What foods did your ancestors love Aparna Pallavi
Last year, I was living with
this indigenous family in India.
One afternoon,
the young son was eating,
and at the sight of me,
he quickly hid his curry behind his back.
It took a lot of persuasion to get him
to show me what he was eating.
It turned out to be moth larvae,
a traditional delicacy
with the Madia indigenous people.
I cried,
“Oh my God, you’re eating these!
I hope there’s a little left for me!”
I saw disbelief in the boy’s eyes.
“You … eat these?”
“I love these,” I replied.
I could see he did not trust me one bit.
How could an urban, educated woman
like the same food as him?
Later, I broached the subject
with his father,
and it turned out to be
a mighty touchy affair.
He said things like,
“Oh, only this son of mine
likes to eat it.
We tell him, ‘Give it up. It’s bad.’
He doesn’t listen, you see.
We gave up eating all this ages back.”
“Why?” I asked.
“This is your traditional food.
It is available in your environment,
it is nutritious,
and – I can vouch for it – delicious.
Why is it wrong to eat it?”
The man fell silent.
I asked,
“Have you been told that your food is bad,
that to eat it is backward,
not civilized?”
He nodded silently.
This was one of the many, many times
in my work with indigenous people in India
that I witnessed shame around food,
shame that the food you love to eat,
the food that has been
eaten for generations,
is somehow inferior,
even subhuman.
And this shame is not limited
to out-of-the-way, icky foods
like insects or rats, maybe,
but extends to regular foods:
wild vegetables,
mushrooms, flowers –
basically, anything that is foraged
rather than cultivated.
In indigenous India,
this shame is omnipresent.
Anything can trigger it.
One upper-caste vegetarian schoolmaster
gets appointed in a school,
within weeks, children are telling
their parents it’s yucky to eat crabs
or sinful to eat meat.
A government nutrition program
serves fluffy white rice,
now no one wants to eat
red rice or millets.
A nonprofit reaches this village with
an ideal diet chart for pregnant women.
There you go.
All the expectant mothers are feeling sad
that they cannot afford apples and grapes.
And people just kind of forget the fruits
that can be picked off the forest floor.
Health workers,
religious missionaries,
random government employees
and even their own educated children
are literally shouting it down
at the indigenous people
that their food is not good enough,
not civilized enough.
And so food keeps disappearing,
a little bit at a time.
I’m wondering if you all
have ever considered
whether your communities would have
a similar history around food.
If you were to talk
to your 90-year-old grandmother,
would she talk about foods
that you have never seen or heard of?
Are you aware how much
of your community’s food
is no longer available to you?
Local experts tell me
that the South African food economy
is now entirely based on imported foods.
Corn has become the staple,
while the local sorghum, millets,
bulbs and tubers are all gone.
So are the wild legumes and vegetables,
while people eat potatoes and onions,
cabbages and carrots.
In my country,
this loss of food is colossal.
Modern India is stuck with rice, wheat
and diabetes.
And we have totally forgotten foods
like huge varieties of tubers,
tree saps, fish, shellfish,
oil seeds,
mollusks, mushrooms, insects,
small, nonendangered animal meats,
all of which used to be available
right within our surroundings.
So where has this food gone?
Why are our modern food baskets so narrow?
We could talk about the complex
political economic and ecological reasons,
but I am here to talk about
this more human phenomenon of shame,
because shame is the crucial point
at which food actually
disappears off your plate.
What does shame do?
Shame makes you feel small,
sad,
not worthy,
subhuman.
Shame creates a cognitive dissonance.
It distorts food stories.
Let us take this example.
How would you like to have
a wonderful, versatile staple
that is available abundantly
in your environment?
All you have to do is gather it,
dry it, store it,
and you have it for your whole year
to cook as many different
kinds of dishes as you want with it.
India had just such a food,
called “mahua,”
this flower over there.
And I have been researching this food
for the past three years now.
It is known to be highly nutritious
in indigenous tradition
and in scientific knowledge.
For the indigenous,
it used to be a staple
for four to six months a year.
