, arguably the most popular beverage in India, is not exactly the healthiest (certainly not, when heaped teaspoons of sugar are stirred in). Interestingly though, tea has several healthy and tasty variations, some of which don’t even use traditional tea leaves! One such refreshing variant involves the use of lemon, turmeric, ginger, pepper, leaves of tulsi, neem, giloi and then gur is added instead of sugar. It tastes quite like the popular ginger-lemon- honey tea, only better.
There are also some fruits, leaves and berries that are ‘foraged’ in the truest sense of the word. These can essentially be eaten right off the tree! Neem leaves, for example, are often eaten raw. The bitter extract of neem is also used as a remedy for cough.
Communities across India have relied on their natural environment for sustenance since the beginning of time. Their knowledge of food, once dismissed as primitive, is now valued by experts worldwide, and we can do well to look at these food cultures more closely ourselves.