India and Its Food : A Predicament of the Modern Consumption Pattern
This article is a reflective piece on Rujuta Diwekar’s interview on her published books during LitFestX, 2015. The link to her video is provided towards the end of the article.
Rujuta Diwekar’s understanding of the system of Food and Nutrition in India is comprehensively organised and interrogative in nature. She verbally maps out the systems as well as the sub-systems directly or indirectly participating in generation of certain practices, resulting in creation of lifestyles along with which come a plethora of diseases, complications and trends, the onus of which, she attributes, lies not on the individual but the social context within which this individual is located in a country like India.
The broad classifications of the sub-systems operating in the system of Nutrition:
If one were to categorise her ideas into sub-systems congruently functioning in the country, they would be the systems of Agriculture, Health, Concepts or Philosophies, Mechanisms of Intervention, Development, Culture and Disease. She says that there’s a direct connection between the systems of Health and Agriculture which is currently untapped or unrecognised but if it did get noticed and imaginatively was balanced through a loop, the effects of it would have been on the larger social canvas of the country which stands divisible into occupation and class. She says that in an agrarian society like ours, pulse and grain growth should have ideally helped us attain soil nourishment for the restoration of agriculture in the long term, the direct benefits of which would be for the rich consumer to take at the time of a failing nutrition pattern she observes. This double burden of malnutrition, as she explains, could be resolved if the rich Indian was a direct consumer of large amounts of nutrition, cultivated by the small Farmer, ensuring the equilibrium of the multifaceted economy of the country.
The interconnected web of multiple elements:
She talks of local food as the primary recipient of grain growth and explores the East v/s West narrative within which current trends like that of ‘Superfoods’ are emerging. Amidst the expansive geography of the country, she iterates, there is an apparent change of cultures, topography, occupation as well as what constitutes the regional food. The emphasis placed on consuming the regional and cultural cuisine is a way to attain better digestion, maintenance of weight and fitness.
Interestingly, she also tries to capture the role of the development sector in forming an invisible liaison with health and disease in general. She establishes that the costs of diseases caused by adoption of certain lifestyles that provide for an individual’s ‘comfort’ in the present day scenario are a direct subtraction from the country’s GDP, the remains of which are again being utilised for further designing of this ‘better’ lifestyle by the sector. Only if the emphasis was placed on this design pertaining to infrastructure, models of accessibility, productivity and overall fitness of the people living in this demography, the resources could be better utilised and disease would be prevented instead of healed or cured. A visual mapping of these connections and loops is presented below.
What mechanisms are involved in re-doing a system?
In this case, through mechanisms like tapping the popular consciousness of younger generations by making celebrity figures endorse a certain food from a local cuisine and marketing a set of ideas, she aims to engage in a reinforcing loop ensuring that the issue at hand, ‘diabesity’ (a type of diabetes that develops in close association with obesity) is tackled. Additionally, she talks of educational and literary methods like Grandma’s Test for young children enrolled in schools, again, being used to reinforce an idea in simple, graspable versions of it. She also mentions the idea of ‘Food Miles’, where she suggests that the distance the food travels is directly proportional to the weight gain leading to obesity, which is probably another tactic to drive attention to locally grown food.
However, is ill-health produced only by physiological effects of the environment of the individual?
As much as her understanding of the system of disease and nutrition is highlighting important facets of the situation, there are identifiable gaps that need a thorough contemplation before mechanisms are further developed. For instance, she often brings back the conversation on ‘fitness’ being an equivalent of ‘weight loss’, and fleetingly refers to the ‘fat body’ being a problematic, mostly for the woman, once even referring to ‘fat’ as the byproduct of pregnancy and the supposed reformative action to be able to get back to ‘fitness’ by ‘losing the fat’. There are two problems with this idea. One is that, accumulation of fat is in a lot of cases not a result of lack of exercise or bad nutrition but actually caused by stress, hormonal disorders, food disorders, gastrointestinal disabilities, psychological conditions like anorexia nervosa, a socially produced condition in the world of women. Mapping these on our larger understanding of the system could help in introducing a set of dimensions that would prohibit the situation from being homogenised or oversimplified. In addition, she doesn’t chart migration as a probable cause of shift in nutritional adaptability of the body and its subsequent failure to make itself reach a healthy equilibrium.
The other problem with this idea is the constant importance laid onto ‘getting back in shape’ which is open to cultural understanding as well as ideas of prevalent body images produced in popular culture, dictating one’s understanding of what it means to be in shape. Of course, this can be quantified medically into body weight and mass index but there are other aspects to this phenomenon which if explored, can help devise a more inclusive language for addressing the problem. The criticism is not to take away from her input but rather to acknowledge the gaps that remain untapped in the system.
The visual map displays the elements in a range of colours, amongst which these gaps are a shade of red-orange.
What does such a discussion lead us to?
As mentioned in the beginning, the idea is to refigure our perception of the genesis of a certain pandemic problem a particular generation intersecting with certain income groups of a country is facing. It becomes imperative to dissect disease and nutrition completely in order to assess the inflows and outflows of the system. Upon dissection, it is the designer’s responsibility to find connections, gaps and devise mechanisms to tackle the same. Based on her example, the simpler the mechanisms, the better it is.
Link to the video :
