The ‘unfair’ foods!
We did not know when our love for clean white shirts, pearl white jewelry, super white walls, and snow-white floors transformed into an obsession for food made of white flour!
When were we tricked into believing that our staples like bread are supposed to be silky white similar to the complexion of people modeling for fairness creams?
We became the admirers of supple, super-soft cakes, providing empty calories and biscuits made of ultrarefined flour, hidden sugars & tons of chemicals, coz, they ..umm.. are smooth!
The dopamine nirvana of eating sugars & super white flour never led us to question the exploitation it is causing to our health. Have we brought our obsession with perfect velvety achromatic beauty standards to our food?
When did we stop looking for nutrients and start choosing foods for their ‘face value’? Yes, we eat our food with our eyes first, but how did our vision narrow to this White-Bias? How are we okay eating stuff resulting in metabolic aberrations?
Maida (white flour) offering nothing but empty calories and, of course, indigestible inflammatory ‘gluten’ has been heavily glamorized for years. So much so that it is now a part of our sandwiches, pasta, biscuits, cakes, biscotti, pastries, pizzas, and perhaps, everything we love to eat!
Once food industries discovered the technological mightiness of gluten and its enormous success in packaged foods, extensive farming of high gluten varieties of wheat, started. This gradually caused a structural change in the original gluten, which became indigestible to the human gut causing several inflammatory disorders.
Millets (ancient grains)- Non-White (read brown), coarse cereals, are nutritional jackpots that can effectively replace our multivitamins and reduce risks of diabetes, cancers, heart attacks, etc. They have had a reputation for being boring, unpalatable, and not-so-appetizing food.
In India, particularly after the green revolution, Millets were completely eroded from most Indian thalis. Our food became wheat/rice heavy. Consequently, millennials like myself believed that there were only three kinds of cereal that exist- wheat, rice, and corn.
With the booming consumption of burgers, pasta, noodles, pizza, food technology innovation also shrunk to exploring just white flour, experimenting only gluten-based products.
I am not arguing against wheat here, it is these profit-driven, insensitive, unhealthy, skewed trends and their consequences that have me agitated.
As a food enthusiast and someone who studied foods for years, I only want to make people understand that grains are supposed to be coarse that is how mother nature created them. Grains are also supposed to have colors other than white, moreover, grains are supposed to be Nourishing.
