Murungai, parangi, sakkaravalli rustic veggies or wonderfood

We read every year of malnutrition related deaths in Maharashtra, children who are infected by out of date iron supplements at noon meal centres, poor pre-natal and post-natal health care for rural women. It is not that rich and famous in the cities don’t face this, but there are enough and more clinics and hundreds of crores worth of nutritional supplement that get sold to compensate for the carbs and white they will cut from their diets to stay slim and fit.

I lived my early days, till I moved to Bombay with my first job in 1990 in a small town, with close connection to villages, though not much of nature. There have been certain cheap, but highly nutritional food that was available for the poor, without much fuss they consumed them.

Source of iron, anti-oxidants and many medicinal value is the moringa or murungai tree, drumstick tree. The leaves are cooked with dal and eaten, the flowers may be some had recipes to cook them, and of course the staple veggie of the sambhar murungaikkai. In village and small towns, every hut, every house would have a murungai tree. This didn’t need much care, and all the water that is used to wash the rice, then utensils washed with ashes of the wood stove all would be thrown at the tree, giving it a good supply of water and nutrients. This rich food was available free of cost to the poorest and probably they would never need to take iron supplements.

North Tamil Nadu, the area I am most familiar with started urbanizing fast, and one of the major casualties of that has been construction and loss of green cover. Trees like tamarind, moringa, neem which used to be in abundance providing nutrition, medicine and much needed clean air slowly disappeared. With that we have also been witnessing the deterioration in health, which is a separate story.

In Tamil there is a saying – “ilaithavanukku elllu, kozhuthavanukku kollu” which translates as sesame for the lean, and horsegram for the fat. Sesame or til, ellu was not a difficult one to grow, and it used to be most commonly used oil seed in Tamil Nadu and Andhra. Til is rich in calcium, the cold pressed til also leftover was a great animal feed. Til seed is also used commonly across the country to make til ladoo where its combination with jiggery making it a healthy and nutritional sweet. Rice mixed with til powder used to given to lactating mothers, til ladoos to the girls on attaining puberty, loads of sesame oil to the girls probably taking care of the need for the nutrition they need at that age and time. This practice has almost disappeared with urbanization. Not only that today til tel or sesame oil has become costly, and at around Rupees 350/litre a luxury for the poor. While we are so happy to import palm oil to supply cheap oil to the poor, no one is paying attention to growing a crop that is easy to do. Lactating mothers don’t have to look for folic acid tablets if they have grown up on a steady diet of sesame oil or til ladoos.

Outside our elementary school an old lady used to sit selling all and sundry eatables, groundnuts, country dates and what not. When it is the season for sweet potatoes, sakkarkandis or sakkaravalli kizhangu she used to bring them boiled with just salt. I was not allowed to eat food cooked outside then, but to compensate for my urge to eat the boiled sakkarkandis grandmom used to make them at home for me sometimes. Otherwise sakkarkandis was very much part of the cuisine going into sambhar, dry sabzi. Today, I find these sakkarkandis retail for as much as Rupees 80/kg. Why can’t we produce more of these and make them a cheap source of beta carotene?

Another source of beta carotene that used to grow abundantly was red pumpkin, laal bhopla or parangikkai, a backyard vine that used to be seen on top of every hut in the villages in Tamil Nadu. In the Tamil month of Margazhi (Dec-Jan) the frontyards used to be cleaned, coated with cowdung, kolam drawn and a parangikkai flower in glowing orange used to adorn the kolam. That too it would  be placed on a heap of cowdung ball. Parangikkaai unlike the Mediterranean doesn’t go into making an exotic cold soup, but everyday subzi with a little jiggery and grated coconut, a koottu cooked with lentils or even the raw fruit added to curd to make pachadi. This is once again vanishing from our villages and towns, though in north India it is still a commonly used vegetable and probably still the cheapest. It is a short crop, easy to grow and can be a good source of nutrition.

We hear of sugar tax being imposed by some states and being suggested for the country as a whole to fight growing menace of diabetes and obesity. But, down south there is a healthier option, karuppatti or palm jaggery. In my childhood the white sugar was expensive rationed and consumed by the well to do. The poor bought blocks of karuppattis to either go with the sukku kaapi (dried ginger brew) or regular coffee or tea. Today the panais, or the palm trees that had great ecological significance are vanishing and so the palm jaggery price has sky rocketed. At Rupees 350/kg even close to where it is made, palm sugar is a gourmet item today.

There is no need for a WHO, ministry of health and major projects to keep these simple everyday food reaching the poor. Let us not rob them of food that worked as medicine and try to sell them calcium tables and iron tonics. Simple, gram panchayat level efforts to grow these foods, and make them available locally should do good in the long run. Like Khadi let us not make the poor man’s food exotic and put them on the supermarket shelves with fancy labels.