Let Food Lift Life

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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Preamble: Food processing aims to make food more shelf-stable, tastier, safer, digestible and nutritionally more available. It also helps plug demand-supply gaps across geographies thru transportability. Beyond population increase, these real positives are making it expand continuously. Additionally, it provides employment on a large scale (as all manufacturing tends to do) and earns revenue for the government that enables spends on infrastructure, security, health and education. On the flip side, all processing directly or indirectly consumes fossil fuels (whose stocks…

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Food processing would not have been a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide (and growing) if its products did not serve largely real consumer needs. Obviously, all food processing is not essential and some of it is actually undesirable. A lot of it has nevertheless become a part of our lives. The entrenched role of processed foods in our lives: We cook at home using nature’s gifts like fruits, vegetables, green spices, milk, water, lentils or pulses (daals), legumes and beans (kathols),…

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We use the following types of cooking inputs: Nature’s gifts like fruits, vegetables, green spices and lemon, oilseeds etc. – unprocessed when bought. Minimally processed inputs like cereals (e.g. wheat) and millets (e.g. pearl millet or bajra), lentils or pulses (daals), legumes and beans (kathol), dry whole spices etc. Processed inputs like salt, sugar, cooking oils, milk and its products, pure and compounded spice powders etc. Thus our home-cooked dishes have processing footprints of both domestic and industrial origins –…

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(Continued from Post #2). Obviously, dietary fiber, probiotic bacteria and most part of prebiotics  helping them grow selectively do not enter the blood stream and hence do not support life and growth thru consumption by body tissues. But they still constitute essential constituents of food as they support crucial life functions including immunity. The stand taken by this blog is that they should be considered part of ‘food’. A large part of the dietary anti-oxidants do enter the blood stream…

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