Suman Sahai
In this tumble down world of
fast foods and junk foods, childhood obesity and the rising spectre of
childhood diabetes and heart disease, should we not be stepping back as a
society to question what on earth our children (and we ) are eating, or for that matter when we are
eating it. For one thing, there is almost no discipline anymore in what
children are fed or at what time. Many of us at late-night dinners have seen
five-year-olds and seven-year-olds eating dinner with their parents at 12 o'clock at night. And like their parents,
usually their food is rich in trans fats and other unhealthy avoidables.
There was a time not so long ago when children would be in
bed by nine clock after a healthy dinner of fresh foods fed to them by eight in
the evening. In most families great attention was paid to what babies and
children were given to eat. They were not for instance given everything that
the adults ate. Chocolates and fizzy drinks, especially colas were forbidden
for young children, as were most heavy, deep-fried foods.
Perhaps the greatest casualty of foods that children used to
be fed, is the category of weaning foods. This was the in-between food fed to
babies as they were being weaned off mother's milk. Usually after 6 to 8 months
of being fed solely on breast milk, and
before they graduated to solid foods, babies were started on foods that had the
consistency of gruel or thin paste. They graduated from liquid paste to
semi-solids and finally to solid foods like rice, roti, vegetables and dal.
Traditionally weaning food, especially in rural areas, used
to be a milky gruel made of finger millet, called Madua in the North and Ragi in the south. Upmarket urban women,
often chose the empty calories of processed cereals, usually rice, that came
out of boxes. Rural women clearly had better sense when it came to feeding
their babies. Finger millet or Madua is high in protein and micronutrients
especially calcium, vital for strengthening growing bones. Rural mothers knew
this long before nutritional analysis uncovered the content of these wonder
foods.
Tragically the practice of madua based weaning foods is lost even in areas whereas Ragi and Madua are
cultivated and still eaten. In a survey done in Uttaranchal by Gene Campaign in
the summer of 2012, not one single mother was feeding her children millet gruel
as a weaning food. Older women in the household spoke of giving their children
millet gruel but said nobody does that any more and the young people don't
listen anyway ! When asked what children were given as they grew out of breast
milk, the answer most mothers gave was rice and dal. Now here is a tragedy. The easily digested high-protein millet, rich in
calcium and micronutrients has been abandoned in favour of rice which is
nutritionally the poorest of all cereals.
Why have we allowed this to happen? Part of the reason is in
the public perception of millets which are thought to be the food of rural hicks and associated with being the
food of the poor and backward. Rural India
aspires to eat the polished white rice because that is what the city slickers
eat. The public distribution system (PDS) ,
the government's largest food
support scheme, has fulfilled this aspiration because it supplies only polished
white rice and wheat to poor households. So rural (and urban) babies are weaned
on the impoverished calories of rice, when they could so easily build sturdy
bones and healthy bodies on a diet of
ragi.
There was a feeble revival of interest in fingermillet when
Japanese agencies sent people to Uttaranchal to enquire about the potential for
organic millets being supplied to Japan.
This was about six to seven years ago. The Japanese had interest in millets
precisely to use them as weaning foods, a tradition that had existed in old Japan,
and which they were trying to revive so
they could reintroduce this healthy practice and make available millets as
weaning food for Japanese babies. The initial enquiries were not followed up
nor was the matter pursued actively by Indian agencies and the whole episode
passed into oblivion. Which is such a pity.
India
is home not only to the largest number of hungry people in the world but also
to the largest number of children suffering from malnutrition and under nutrition.
What a difference this wonder cereal could make to the nutritional status of
both children and adults. Common sense would dictate that people switch or at
least include millets in their diet. But in a nation where the rural poor have
chosen to raise their children on Maggi noodles and dangerously unhealthy
snacks packed in foil packets, who is looking for common sense?
