Have a safe meal

It’s early afternoon in a paara (colony) near Shobha Bazaar in north Kolkata. One of the numerous maze-like lanes has been taken over by a colourful pandal. Inside, people are milling around the many stalls — some selling varieties of locally-grown vegetables and rice, others have bottles and jars of honey, as well as jams and squash made with native flowers and fruits. Posters inside many stalls dole out information on different foods, their nutritional values and benefits. A huge crowd is milling around a stall demonstrating common food adulteration methods.

At the fag end is a makeshift stage where a kurta-clad man is talking to people seated around him. “Real mustard oil doesn’t have jhaanjh (the pungency that all ads will talk about), nor is it crystal clear. But that’s what you will find in the big brand varieties in the market because that’s what you want. That honey you buy from the market — do you ever stop and ask why they all look and taste the same? You know that honey comes from different kinds of flowers, right? So it should taste, smell and look different. So please, next time when you are buying food, ask yourself how safe it is, how and where it is grown, and how much of the money is reaching the people growing it? And when you buy from these small-scale, local farmers, please don’t bargain — do you bargain at supermarkets or with Ola/Uber? It’s our responsibility to take care of our farmers. For the sake of our health and the planet’s.”

The event is a Safe World Festival, one of a series of melas being held across Kolkata (and parts of Bengal) for more than a year now. The organisers are Development Research Communication and Services Centre (DRCSC), which works on sustainable food practices and livelihood in Bengal and neighbouring States) and BhoomiKa, an initiative to link people in the food supply chain and ensure the smallholder farmer gets a fair price. The man on stage is Anshuman Das, one of the founders of BhoomiKa. “People don’t understand the link between safe food and health. Unsafe food is the reason behind so many diseases today,” he says.

In urban India, food has been reduced to an anonymous product one buys at a store or restaurant. However, before the industrialisation of the food chain, there existed communal and personal connections between the farmer, the market, and the consumer. The Safe Food festivals aim to revive that connect. People can sample a range of traditional dishes that are disappearing from kitchens. “It’s amazing how out-of-touch people — especially the younger generation — have become with the food they eat,” says Das.

At the Safe World mela, the stall that draws the biggest crowd is the one selling dishes made with local ingredients — mocha paturi made with chopped banana flowers; ranga alu pantua, a Bengali dessert made with sweet potatoes; bhaapa pithe , steamed rice cakes with organic jaggery, alur dom with khaam alu (a variety of yam), a fiery crab curry from the Sunderbans, and pink-toned tea made with rosella and a pinch of beet salt. Golden cutlets made with oal (elephant foot yam) sell like hot cakes. “This brings back childhood memories — my mother used to make them,” says 68-year-old Oindrila Dey.

An item that always gets sold out is the chemical-free gur — cut in chunks, it looks like fudge. “Most of the gur found in local markets have sugar and added essence, this one is pure,” says Sumit Sarkar of DRCSC. The legendary Kolkata sweet shop Balaram Mullick is now sourcing the DRCSC gur for its famed nolen gur sweets. The chain is also buying organic milk from DRCSC’s Sundarini Dairy.

Also much in demand is the rice — they sell over 26 hard-to-find varieties. The names are enchanting: Radhatilak , kalo nunia , kathari bhog , khudikhasha , bhootmori , kalo jeera , badshah bhog and radhuni-pagol (which literally means “the rice that made the cook go mad”). They also stock a variety of khoi — popped rice — made with traditional varieties such as kanakchur , binnidhaan khoi and morichshaal (the last has medicinal value and counters diarrhoea). Sarkar recites an old Bengal ditty about khoi — ‘ Kajer sheshe bari jaai, dheki chaler muri khai (I go back home at the end of the day, and have khoi made with hand-pounded rice). “These songs were so much a part of our culinary traditions,” he says.

At the end of each event, people are told that the mela can be held in their colony as well — all they need do is find a venue, and a place for the farmers to stay the night. In the pipeline are recipe contests. At the mela held last week in Paikpara, also in Kolkata, a dal with tauk dhnarosh (a sour bhindi variety) and another dal with chikni saag , a weed found in paddy fields, took visitors by surprise.

The popular expression “you are what you eat” is often meant to be interpreted literally, but this saying holds true in the greater cultural sense as well. A curry made with crab from the Sunderbans showcases a kind of life which has fed and sustained the region’s residents for centuries, and still remains a critically important occupation and way of life. If nothing else, the folks behind these festivals hope people will once again embrace traditional, local foods just for their remarkable flavours. What’s not to appreciate about oal cutlets and tangy roselle tea?

Anuradha Sengupta is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata

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