Six Months Out

My official second report detailing my fellowship life from September 5 to December 5:

As the population of India continues to grow, change has been inevitable. You can see the prospect of this growth through communal excitement and dread of the overwhelming and ongoing transformation. I have been amazed to see how much notions of progress center on food here. People speak with pride about how they can afford to eat packaged foods that they couldn’t five years ago; efforts to mandate flour fortification make front page news in The Times of India; people born with congenital amputations from fertilizer-poisoned water supplies walk the streets begging for a livelihood, knowing that their health has been the cost of increased yields. Food is an essential connection to culture here and people make it ever clear that they are invested in what they eat. India wears its stomach on its sleeve.

I spent the first two weeks of my time in India at the Navdanya organic farm. Navdanya is an organization which works to promote organic farming and fight against corporate control of agriculture in India. I chose to spend time there as a sort of agricultural antithesis to my time at CIMMYT in Mexico. While CIMMYT claims to save scores of lives from starvation, Navdanya asserts that the Green Revolution has been the principal cause of malnutrition in India and did nothing but sow seeds for further commercial exploitation of Indian farmers. Led by Vandana Shiva, a charismatic Indian woman who has been at the forefront of several legal challenges to laws regarding genetic patenting in India, the organization makes an effort to speak for the small farmer and improve the Indian diet by returning it to its roots.

I spent my first week at Navdanya in a short course examining food security in India. The next week I spent attending a conference of farmers and learning about the ancient grains which Navdanya is helping to preserve. Both provided great time to hear from people who were clearly experts in their fields – whether that meant farmers who were literally experts at what their fields needed or academics steeped in the politics and complexities of Indian nutrition, agriculture, and trade. In a short time I was introduced to the rich assortment of pseudo-cereals and millets which make up the traditional Indian diet and are fighting for shelf space against rice and wheat. It was amazing to be eating and cooking with crops I had little knowledge of previously and to hear the passion behind the defence of truly local varieties.

Navdanya is a striking foil to CIMMYT in both form and function. CIMMYT's campus is a large cluster of very 60's architecture with clean though clunky offices, manicured lawns, and trim fields. Navdanya is a small group of cow-dung buildings with thatch roofs and unruly fields of mixed-use crops. While CIMMYT looks only at corn and wheat, Navdanya grows literally thousands of crops on considerably less land. Both aim to help feed the starving masses – CIMMYT through science, Navdanya through traditional means. Though so divergent in their methods, both appeal to me in some ways. I think that both are imperfect solutions to the great problems they aim to tackle, but amazing and impassioned attempts.

Coming away from Navdanya, I couldn't help feeling skeptical of their denial of any of the benefits that came from changes made by the Green Revolution. While I certainly agree that the means by which agronomists tend to measure progress is rarely a holistic approach, I think that Navdanya's organic-only approach doesn't take in all of the practical matters either. Facts and priorities became a bit jumbled to me. How do you measure the loss of diversity against gains in production of more commercially viable commodities? Which is more important, the calorie output or the nutritional value of an acre of crops? If the government needs to subsidize one crop to provide food aid, does going with wheat reinforce imperialist tendencies toward western diets or simply go with a crop that is already a standard international commodity? The notion of what 'progress' precisely means was already muddled in my mind, but during the conversations I had with various people at Navdanya they began to abut with even more difficult concepts regarding the morality and aims of development generally.

I chose to let these ideas fester for some time and to try to get better adjusted to India through language. On the advice of some contacts at Navdanya I headed north to Mussoorie to study Hindi for two weeks. These courses taught me little more than the basics of grammar, but provided needed insight to how Indian communication works and gave some more cultural background. Understanding Hindi has helped me understand Indian English much better. Additionally, gaining the ability to ask the essentials ('What is this?' 'How much is that?') has helped me get a needed edge when beginning conversations. Simply being able to read some signs or menus has been of great comfort.

From Mussoorie I worked my way west, passing through Chandigarh, the only planned city in India. Chandigarh is lauded as a symbol of the great rise of development in India – but likely not in the way the government intends it to be. It serves as an ironic metaphor of progress in India – well organized streets in a perfect grid, a great public transit system, and enormous shopping complexes in planned commercial districts – all of which look like nobody knew what to do with after their construction and have begun to literally fall apart. While initially considering staying in the city for some time to take cooking courses there, after seeing the state of the city, I opted to move along.