In many ways, it is very similar
to your local marula,
except that it is a flower, not a fruit.
Where the forests are rich,
people can still get enough to eat
for the whole year
and enough spare to sell.
I found 35 different dishes with mahua
that no one cooks anymore.
This food is no longer
even recognized as a food,
but as raw material for liquor.
You could be arrested
for having it in your house.
Reason? Shame.
I talked to indigenous people
all over India
about why mahua is no longer eaten.
And I got the exact same answer.
“Oh, we used to eat it
when we were dirt-poor and starving.
Why should we eat it now?
We have rice or wheat.”
And almost in the same breath,
people also tell me
how nutritious mahua is.
There are always stories of elders
who used to eat mahua.
“This grandmother of ours,
she had 10 children,
and still she used to work so hard,
never tired, never sick.”
The exact same dual narrative
every single where.
How come?
How does the same food
get to be seen as very nutritious
and a poverty food,
almost in the same sentence?
Same goes for other forest foods.
I have heard story
after heartrending story
of famine and starvation,
of people surviving on trash
foraged out of the forest,
because there was no food.
If I dig a little deeper,
it turns out the lack
was not of food per se
but of something respectable like rice.
I asked them,
“How did you learn
that your so-called trash is edible?
Who told you that certain
bitter tubers can be sweetened
by leaving them in a stream overnight?
Or how to take the meat
out of a snail shell?
Or how to set a trap for a wild rat?”
That is when they start
scratching their heads,
and they realize that they learned it
from their own elders,
that their ancestors had lived
and thrived on these foods for centuries
before rice came their way,
and were way healthier
than their own generation.
So this is how food works,
how shame works:
making food and food traditions disappear
from people’s lives and memories
without their even realizing it.
So how do we undo this trend?
How do we reclaim our beautiful
and complex systems of natural food,
food given to us lovingly by Mother Earth
according to her own rhythm,
food prepared by our foremothers with joy
and are eaten by our forefathers
with gratitude,
food that is healthy, local, natural,
varied, delicious,
not requiring cultivation,
not damaging our ecology,
not costing a thing?
We all need this food,
and I don’t think I have to tell you why.
I don’t have to tell you
about the global health crisis,
climate change, water crisis,
soil fatigue,
collapsing agricultural systems,
all that.
But for me, equally important reasons
why we need these foods
are the deeply felt ones,
because food is so many things, you see.
Food is nourishment, comfort,
creativity, community,
pleasure, safety, identity
and so much more.
How we connect with our food
defines so much in our lives.
It defines how we connect with our bodies,
because our bodies are ultimately food.
It defines our basic sense of connection
with our existence.
We need these foods most today
to be able to redefine our space as humans
within the natural scheme of things.
And are we needing
such a redefinition today?
For me, the only real answer is love,
because love is the only thing
that counters shame.
And how do we bring more of this love
into our connections with our food?
For me, love is, in a big way,
about the willingness
to slow down,
to take the time to feel,
sense, listen, inquire.
It could be listening to our own bodies.
What do they need
beneath our food habits, beliefs
and addictions?
It could be taking time out
to examine those beliefs.
Where did they come from?
It could be going back into our childhood.
What foods did we love then,
and what has changed?
It could be spending
a quiet evening with an elder,
listening to their food memories,
maybe even helping them
cook something they love
and sharing a meal.
Love could be about remembering
that humanity is vast
and food choices differ.
It could be about showing
respect and curiosity
instead of censure
when we see somebody enjoying
a really unfamiliar food.
Love could be taking the time to inquire,
to dig up information,
reach out for connections.
It could even be
a quiet walk in the fynbos
to see if a certain plant
speaks up to you.
That happens.
They speak to me all the time.
And most of all,
love is to trust that
these little exploratory steps
have the potential to lead us
to something larger,
sometimes to really surprising answers.
An indigenous medicine woman once told me
that love is to walk on Mother Earth
as her most beloved child,
to trust that she values
an honest intention
and knows how to guide our steps.
I hope I have inspired you
to start reconnecting
with the food of your ancestors.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)