What's in your plate

Culturally and anthropologically, food has crossed boundaries – geographical and creative – to become an intrinsic part of our lives. While experimenting with different ingredients and curating unique experiences have become a trend among the food lovers and enthusiasts, there are some who are revolutionising what we know about food through their innovations and research. At a food convention and networking event called Bread & Butter – What’s on the Table, some of the city-based food entrepreneurs gathered together to delve into the recent developments in food innovations and sustainability.

Organized by the networking organization Dysco — founded by siblings Khrisha and Mishal Shah — the convention hosted varied talks, but a common trend among some appeared to be the focussed shift to the alternatives of some of the most commonly consumed food on the basis of fitness, health, and sustainability.

For Ritesh Shaiwal, one among the five founders of Easyhuman Café – the services of which extend to teaching their customers how to eat food in accordance with their fitness needs – people have forgotten that their gut knows the best, literally. “Your intestines understand food the best. It doesn’t understand just rice, it understands rice and daal; it understands combination. We were hunters and gatherers back in the day, so we used to hunt our food, and we used to eat that food. So if the evolution is like that, your intestines understand the best food group ever possible, which including seeds, nuts, fruits, meats, and vegetables,” says Ritesh in the talk.  He goes on to elaborate that when we feed ourselves, we are essentially consuming information in our gut, which gives that information back to us. Illustrating an example, he says  “When we talk about food, one thing has been established that the sooner you move away from the processed food, the efficiency of your brain is transformed. Food is about the information it feeds on to your brain,” he says, before adding that we need to learn about our consumption pattern than jumping into dieting.

Dhruvi Narsaria

Taking the conversation about what we eat forward, Dhruvi Narsaria from the non-profit organisation The Good Food Institute elaborated on the environmental degradation caused by animal farming industries. “One piece of a red meat steak uses 1.6 kgs of animal feed and needs energy that can power 60 times over. It uses 3,515 litres of water which is actually an average consumption of a person in five years, and also emits 4.5kg of carbon dioxide,” lists Dhruvi in her talk. Further, there is sheer wastage, as she goes on to tell that to get one calorie out in the form of chicken meat, you’d have to feed it nine calories in the form of corn, soy, and wheat. That’s wastage of eight calories of food that could have been consumed directly. While the consumption of meat cannot be stopped, there is a growing consensus and research made into the plant-based and cell-based meat harvesting. “In India, it’s very important for us to look at it because our population is going to play a great role in deciding what we can consume. We also have ingredients like millets in our backyard, which are inherently rich with macronutrients that can be a part of the global supply chain and feed globally,” she says, indicating it to be one of the most important developments in the food innovation industries globally.

Meanwhile, the food scientist Karishma Boolani addressed the dire need to shift from carbohydrates to fats for the body’s primary fuel consumption. Telling the story of sports scientist Tim Noakes, who along with his athletes having high-carbohydrate diets for 20 years, developed Type 2 Diabetes, obesity and other lifestyle diseases. On researching further, Tim found the cause to be the glucose and replaced it with fats as the primary source. “We feel that these are just the disease of lazy, but when these world-class athletes developed lifestyle diseases, then there is something wrong in the way we are consuming food. He started fuelling these athletes with fats, butter, animal fats, and he realized that once the athletes adapted to it, their performance was on par with just as they were on carbohydrates,” says Karishma. Adding further, she says, “There is only one secret: you have to keep your carbohydrates low, and you have to increase the amount of fats you have. Because you are trying to train your body
to use the new kind of fuel, when it's used to burning fats, it will understand that now I can use this as a potential fuel and it will burn  its own fat.”