The sattvic life; or, how I accidentally joined a cult

Well, I wasn’t sure I would, but I survived a month of Sivananda Vedanta. I’ll start by saying that I would not reccomend this organization unless you are looking for a thoroughly dogmatic philosophy and REALLY like chanting bajans in a way that resembles drunken sailors more than it resembles divine worship. It was intense, though certainly educational. Our daily schedule was as follows:
5:30 am: morning bell
6 am: Satsang (meditation followed by an hour of chanting)
7:30 am: chai
8 am: asana class (teaching practice)
10 am: brunch
11 am: free time
12: lecture (chanting lessons or Bhagavad Gita lessons)
1:30: herbal tea
2: philosophy lecture
4: asana class
6: dinner
6:30-7:45: “karma yoga” (do free labor for an hour)
Insert 2 minute cold shower here
8 – 9:45 : Satsang
(8:30: hopefully sneak out of Satsang to have an hour of free time to relax before falling asleep.)

(here we all are in our uniforms in the Shiva Hall, not listening particularly well to a Bhagavad Gita lecture.)
There is no time for sleep, or personal space, and the swami who gave lectures is apparently going senile, but this is easily written off as enlightenment. But I digress, if you want a real rant, talk to me personally.
I decided to come to the Sivananda ashram to take a course on yoga so I could learn the physical practice better, and so I would actually have a good foundation in the philosophy (which, considering it uses words like “there are 72,000 nadis (astral tubes) in the body”, I find mostly just humorous now). But I was also aware that Sivananda yoga places a good amount of stress on the “proper diet” aspect of the Five Points of Yoga (they have a great cookbook published), so I was eagerly awaiting that part of our education.
I will try to get straight to the point now…
Proper diet includes both how and what you eat; it restricts foods (it is vegetarian, very little salt, no onions or garlic, little spice), fasting for a day or two is promoted, and one should eat in complete silence (you would not believe how many times I heard “OM please eat in silence! Eating is a spiritual occasion, not a social event. OM” in the past month) with reverence for food and the God who created it. Personally, I think a lot of the rules in about food and the body in yoga philosophy come from the idea that the physical world holds us down from unity with the divine so we need to constantly scrub ourselves clean of any trace of animal instinct or natural needs. In theory I actually understand this, within the context of the whole Vedanta philosophy, but it’s still a bit unnerving.
Now, in yoga philosophy there are three types, or “gunas,” much different from the ayurvedic “doshas”. They are Sattvic (pure, balanced, on the path to godliness or enlightenment), Rajasic (over-energetic, argumentative, egoistic), and Tamasic (apparently Tamasic people practice voodoo and black magic and do not listen to rules). Foods can likewise fall into these categories, and at the ashram we were fed only sattvic foods.
Tamasic foods are sour, rotten, or pickled foods, over cooked foods, as well as meat and eggs.
Rajasic foods are spicy, sugary, coffee, tea, fermented foods…basically anything especially pungent
Sattvic foods are: vegetarian, including grains and pulses, some ethically produced dairy,organic fruits and vegetables, calm spices like cardamom, and all these things should be as lightly cooked as possible.
In all honesty, the ashram food is my favorite food I’ve had in India (much of it is just typical Keralan food with a few tweaks.

(popular ashram legend holds that the pink “herbal water” they serve contains herbs meant to suppress “sexual energy”…..)
Apparently, according to the philosophy here, it’s not just the type of food that matters, but all the “karma” that is related to the food. “Ahimsa” (non-injury) is a major part of yoga philosophy, and it includes humans, our selves, the environment, and animals. So if there is any hidden cost to a food item it technically should affect the energy and karma we assimilate into our bodies. Ironically the ashram’s food is not organic, and a lot of the products they sell at the “Health Hut” (snack shop) are super processed (like “cheese product” slices) and just purchased at the big supermarket in the nearest city. But that is just one of many hypocrisies, so I think the idea is to take what we learn and apply it ourselves, regardless of how an ashram (basically a business in this case) is run.