I worked my way towards the farm of Ramesh, a man who has recently begun an organic farm and education center south of Dharamsala. I spent two weeks at Ramesh's farm learning about the work he is doing, meeting farmers in the village he lives in, baking with his local variety of wheat, and the challenges of farming in these barren hills. Working with someone who is trying to address the problems of agricultural poverty on a very local level was a fascinating opportunity to hear some predigested thoughts on the changes taking place in India.

I moved down to Delhi four weeks ago to get a taste for the big city and help figure out how the changes in agriculture which I had observed up North are altering the dietary habits of the whole of the country. By talking to a wide variety of contacts, the tangled web of what Indians are eating and why has continued to become more complicated. Talking to folks from Navdanya and Slow Food I hear about the great loss of culinary diversity and the rising unsustainability of current farming practices. Speaking with people at the Rice Wheat Consortium I have learned about their claimed successes of the Green Revolution and their future plans to help save humanity from mass starvation. The Ministry of Food Processing Industries has sung the praises for recent great improvements in farming and for the potential for commercial food growth in India. Factory owners tell me the government's enormous bureaucracy and nepotism prevents any sort of domestic growth in industry. Street vendors complain of recent government crackdowns on the previously unregulated industry. Everyone complains that you can't find a decent restaurant at a reasonable price and that new supermarkets are more glam than substantive improvement in hygiene. And the list goes on.

Delhi, seemingly like much of India, is a city which is constantly trying to figure out which direction it is going. Depending on who you talk to either change is coming on at breakneck speeds or it has been falsely promised for decades and will likely never be delivered beyond superficial improvements. For all the people I have spoken to about the state of Indian diet and agriculture, I still don't know what's going on, but I have been blessed with an astounding variety of forecasts. Because of the great diversity of people who I have spoken to, and the sheer enormity of this nation, I have become hopelessly confused - in a good way. The questions I ask do not deserve simple answers and I am glad not to have found them.

While my research here has been excellent, I have to admit I don't especially like being in India, which is funny. I have always wanted to come here, with no specific expectations or reasoning; just a general wonderment for a culture so different from my own and a hearty appreciation of the food. However, I am not sure if I have ever been in a place more confusing in my life. My arrival in India was rough. It took four drivers to get me to my hotel from the airport. Each told me that my hotel had burned down or been knocked down by the government and tried to deliver me to another guest house where they would receive a commission. My first two days in Delhi were full of similar incidents and they have continued off and on during my travels. It has gotten to the point where I feel less and less saddened each time another person tries to take advantage of me and just resigned. I feel disappointed in myself at becoming hardened.

I have been really surprised how difficult it has been for me to adjust to the culture here. Generally, I have had a tough time having authentic interactions with people – all of my informal conversations seem to be only a build up for a proposed fiscal interaction. I have had difficulty adjusting to India's sliding scale – time, distances, prices, or facts need not be precise or even reasonable estimates – any answer is seen as better than none. I have had a really hard time trying to wrap my head around the rigid boundaries of race, sex, class, and caste and the deplorable treatment that others receive to my benefit. Because of these factors I frequently feel uncomfortable and frustrated - sometimes in a manner where I think I am learning from it - sometimes not.

When I encounter expats or other travelers and relate my woes they nod sympathetically and press books upon me as if they were prescriptions. These India focused auto-biographical accounts, histories, and religious tomes flesh out the country bit by bit but seem to only address the symptoms, not the underlying cause of my melancholy. Similarly, as my bowels try to adjust to the country, I try a little of what everyone says will be the solution to my belly trouble – pills, potions, and special food – but nothing except time seems to do the trick. In the process, I lose a day or two every week, bound to my bathroom waiting for whatever has recently taken a hold of my gut to release me.

Despite my continued confusion about the culture here, the slow going and constant hurdles, the hectic pace, and the troubled health, I am learning bundles about the shift in consumption and growth patterns of food products which are taking place here. Soon, I head south to what I have been told is a very different sort of India. While oftentimes wearisome, my time in the North has been filled with many opportunities for learning. I hope with my move I will continue to be able to flesh out the many mysteries of what is feeding the subcontinent fed.