Let Food Lift Life

A few things stand out about oxygen: 1. It is practically everywhere; even in water in small quantities. 2. It owes its properties, life-sustaining ones included, to its reactivity. 3. It can be indiscriminate in its reactivity i.e. it will not spare anything crossing its path under the right conditions. 4. Its presence is not noticeable to senses and hence its effects look mysterious.  5. Air, its only natural source, must be kept as clean as possible. 6. Its adverse…

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(Note: Visit post no. 2: Health, happiness, life and food, Part I, What are they? to understand what is meant by ‘life’ in this post and the next post to understand how life-giving oxygen can be life-threatening.) Preamble: There are striking similarities between water and oxygen: (i) Both are chemically reactive and are found everywhere. (ii) Both make life itself possible in different ways. (iii) The properties and effects of both need to be controlled and modulated, failing which they…

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THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ROLE The role of water in digestion of food: Starch, the most abundant natural nutritive carbohydrate in our food, breaks down into simpler  glucose in our digestive tract with the help of water and enzymes generically called amylases. (Amylose = starch, ‘ase’ indicates ‘ability to breakdown’). Such water-mediated chemical breakdown is called ‘hydrolysis’ – hydro = water and lysis = breakdown. All digestion is hydrolysis. Proteins digest into constituent amino acids and oils, into glycerol (or glycerine) and…

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We have grown up grasping the many facets of water and air; they are everywhere, life is impossible without them and they are in awe-inspiring abundance. Ironically, they happen to be two of the most abused materials in life with the result that they are getting polluted at an alarming rate. Despite their abundance, many people on this planet don’t get enough water to drink and clean air to breath. Irresponsible wastage and pollution of water and pollution of air…

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Nature’s gifts to us like fruits, vegetables, spices, grains and cereals, legumes and lentils etc are taken for granted both as inherently safe, barring unwanted crop protection chemicals on them.  We have to accept them as they come and make them safe thru our homely precautions. Processed foods can be classified in many ways; their utility or essentialness in our life is a useful one. Processed cooking ingredients and ready-to-eat bought-outs: Domestic cooking is inevitable, represents the bulk of our…

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Recently, during a delightful 45 days in the downtown area of a graceful American city, we frequented an all-in-one food store for our fresh and processed food requirements. Among them were several loaves of various types of sliced bread and, to my delight, each well-made loaf stayed fresh for over 10 days, taking considerable cooking load off our shoulders. I vividly remember simple bread slices dipped in spinach-tomato muti-daal followed by blueberries munched while watching some show. (Note, not bread…

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Present times demand being cost-conscious and hence cost-effective in all our endeavours. Milk powder is obviously costlier than equivalent milk and hence its potential as ‘milk on the shelf, in emergency’ would be questionable, especially in these times of easy and immediate availability of fluid milk. But the devil is often in the detail. Introduction: The cost of the equipment-use and of the fossil fuels to evaporate water from milk apart from the other standard ‘overheads’ are the obvious reasons…

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A case for any processing becomes ‘compelling’ when its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages. In fact, processing of all kinds has expanded simply by picking such cases of large value-addition, enhancing it further and mitigating the negatives. Improving the standard of living of millions of farmers spread all over India thru increased milk production by them and availability of a variety of nutritious products to consumers, is one such compelling general case. In this arena, concentrating milk, partly to condensed…

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Milk has always had the image of a near-complete food which obviously rubs off on its products – plain, fermented, fractionated, sweet. Hence its processing – whether to make products from it or simply to preserve it for future convenient use – has inherent merit. Here we talk about dried dairy wheys – also called whey powder – as the first among three dried industrial milk products which have all the attributes of milk and more. But to see why…

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For a case for any processing to become ‘compelling’, the advantages have to far outweigh the disadvantages. The processing has to be qualitatively so overwhelmingly beneficial that the quantification – always difficult and dicey – becomes redundant. In the next three posts, we talk about three India-specific compelling cases. Improving ‘net advantage’ of processing thru green energy: Food processing, like all processing, causes depletion of non-renewable fuels, pollutes the immediate environment (land, water and air), aids climate disasters thru release…

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