It’s interesting to ponder – think about how your body and mind feels after different types of meals. In some ways I think there might actually be something to this three gunas of food thing; I was speaking to a woman from the North of India who pointed out that up north life moves faster and people are much more agressive, and that North Indian food is famous for nothing if not for it’s spiciness and more frequent acceptance of meat. Although it’s likely also relevant in understanding the South Indian food/yogic lifestyle link that the two Swamis to whom this organization is dedicated were born and raised in Kerala.
Really though, in the end, I think the takeaway message was that what is truly important is being conscious of the impacts of your choices in life, and revering, enjoying, and being thankful for your food.

* a note: for all my complaining, I met some really great people – everyone in the course was amazing and friendly and made the experience worth it. Also, after vising the famed Amritapuri ashram, Sivananda seems like heaven on earth.

Better in Goa

So say the shirts and bags at souvenir shops, anyway…

Heading further south, I spent New Years in Goa (the state south of Maharashtra), which, if you ask me, hardly counts as India. The whole state (at least along the coast) is basically a giant beach resort filled with Brits, Germans, and Russians (well, not entirely, but mostly) looking for a tropical getaway. It almost might as well be the Caribbean or Mexico based on the architecture and the palm trees and the Westerners sunning themselves on white sand beaches (while being gawked at by male Indian tourists – this is really an issue that made the tropical vacation much less fun than it ought to be, but at least the locals try to chase these guys off). There is a reason for this, though; Goa was under Portugese control until 1962. It is mainly Catholic (there are nativity scenes everywhere – a bit bewildering in India) and the majority of the buildings are old Portugese colonial houses. Now, I’m basically just on vacation, but along with my photos, a note on the food: being on the coast, one of the main attractions is the fresh seafood that you can eat on the beach cooked in a Portugese-inspired style (whole grilled with a blend of red Indian spices inside). Being a Catholic state, vegetarianism is much less prevalent, and fish is especially important (apparently in Gujarat, where most people are vegetarian, fish is MUCH cheaper – but just as good – because it sells so poorly!) So there is a nice healthy industry of small-scale fishermen and little restauarants lining the beach grilling up seafood.

(above: dinner on the beach. Below: some of the day’s catch being dried in the sun (to save for later!))

It’s worth noting if you come to Goa that most restaurants do Goan food really well, but really are not so skilled at the North Indian food that they feel obligated to put on the menu – something I find interesting since in most other states the good restaurants tend to serve food from other parts of India. I guess the fact that the economy mostly relies on tourism means that the restaurants are best when they serve the local cuisine. Of course if you manage to have lunch at someone’s home, it’s even better.

I also got to go to the market with the woman who authored a cookbook I bought, and she gave me recipes to cook loofah and okra, so I picked some up at the local market. Apparently everything is in season basically all the time in this climate!

(above: a kind of berry that is similar to black pepper – used in the local variety of coconut curry; young coconuts and some strange kind of fruit; vegetables, on the right is a sort of fern used as a vegetable in local dishes)

(above: making puri; kids selling onions; cucumbers!)

(above are two things I saw that I think are really cool. The first is where you go to buy chicken. They get the chicken from out back where they live, weigh it live, kill it about 10 feet away and then pluck it and cut it however you want. Reason I think this is great: you know exactly what you’re getting, where it comes from, how it was treated, AND if you’re eating meat it’s good to recognize that an animal gave its life for that dinner! And the other is a shop where people bring their whole grains (wheat, millet, rice, etc.) and have it ground to their preferred coarseness depending on personal preference and what they plan to cook.)

And a few more shots:

(above is this odd local new years tradition where people make an “old man” effigy representing the past year. Kids stand by the road asking for money to “save the dying old man” – surprisingly, everyone actually gives them money… – and then at midnight all the “old men” are burned in bonfires. Some guys plopped this old man down next to our dinner table, and it was strangely reminisient of Weekend at Bernie’s…slightly disturbing)

