How mundane becomes exotic

I came across this story in the news about making your own yogurt. It talks about these special “heirloom” cultures from European countries. The story makes yogurt-making sound exotic and wondrous. We Indians can roll our eyes at it, given that making yogurt is an integral a part of our daily lives, but I see an omen of things to come. Our mothers have probably never even thought about how old their yogurt culture is. My mother’s is older than I am for sure, and I have been using the same culture that I brought from India about ten years ago. But in a country where food has been industrialized for many generations now, making yogurt at home becomes a newsworthy item. 

Raw milk is another such thing. When I was growing up, we got raw milk delivered home every day. We boiled it to kill all contamination, drank it the same day, turned the leftover into yogurt, and started the process all over, the next day. In the US, pasteurized and homogenized milk is considered the cause of many dietary and allergy problems by some, but you have to jump through hoops and pay through your nose to get raw milk. Advocacy groups have been established for this once simple thing.

Then there is the ‘eat local’ movement in the US. My Indian friends will remember their parents going to the “sabzi mandi” regularly to buy locally grown seasonal produce without upping their noses and calling themselves ‘locavores’. Specialty, and very expensive, restaurants have opened that profess to serve only locally grown fruits and vegetables. It really is quite difficult to find locally grown and seasonal fruits and vegetables in the US.

Now I see globalization not only bringing convenience foods to India, but actively trying to change dietary habits to sell more breakfast cereal and doughnuts. Modern Indians look forward to be able to buy packaged milk that lasts for a whole week. Children are growing up eating industrially-produced breakfast cereals and fast food, guaranteeing that food habits would have completely changed in just one generation. I want to scream, to shout, “Learn from other people’s mistake. Don’t do it!”. Here I am in a 'developed' country, struggling to feed my family seasonal and fresh food, and fighting an expensive uphill battle to achieve that, and there are people on the other end of the world happily giving that up to be 'modern'! The society in America has already seen what convenience food can do to a culture, the health of a populace and to the environment. It has changed crops to the extent that we have to seek out heirloom seeds to get tomatoes that have some flavor. Food industrialization has destroyed a way of life beyond recovery in the US, and bringing it back has turned into a legal, and political battle. That way of life is still healthy, and not forgotten in other countries, but it will be destroyed even faster in a mad dash towards consumerism and modernization. 

Is obesity and environmental damage an integral part of providing equal opportunities to the children of India? Do things have to come full circle again, if they have already been there once? Do we have to destroy a way of life, and then be forced to discover it as ‘exotic’ once again?