Poverty may actually help Dalits eat healthier

Dalits, for centuries and till not very long ago, were forbidden to eat with the upper castes and the high and mighty of their communities.

What the guardians of exclusivity did not realise, the precluded Dalits actually ended up eating better than them.

Chandrabhan Prasad, Maoist-turned-Dalit activist-writer-entrepreneur, stumbled upon this irony during extensive field studies among Dalit communities, where he found that those who survived child mortality, despite being poor and deprived, went on to lead healthy and active lives till their 80s and 90s.

Digging deeper into this contradiction, Prasad, who is engaged in mapping changes in Dalit consumption behaviour with Harvard economist Devesh Kapur, realised that members of his community have traditionally been shunted to one corner of their native villages, which are also poorly irrigated and therefore rain-dependent.

Such parcels of land are just what hardy crops such as barley (jau), millets (jhangora, bajra and ragi, for instance) and sorghum (chara) need to thrive.

The landlords grew these crops to feed cattle and pay farm workers. Dalits grew them for their sustenance.

They did not know that these very crops, which renowned scientist and biodiversity activist Vandana Shiva describes as India's "forgotten foods", would get to be hailed as "super foods" by the Western world because they come packed with beneficial nutrients - iron, calcium, magnesium, B vitamins and dietary fibre - and are known to slow down the release of sugars into our blood as well as diminish its capacity to absorb glucose.

After advocating English-medium education for Dalit students (so that they did not get marked out in elite institutions such as IITs) and promoting Dalit entrepreneurship (he is the "mentor" of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and has co-authored with Devesh Kapur and D Shyam Babu a book about Dalit business owners), Prasad has made it his life's mission to make adulteration-free pickles and spice powders available across the country.

He calls these "Dalit foods" because members of his community, being the last to be exposed to packaged food brands, have been eating hand-ground spices and home-made pickles.

The products will be formally launched with the support of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on July 2, at the India International Centre. Till recently, in fact, roti and mango pickles used to be the most common staples in Dalit homes in his home district, Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh.

For this reason, pickles made in Dalit homes had more oil than those prepared by the Thakurs because the oil spiked with masalas not only preserved pickles for years without requiring chemical additives (sodium benzoate, which is potentially cancer-causing, is the industry favourite) or artificial colouring, but also filled in for vegetables in the poor person's diet.

The mango pickle in Prasad's repertoire is made using the same elaborate process, stretching across about 100 days, that was employed for generations by women in his family.

Continuing on his theme of how Dalits ended up eating healthy because of their abject poverty, Prasad says they were too poor to adopt the now-much-criticised high-yielding varieties.

They stuck to using what are today known as "heirloom seeds" - seeds that have survived centuries without genetic or other manipulation. He gives the example of the Dalit foods turmeric, sourced from water-distressed Wardha in Maharashtra that is rich saffron, not chemically manipulated yellow, in colour.

Dalit families grow this variety for their own consumption and for pharmaceutical and beauty product companies.

When you cook with it, the food takes on a sunset hue that is as pleasing to the eye as the taste is to the palate. The stories of his coriander seeds from the Malwa plateau of Madhya Pradesh and the red Bhiwapur chillies from Vidarbha, Maharashtra, are as appetising.

By bringing native purity to the table, Prasad says he has gone beyond organic farming.

To get an "organic" certificate, farmers have to ensure their land parcels are completely chemicals-free for a minimum of three years.

The products that go into the Dalit foods repertoire, however, are grown in land that have never been exposed to chemicals because its owners were too poor to afford either high-yielding seeds or fertilisers and insecticides.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)