Making Farming Work

Back in Pune (it was just too cold in Dehradun!), I found out that my hosts from my last visit actually have two different agriculture projects going on! They are very cool projects, if I were them I would have been bragging all the time. But anyway, now that I’ve come back for a few days I got to go visit each of the farms.
The first was started in the 70s for, it seems, two reasons. It was created as a trial project to see how water use could be more efficient (conserving water and creating agriculture in typically dry places simultaneously) and fairly distributed (in Environmentalist speak this is “water democracy”). Sucess of the project in villages meant that it would actually be labor and cost effective to continue farming, which helped slow the exodus from the countryside (people from the village had moved into the city and were set to work by the government literally breaking stones for lack of other employment). The founder of the project wrangled up some engineering students, did a bunch of surveys on what would be needed in different villages, convinced the government to give some test land (which of course was some dry sloping land that no one wanted, got funding from a charitable organization, and set to work setting up the water project. What resulted was basically a big dam to catch water at the bottom of the slope during monsoon season, and trees to keep the soil in place during the same monsoons. It added a huge amount of available water to the village farmers, and was distributed to them based on water for 1.5 acres per person in the family (the estimate of how much land a single person could work on an organic traditional farm),assuming the recipient agreed to not grow water intensive cash crops like sugarcane. So the associated farms now grow food crops that people in the area use in everyday cooking (wheat, tomatoes, greens, etc), and what they don’t use themselves they sell in Pune or Mumbai.
The organization has its own farm, which is what I visited. There they basically research what kind of plants they can grow using little water, making compost, and how to retain water in a very dry climate (I think there was some mistranslation, but I was told there has been no rain all year).
(sorry for the bad photos, I forgot my camera so all I had was a phone…)

(naturally growing neem trees)

(the water reservoir)

(millet, a traditional grain that uses way less water than rice or wheat)

(compost!)
The most basic thing I took away from this is that even in areas where people don’t think the land is useful, making local agriculture difficult, there are many innovative (and environmentally friendly) ways to create jobs and provide food all over (without GMOs or chemicals!!)

The second place I visited leaned more towards the permaculture side of things. It is the pet project of this lovely older woman who is interested in keeping agricultural communities alive, and popularizing organic growing methods and not using too much water. She has all kinds of crops growing, and almost entirely in mixed crop fields (which is great because the crops give and take different nutrients to the soil, so you get more variety and don’t need to treat the soil as much.) She is also an adamant mulcher – leaving old leaves, coconut husks and weeds (pulled up) on the soil to keep as many nutrients in the soil as possible, and to help with water retension. She seems to not yet have found a great market for her crops though; she said it is probably because not many people are aware of organics, and anyway organic produce tends to be more expensive. But in any case it is a great model farm and there’s a lot of variety of produce on a small patch of land.

(taro field; chiles drying in the sun; my host explaining the various crops; wheat fields with papaya trees; mixed crop of millet, chickpeas and sugarcane)

I also learned a lot of random facts, but one thing I thought was really cool was how even “weeds” are useful in Indian cooking, or in Ayurveda. Many of the weeds are used as green vegetables, have religious significance, or make nicely scented shampoo. This leads me to believe that Indian cuisine and tradition makes for the perfect backdrop for introducing more permaculture methods, because then you actually like most of the weeds!

(a weed that is edible and is also used as an offering to Ganesh; wild tomatoes that pop up on the sides of fields; flowers planted with crops acting as a natural pesticide; apparently the chiles on the bush that grow upwards are spiciest)

And of course who could go out to the countryside without some homemade snacks and a picnic lunch?

24 hours in Delhi

Most often when people talk about the time they spend in Delhi when visiting India, it is accompanied by a heavy sigh, or at least an eyeroll. I was really expecting to spend my time in Delhi by hiding out in a mocie theatre watching Desi Boys to just completely avoid the place. But I’m glad I did not do that (although I still do want to see that movie…). In one day in the city I think it is safe to saythat Delhi is where the contradictions of India really show – New Delhi and Old Delhi, one with wide (and surprisingly clean) streets, the other a series of narrow passages and teeming with people (and trash. Bicycle rickshaws on the roads and the cleanest metro I’ve ever seen underground. It is, contrary to what I expected, a pretty incredible place. Delhi was on many respects the India I was expecting before I got here or had any idea what I was getting myself into. One thing Delhi has that I had yet to see (and kept trying to find) was a huge old street-turned-spice market. Which was…incredible – you can smell it from 5 blocks away. And slightly terrifying – you basically get pulled along in a current of bodies, and if you want to stop have to fight your way into the miniscule amount of standing room in the shops.

