India on Foot

No time-saving machines; no labor-saving gizmos; no measuring cups and spoons; no fancy ovens; no cuisinarts; no blenders; no recipe books—apart from carefully handwritten slender, little notebook of recipes, Oriental and Occidental, appreciatively learned from visiting neighbors or friends; no cans; no frozen foods; no microwavables. No this and no that!

How, then, could so much diversity and productivity pour forth from a pre-modern kitchen of commoners, so totally devoid of the gadgets and gizmos that constitute the global economy?

For the price of one Pepsi Cola, how could she serve fifty people nutritious, divinely delicious, wholesome, and sensuously spicy Aam Ras, Jal Jeera, or Nimbu Pani—to name three out of a hundred fruit drinks served to the flow of visitors who dropped by unannounced every evening in the pre-telephone, pre-television era of sitting together sharing stories way past sunset? How, then, could she create so much, so slowly, enjoying not only the artistry, but also the leisure needed for its fullest flowering?

“Rasoi” is rooted in the Hindi word “Rasa”— which is in its essence almost untranslatable into any language from Hindi and Sanskrit, as are most of the core words referring to the sacred and the divine that defines Hindu culture and traditions; defining my peoples’ cosmovision. How, then, do I even begin to explain rasa to you in English—a word without which it is impossible to say anything significant or meaningful about any of the hundreds, nay thousands, of traditional Hindu arts and sciences, including that art of preparing and serving spicy, stunningly beautiful aromatic foods for fully enjoying the profound pleasures of eating?

One of the many meanings of “rasa” is “juice”—that quintessential flow of flavors that comes only from slow, deliberate ripening following from the organic rhythm of nature’s cycles—whether of fruits and vegetables or of peoples learning to live the good life. Rasoi (our Hindi word for “kitchen”) then literally means that special sacred place in the home where the juices flow naturally and organically, and therefore produce profound pleasure—erotic and sacred—psychophysiological, aesthetic and religious. Indians recognize that true artists in every field of creativity create diverse and unique kinds of rasa. Each art form—including the art of living—has its own intrinsic, defining rasa. Excellence of technique or techne is necessary but far from sufficient for generating rasa. Rasa only emerges when people work not only with the technical expertise that comes from the head, the product of sharp intellect; but, more importantly, when they cultivate habits of deepening the heart, while connecting head and heart to the slow, deep workings of the human soul. Only when food is prepared with love, reverence, and respect for not only the eater and the eaten, but for the Great Spirit—our Creator—the Great Giver do people become adept in the art of bringing out the juices, the rasa, of all the vegetables, fruits and other ingredients that go into the sublime and sacred preparation of food—located in the rasoi—at the center, the heart and the very core of Indian hearth and home.

(by Madu Suri Prakash)

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The word “yoked” is a direct translation of the word “yoga,” the disciplined union of mind, body and spirit, and one of the many great gifts of the Indians to the whole world. 

In celebrating Slow Food, quintessentially we celebrate the profound pleasures inextricably linked to the yoga of eating: yoking and reconnecting food for the mind (the classic conception of “education”) with foods for the body and soul.
This yoking hopefully heals; starting by healing the radical rupture, the pathological schizophrenia of Fast Food for Fast Lives that creates such huge fissures between mind, body and soul today.

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The Fast Food Nation: Eating in Absurdistan

by Madu Suri Prakash

Ray Kroc, the founding father of the Fast Food Nation, summarized its philosophy pithily with the following words: “This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ‘em, and I’m going to kill ‘em before they kill me. You’re talking about the American way for survival of the fittest” (Schlosser 2001:37).

A super success among industrial eaters, Kroc made his big bucks, just like the other founding fathers of Fast Food (“Your Trusted Friends” Schlosser titles them) by “dismissing any high-minded analysis of the fast food business” (Schlosser 2001:37); recognizing clearly and quickly that on the fast lane traveled daily by industrial eaters, there is neither time for rasa nor the freedom for fully enjoying the sensual, the sacred, or the human pleasures of Slow Food.

