Video Adventure: Benog Hill

I am not sure the name of the place I was. I think it was called Benog Hill. It was pretty, eh?

Flatbreads abound!

I came to India to study wheat. Little did I know that the real story was in notwheat. Wheat is as good as native to India. It’s been here for millennia, having traveled the short distance from its species birthplace in the Middle East long ago. Until the middle of the twentieth century, however, wheat was only one of many grains and pulses used to make breads. The Green Revolution however crowned wheat king of grains and diet patterns began to shift. Though you can still find some of the older grains and pulses about in smaller towns and farming communities, it’s much more common to find wheat bread products in the cities and towns of India.

Leavened bread doesn’t have much of a place in the traditional Indian cooking. I have been able to find plenty of it here – but it’s been mostly packaged sliced, white bread. The brown breads I have found seem to be fairly singularly baked for the tourist or westernized market.

Similarly, cookies, biscuits, and crackers have exploded onto store shelves across the country in the past decade as multinationals have begun to exploit this emerging market (a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day – roughly the cost of a bag of Lay’s potato chips or a packet of cream cookies) but there’s nothing Indian about them. Sweet shops abound here, and though I have tried a number of things, I am yet to figure out what much is beyond gulab jamun (a perfect, milky, soft doughnut hole soaked in rosewater and honey). As far as I can tell this is the only of the traditional sweets which is made predominantly out of wheat flour.

So, while leavened bread doesn’t have much of a footing in India, flat breads abound. And many of them aren’t made of wheat flour. While eating them daily, it is taking time to manage to figure out just what each is and why it is called what it is. When I figure it all out, expect to hear all about just what makes these flat breads have their identity: Chapati, Dosa, Idli, Kulcha, Naan, Padad, Paratha, Roti.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

One of the toughest ideas which I have been battling with for a long time is the notion of progress. Everyone likes the idea of things getting better, but defining just what 'good change' is can be real hard.

There was a great example I heard while in Mexico about the perils of progress. There was a small town that was doing okay economically, though they were growing corn which was relatively low yielding. A scientist came through and observed that the fields could be growing much more than they currently were so he helped introduce an improved variety which yielded better. Through a big information campaign and seed giveaways they were able to convince most farmers to make the switch to this new variety. A year later, the scientist comes back to find the town economically devastated. Though the yields of corn had improved substantially it turns out that the new variety of corn produced weak corn husks. Farmers had been making the bulk of their income through the sale of husks for tamale wrappers and the corn itself had been more of a by-product. This fact that the low yielding corn variety garnered exceptionally good husks didn’t even register to anyone until after havoc had been wreaked.

This story is but one of many but it is a particularly accessible example of the problem of external meddling in the agricultural practices of others. The Green Revolution is hailed by many as the change which saved the lives of millions through increased outputs in fields – yet many others lambaste the supposed reform for having done just the opposite. While the yield of wheat, corn, and rice fields leapt it was at the cost of overall agricultural output. In the thoughts of modern, western farming practices fields come in one crop – but in many traditional methods of farming a field can reap a wide variety of crops. When practicing subsistence or small-profit farming, much of the work is done by hand – allowing multiple harvests of crops. Eliminating other crops may increase the yield of a staple grain, but will often decrease the total output of calories and nutrition.

Economic measurements are easier the fewer outputs one has to deal with. Measuring the amount of grain grown is easy to see – but to measure the amount of grain, plus the use of straw for animal fodder, and the use of husks as tamale wrappers, the simultaneous growth of pulses as a protein source and a nitrogen fixer, and so on and so on… it is next to impossible to measure the effects of change - unless talking to the people these changes effected directly.

In Mexico, there were fairly mixed reviews of the Green Revolution – but in India I have been encountering near universal criticism of the destruction of traditional farming practices for industrial methods. There have been tens of thousands of farmer suicides over the past decade due to the desperation of the situation, land is being mismanaged, pesticides are poisoning thousands of people, fertilizers are polluting rivers, traditional diets are being lost. Some say that if India ever hopes to stop being an agricultural economy it needs to industrialize its practices and move away from subsistence farming (currently around 80% of the population lives in rural areas). In the traditional pro-urban mindset that sounds like a given – but talking to happy folks who live simple lives in the middle of nowhere I could see why you may be a bit suspicious of such ‘progress.’

Sound of Silence

Wow. I think that was the longest I have ever gone without checking my e-mail since I got internet in the early 90s. A few days is nothing special, but 12 seems to have garnered me quite a bit of business to reply to. Life is good, I am up in the foothills of the Himalayas taking a language course in Mussoorie and enjoying myself. My time out in the country gave me some peace and my first day in the mountains have only increased it. More to come with internet cafes again in walking distance.

Im movin' to the country, I'm gonna eat me a lot of peaches

Well, the move up to Derhadun has given me some peace, but the pace is still a bit tiring. Laying in my hotel bed this morning, the longest break between two horns I heard was six seconds - and that was an eerie bit of silence. People have been much nicer here though - likely because they are confused why I would come up here. I have had several young folk ask to touch my hair because it "so like golden fleece." Erm...

Anywhoo, tomorrow I move to the farm where I will be taking a short course on Global markets and nutrition at the Navdanya Center with the famed (in the world of nutrition literature) writer and academic Marion Nestle. I might be there a week, I might be there a month. I have no idea if they have internet access.

I do however now have an Indian cell phone. I think I even get free incoming calls. The number is 9760372289. There's a twelve and a half hour time difference between here and the West Coast of the US (and it really bothers me that India thinks it's okay to be 30 minutes out of line with the rest of the world...) and I likely will be just as bad at picking up my mobile here as I was in the US, but in case of emergencies...