(this was a very exciting place for me, hence the dorky grin…)

Spices are really an odd thing, if you ask me, to talk about when thinking of local food. On the one hand, spices are incrediby important for distingushing regional, and even individual, variation of cooking. India as a nation – since as long as the Occident has been in contact with it, I imagine – has been famous for its spices. But oddly enough the place where this El Dorado actually exists is quite far from where spices are grown in India (mostly in Kerala, fyi). With the spices we can still talk about national local foods, but not really regional.

One thing I think would be interesting to research more (though I have not delved into this as of yet) is how the domestic spice trade has affected its social and political (and culinary, of course) development throughout India’s very long history. Particularly because the spice market was in a markedly Muslim part of town, I assume there is a very long history of spices and immigration and cultural mixing. I’m going to need to find some food historians (or books…) to see what I can find on that.
What this has me thinking about is what I said a while back about traditions (how in Kerala the traditions led to using a lot of local ingredients. But really, if traditional North Indian food uses spices from the South, how far back do we need to go to find a cuisine with truly local ingredients? (and would we really consider it “cuisine”?) This is leading me to think more about how silly, or at least culturally a bit sad, “eating local” might really be if it’s followed to intensely. (Unless you’re hunter-gatherers….) What do we gain and lose as the acceptable window of where food comes from narrows? I do still believe that it is ridiculous to fly grapes from Chile to New York in December (eat some pears, people), but is there some kind of healthy compromise?
Well, I don’t actually have an answer to that question right now. So, for the moment all I can leave you with is those thoughts that are now simmering in my brain, and some pictures that can do no justice to the experience of this place.

(that last one is from a totally different part of town, but I had to include some textiles!)

Friday Market

Well, the [biased] politics seem not to have been inspiring, so I’ll just make this post some photos of the Friday market. In any case, not much is going on here – like I said, they don’t really *need* the volunteers here, so I’ve just gotten lots of reading done…we also took a trip to the Friday market, where I leaned about this strange dessert that is essentially just deep fried sugar…the epitome of Indian food.

Also, apparently you can hitchhike with the massive, brightly colored trucks. They play VERY loud music, and you just get tossed around on the seat. Good fun.

That’s all I have for right now. Unless anyone is interested in microbial life in soils (and why you shouldn’t till the soil), or how to make good compost (tip: add cardboard).

Bijavidyapeeth

Moving on from the town selling itself to spiritual junkies, I’ve moved on to tourism for eco-foodies, if you will. I’ll be spending three weeks at the organic farm and seed bank campus Bijavidyapeeth, run by the organization Navdanya (which is run by “ecofeminist” Dr. Vandana Shiva). I think I’ll leave the “ecofeminism” part of this alone, because I feel it’s unproductive (I don’t understand how replacing patriarchy with matriarchy is conducive to equality, really…), although it could add an interesting dimension to my research, to be sure. But I’ll start by saying that anyone who argues that organic farming is too labour intensive might want to volunteer here and evaluate that idea. I say that because there is very little farm work that the volunteers are really necessary to get done – the few regular local farmhands seem to have it covered pretty well. My days are spent reading, doing a bit of yoga, and an hour or two of weeding or grain sorting- if I feel like it. (Well, except for the days that were spent violently ill huddled between a few comforters praying for a space heater and some insulated walls to magically appear.) Pretty nice way to volunteer…

(above: doing some afternoon weeding – the ‘weeds’ we actually had for lunch the next day – lunch in the sunshine (after a freezing morning!), and the campus)

(fields, including tumeric; one of many forms of composting on the farm; sorting grain)
But anyway, the mission of the farm is actually quite important. It is set up as a model of a traditional (organic) farm with a special focus on preserving biodiversity as opposed to using GM (genetically modified, aka evil) crops. Did you know there are something like 200,000 different types of indigenous rice in India? What is more, the different varieties are already naturally evolved to be drought tolerant, or flood resistent, or repellant of some pest, etc. And yet for some reason a handful (like, 10) very large companies who make A LOT of money off Indian farmers have decided to convince us all that the only way to feed the world is to genetically modify one or two varieties of rice and grow them in HUGE monocultures to do the same thing that nature already did. Hmm…logic?

So the point of the farm is a few things, but mainly to show that organic farming is productive and economically viable, and to grow all these heritage crops (various vegetables, rices, different kinds of millet and wheat), to sell and to save the seeds in the seed bank for just in case the world really goes crazy and we lose them.