Adding to this Fast Food chorus in his own Disney World, one of model, top- ranking institution of the global economy, was Walt Disney. “It’s the law of the universe,” Disney declared, “that the strong shall survive and the weak must fall by the way, and I don’t give a damn what idealistic plan is cooked up, nothing can change that” (Schlosser 2001:37).

The empires built by these founding fathers reign supreme, thanks to all those who support it, including all Fast Food fans/addicts/junkies (you choose your favorite fast food descriptor).
In 1970 Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000 they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music combined.

No surprise, then, that one in six children, ages 6–19, are overweight; that the statistics for African-American and Latino children soars even higher; that 29 million students eating school lunches daily ingest meals riddled with fat, partly because the National School Lunch Program’s mandate is to provide a market for beef, dairy, and other agricultural subsidized surpluses.

Schlosser’s statistics in Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal open our eyes to the fast life lived stuffing our mouths and extending our bellies on fast food as a “savage servility slides by on grease” (Robert Lowell). Sliding, in fact, very long distances, the average American mouthful travels more than 1,000 miles so fast on superhighways that the guzzler of greasy stale cuisine has neither the awareness, time, nor wits to ask any real social questions, including: Where does this food come from? Who suffers and pays the price of its cheapness (99 cents or less) to industrial eaters? The long distances traveled and the industrial pace of life lived at computer time speed prevent industrial eaters/consumers from knowing much, if anything, about the pre-cooked food that is fast being shoveled into industrial mouths.

“Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato” (Berry 1972:78). Nor, for that matter, will they be able to differentiate between a potato plant and a chive, a cucumber and basil, or a cantaloupe and a strawberry (Heitman 2004).

School lunch and food plans are a part of the reason for this profound ignorance. As is the brutal fact that small, independent farmers, like the nation’s craftsmen and storekeepers, are being replaced by corporations, machines, and absentee owners (Berry 1972:78).

The fast food available in school and university cafeterias, and in every town’s identical strip malls, explains much of this destruction and violence, affirmed by socially or systemically engineered ignorance, fittingly called McEducation (Jain 2003). Consumers supporting “McDollars, McGreedy, McCancer, McMurder, McProfits, McGarbage” (quoted by Schlosser from the public pamphlets of London Greenpeace) have neither the time, patience, nor staying power to sit with basic questions of justice or sustainability: Who suffers and pays the price of its 99-cent cheapness for the industrial eater? What are we leaving for our children?

The distances traveled prevent industrial eaters/consumers from knowing much about the pre-cooked food that is fast shoveled into industrial mouths. No surprise, then, that at this time, national subsidy policies leave children more vulnerable than any other time in human history to developing asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure accompanying the national rise in obesity, or that farmers and ranchers have startling suicide rates and numbers of bank foreclosures; that healthy aquifers and healthy forests, lakes and rivers, including top soils, for the first time in the nation’s history, have joined the rapidly expanding list of endangered species.

Is there any hope for regenerating the affection, the care and the other virtues sung about, savored and digested in the Age of Slow Food—in India as well as in all the other lands tended and cared for by husbands and dwellers?

“Yes!” is being quietly affirmed by the thoughtful mouths and mindfully opened wallets of American Refuseniks of mainstream institutions, including Fast Food. Affirming the New American Dream, they are also called “Cultural Creatives” (Ray and Anderson 2000).

There are 50 million Cultural Creatives, according to some calculations, and in 50 million diverse ways, they are radically refusing to be chained and nailed down to the inhumanity of economics that drives the fast food nation.

In schools and campuses across the country, the New American Dream is bringing together in fresh, new, radical (that is, rooted) ways school lunches, families, family farms, gourmet chefs, and community-supported agriculturalists. So fresh, delicious, delectable are these new, revolutionary webs of inter-connectedness being woven that some observers of such initiatives are calling them “Grassroots Postmodernists,” while others write about the new “Natural Capitalists.”

Naturally, I smile when I hear these new “cool” academic words for our own ancient Hindi and Punjabi names I learned sitting on the lap of my under-educated Mother : from her “underdeveloped” world of Slow Food—perennial and sustainable.

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