(above: the seed bank building, with loofah drying in the sun!, and some “mango ginger”)
The important thing about doing this is food sovreignty for India. Meaning, in a nutshell, ensuring that India can be self sufficient for its food – that means not only growing all its food domestically, but also not relying on huge foreign multinationals (which, by the way, could bring the US to its knees…they already do with their lobbying in Iowa, so don’t just go ha-ha to the developing nation) for expensive chemicals and the matching GM seeds. For illustration, a statistic from an essay by Dr. Shiva:
“A study comparing traditional polycultures with industrial monocultures shows that a polyculture system can produce 100 units of food from 5 units of inputs, whereas an industrial system requires 300 units of input to produce the same 100 units.”
Again…logic?
This is also especially important in India, because (apparently), as of the year 2000, about 70% of Indians earned their livlihood from farming. Compared to 2% in developed countries. India has a HUGE population, so turn over all the farming to foreign companies and create mechanized monoculture plots and you take away a lot of jobs. The service industry can only absorb so much of that. (I have a separate two cents on global population but I’ll leave that be. All I can say is go read “The Tragedy of the Commons.”)

And as an added bonus, with all these different foods, you get to eat pretty darn well, and it definitely doesn’t get boring.

(whole wheat masala dosa (ok, wheat flour is wrong for dosa but that’s ok) with chutney and fruits and chai for breakfast, and many many things for lunch (a LOT of starches in Indian food…) )

Ok everyone, have fun at the farmer’s market buying those purple carrots, now!

How the Redhead got Rudraksh, and other tales

Greetings from the land of many ashrams, monkeys that fight with cows, and where the White Album was born.
With a couple days to spend before i head to do some farm volunteering, I stopped in this town that has, it seems, become the hotspot for Western tourists seeking spiritual englightenment, or who really like the Beatles (or both); Western tourists dressed in loose cotton garb and often sporting dreadlocks. It is also a destination for white water rafting. (It also happens to be the place where the original Sivananda ashram is, which is the swami whose yoga philosophy I favor. I saw the little hut where he went to meditate and such, it was quite pleasant.)

Of course being on the Ganges, it is a popular place for religious devotees to come on retreat or vacation.

Well, I was basically on vacation, but I did notice something interesting research-wise. Being a place that draws the “crunchy granola” crowd of western tourists, if you will, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised with the fact that literal crunchy granola was such a big part of the local economy. Every store that is not selling beads, brass figurines, or tour packages, is a general store advertising peanut butter, organic granola and brown bread (along with mountains of toilet paper – something Indians don’t use because they use water, just fyi). Well, I hope it is obvious that none of these things are traditional foods. In fact I have hardly seen peanut butter anywhere until now, and even then all you could find was Skippy. I asked a man who owned a shop if peanuts were grown in the area, because there was so much peanutbutter here. He laughed at this question and said “Not at all! We just have it because the foreigners, you know, they’re always asking for it, for their toast and things. Peanutbutter, cashew butter, Nutella, all these things.”
Point being, I found it odd that the group of westerners I would have expected to be most likely to be aware of their impact on the environment were the ones who spurred an economy based entirely on replicating what they could get in their hometown food co-op. (Seriously, the menus here read like a Portland brunch hangout. Avocado on everything, burritos, many fancy salads…) though I just went with it, and based on the meals I got, I was a happy camper…

Really, I can’t remember the last time I had hummus!
However, my hiking guide told me, as we passed rice paddies on the outskirts of town, (unprompted, no less!) that he always buys rice from the local guys because it’s cheaper and way better tasting. This made me glad. Also the local people don’t generally shop at the granola shops or eat at the hummus-serving restaurants. Its like two separate worlds of foods!

After making these inspiring discoveries, I took an 8 hour trek to a temple on a mountain, where I was asked to pose with various Indian tourists for their own vacation photos.

About two hours in to a steep uphill struggle, we stopped in this town because of those sugarcane bushes you see. Thus, I learned to gnaw on sugarcane.

And there was a wedding at the temple.
And, we could *just* see the Himalayas. Though it was only difficult because of the blanket of pollution that is apparently inescapable…

And when I wearily returned (ok, my guide and I got a motorbike ride back the last 3 km. It was a LONG hike!) I was treated to this citrus fruit I have seen being sold in carts (and have no idea what it is), that you dip in a mixture of salt and chili (possibly the best thing I’ve had in India, weirdly enough). I was told it was, in fact, a complete protein (in a fruit??) and therefore excellent after a trek.

And then I had a nice long shower, after finally figuring out how to get hot water out of my faucet.

Greetings from Mumbai

Besides being incredibly polluted (see above…), Mumbai is the epitome of the cliché “country of contradictions.” It goes beyond contradictions – everything you could imagine is going on at once, like there are multiple universes carrying on in parallel, just working around one another (though in some strange complicated way they all depend on each other). For that reason it would be absurd to try and make any generalizations about Mumbai, especially having only spent two days in the city. Any kind of food you want, it’s somewhere to be found. A restaurant where I got takeout served many types of Dosa (south Indian), veg tikka masala (north Indian), burritos, macaroni and cheese, and chop suey (I found it amusing to actually see “chop suey” on a menu…). The whole chile in my mixed veg was a nice touch – proof of spiciness, though it didn’t make me sweat so they could notch it up a bit.

Down the street is a coffeeshop where I could sit and read by book (bonus: no one recognizes the name of a certain Greek philosopher, letting me sip my coffee without looking as pretentious as I am. Miraculous!)

They did have two Indian coffees on the menu. I ordered one that is exposed to monsoon rains for flavor, to mimic the effect of exposure to storms on East India Company ship voyages way back when. Sadly I think it was Robusta beans so…the gimmick didn’t do much for me)
Oh, need a high-end espresso coffee and pastry?

Point being, there is no way for me to judge, or generalize, the balance of local/imported, traditional/non traditional. Other than to say that fancy Italian restaurants are really the realm of the upper echelon, and there are MILLIONS of working class people who may not have attained (yet) the means to participate in the growing restaurant market.
In other words, Mumbai is a BIG city with A LOT going on and a bit beyond my mental capacity.
Also, I didn’t get my big Bollywood break yet. Fingers crossed…

(Oh, and yes, the slums are as big as you’ve heard, and weirdly crammed into crannies between freeways and railroads and fancy highrise buildings. They look like warped medieval towns, with teetering higher buildings and narrow meandering streets (which, ok, I only peered down as I drove by.) Not really the place to go take photos, also a little weird that Mumbai slums are like mythical beings that I saw and kind of was in awe…that’s a whole other philosophical debate, though.)

Coffee or tea?

Well, to West coast U.S. raised me, who will drink any form of bitter caffeinated liquid available (within reason) this may actually be something I consider every morning. But sometimes the choice of coffee or tea is actually something that can define a persons identity.(*see bottom of post…)

Today, while sitting in a hotel room being thoroughly unproductive (watching HBO – which is censored in India, what??) I saw a Nescafé commercial that sells instant coffee to the up-and-coming Westernized 20-something class (hint: girl in short shorts and spaghetti straps wanders into 2 guys’ apartment…thats racier than some bollywood movies), with the tag line “It’s time you started.”

(this is the best I could do to find the ad online: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=128782150564915) (by the way – shoutout to those mini-drama Taster’s Choice commercials with Anthony Head…)

It took me a minute to figure out why that would be a good commercial for coffee (without the cliché of ‘start your day’), but eventually I realized that in this part of India, coffee drinking is not the tradition. In most parts of India, one takes tea (chai, really). Tea vs coffee drinking can be telling of where a person is from or, I imagine, how they grew up. There is an article – which, ok, I have not read, because it’s in Tamil, but someone told me about it – that is an anthropological account of how Indians in Madras (Chennai) were known as “the coffee drinkers” for their unusual taste for the stuff (perhaps because of their proximity to French-influenced Pondicherry?). So the idea is that Nescafé wants to let Indians know that it’s time thet ALL developed this taste for coffee.

Really it makes sense that tea is popular in India (no, not just because the British like tea…well, ok, kind of because the British started the plantations but lets not complicate this). There are tea plantations across the country – Kerala, Darjeeling, Assam – so it’s easy to get tea from within the country. There may be some coffee growing, but not nearly as much.

So if Nescafé is selling this product as a “lifestyle” symbol (the use of the word “lifestyle” in ads in India is it’s own separate subject!), that means that coffee (particularly an imported processed branded version of it) is a symbol of affluence, Westernization, style, modernity, etc., while the locally produced product, tea, is a symbol of tradition and/or the past (not always a negative thing but generally seen in opposition to the Westernized lifestyle shown in the ad). Message: buy coffee, become a part of the modern Westernized lifestyle.
Considering that a good portion of random people who have asked me where I’m from (I do stick out, after all) react to my nationality with either “I love the US!” or “the best country!” (I’m not kidding), this spells a sad fate for good old homegrown chai.

All that from a 30-second commercial! Maybe this is a sign I should go outside…

(*) actually, it’s probably the case that even for me I can use drinking coffee or tea to fit in with some kind of image, if I want to. Ah, food, what a social tool you are.

Food of the gods

It’s a trick, it’s not chocolate!; in India honey is more likely to be referred to as food of the gods. Honey is, we all know, a delicious sweetener and generally considered healthier than sugar, and it is used in various kinds of sweets here. Beekping is also an incredibly important part of agriculture; without bees, we would have no fruits or vegetables, so it makes sense to show some reverence. But honey is also referenced way back in ancient ayurvedic texts, which has made it beloved for everyday food and as an important medicinal product.
While in the city Pune, I decided to focus on honey, how it is made, and its many uses. To understand how big a deal honey is here, one needs look no further than the fact that there exists a large research center dedicated to the stuff. The only bee research institute in all of Asia, it seems.

The Central Bee Research and Training Institute (slightly awkwardly acronymed CBTRI) is run by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, a Government organization, which exists to help rural and tribal groups find ways to become economically sustainable while staying in their their forest or village homes. The Bee center was started about 50 years ago, basically with the recognition that honey was an important product in India, that rural and forest people already knew how to harvest honey and did so for their own use, and that scientific research and proper training could increase quality snd output. This would help the rural people, who gained a source of commerce, and helped consumers who could better understand why they should buy honey besides that it is in traditional recipes.

(They did all this on the economic benefits of beekeeping for rural people; I am too lazy to type it all up again. So useful!)
After chatting a bit, just to understand what the center does and why it exists, and being excited to hear there is such a program, I got to see some bee colonies kept on the grounds (you can also buy fresh honey here). Did you know there is a different species of Indian honeybee? Depending on the climate, beekeepers either use European honeybees, or the hardier Indian species. Mind boggling!

And I left with a bag of honey (which my charming 11 year old companion for the day ran off secretly and bought for me as a souvenir; too sweet) and a bit of literature on the Institute and a nice retro, but informative, booklet about “HONEY: The Most Nutritious Food.” (it even has some home remedy recipes!)

Next I went to visit a major honey company, and talk to them about their single floral honeys. For those of you who haven’t sat uncomfortably while I’ve explained this while refusing to buy honey in a bear-shaped squeezy bottle: single-floral is literally just honey that you get when the bees only gather pollen from one type of flower. Put bees in a field of sunflowers, they stick to the sunflowers. Each flower produces a very distinctly flavored honey. To keep the nutritional benefits, and the flavor of honey, the company has fancy machines that clean and pasteurize the honey without overheating it.

BUT not only are the flavors different, according to Ayurvedic medicine (and many scientific charts and tabkes I was shown), different honeys have different healing properties. These properties are generally similar to the properties of the plants themselves. But honey is ideal because it is so easily absorbed by the body, is very nutritious, and, lets face it, tastes a lot better than any other medicine.

(little booklet on the health properties of honey)
The different honeys favored by ayurvedic doctors, and even everyday consumers who know a thing or two about honey, typically come from plants rarely found outside India, so the company proudly works side-by-side with agricultural villages and with people who live in theforest literally climbing cliff faces to get honey from wild bee hives (that Winnie the Poo episode with the honeybin the tree was fairly accurate, apparently). So they end up with many different tasting honeys to sell in India, which are all used for different purposes, or at least tastes.
The back of this booklet basically did my research for me:

The owner sent me merrily on my way with a whole box of honey – I will never get sick again! – as well as a jar of a special Indian product made of Indian rose petals (normal roses will definitely not do the trick) and sugar.

I’m hoping to make it out to the forest area where most of the honey making happens, but so far I haven’t found out what kind of transportation actually goes there (odd, since it’s a fairly touristy hill station), but there’s still time!