Your diet may be good for health, but is it delicious? Bet not

So are you on keto? Or, maybe gluten-free? Avoiding dairy? Eating ancient grains? Or, perhaps just eating that black-fleshed Kadaknath chicken that the Krishi Vigyan Kendra in Jhabua has written about to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, recommending Virat Kohli eats it rather than be, as he is now, vegan (and doesn’t seem to be doing too badly on that in Australia)?

Maybe you are not exactly calling them notoriously hard-to-keep New Year resolutions, but the start of a calendar year always seems a good time to consider making dietary changes. And every year there seems to be a new set of foods and diets that are in fashion, though a little examination shows that most are old ideas in new packaging.

The high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (keto), for example, seems to be the latest iteration of the Paleo and, before that, the Atkins diet. The reasons given for the efficacy of the diet can vary. Paleo was said to be a return to how our cavemen ancestors ate. Keto, which has a rather surprising origin in a highly specific diet for epilepsy patients, has a theory built on controlling glucose in the blood. Most of these diets have some such niche medical justification which their devotees can become remarkably knowledgeable about.

This is not to say that such diets can’t work. With the possible exception of the Tapeworm Diet, which, yes, advocated swallowing tapeworm eggs to give your own friendly, body-consuming parasite, almost any diet has some potential to help those following it, if only by making them more mindful about the food they eat. Not every diet works for everyone, but perhaps the benefit of repeated waves of diet fads is that they can help people find a long-term pattern of eating that works for their bodies.

Grain Gains
These seasonal diet fads also have the benefit of bringing attention to otherwise neglected ingredients. India has a wealth of millets and pseudo-cereals like buckwheat and amaranth, most of them with long-standing usage as staple foods in different parts of the country, or for consumption during religious rituals like upvas fasts. These have been sidelined by rice and wheat, seen as desirable grains for more prosperous consumers, and also promoted by government policies that encourage farmers to focus on these two grains, which are also the only ones given consistent procurement support.

These other grains had become, as an excellent book on them published by Navdanya dubbed them, Bhoole Bisre Anaj (lost and forgotten foods) until they were resurrected by gluten-free and alkaline diets. They are now known as ancient grains, a term that is rather more market-friendly, if not entirely clear — does that mean that rice and wheat aren’t ancient? Supermarket now have gluten-free granola and hip restaurants offer porridges, pancakes and even pizzas made from ancient grains.

Greater choice in food is always a benefit, even if the ostensible reason for it can be queried. Some scepticism can be raised, for example, on whether gluten is really such a major problem for all the people claiming allergies to it — but it unquestionably is a problem for the small group of people suffering from celiac disease, whose gluten intolerance is medically proven and who now have a much larger and easier-to-access range of foods.

Lactose intolerance is another condition whose sudden upsurge seems surprising. A small number of people appear to be severely lactose intolerant, while a larger group has a spectrum of intolerance where, at one end, milk might cause just mild discomfort. (It’s been suggested that such mild discomfort can be helped by eating something with the milk, which could give medical validation to the classic cookies and milk combination!)

These levels of lactose intolerance might not seem to justify the rise in dairy-free milks made from almond, soybean, coconut, hazelnut, hemp, oats and other oily plant sources. (Milk is an emulsion of dairy fats and water. Plant-based milks create similar emulsions by forcibly extracting their fats in combination with water, as with making coconut milk at home.)

The real problem with milk might not be lactose intolerance, but all the cruelties of dairying, like the forcible separation of calves from their mothers, and the controversies resulting from the government’s gau rakshak programme. Plant-based milks offer a long-term solution to the dilemmas of dairying, and the spectre of lactose intolerance can serve as a convenient catalyst.

Kadaknath chicken, whose sudden visibility was one of the food surprises of last year, is a (slightly dubious) solution to a similar problem. Chicken is one of the fastest-growing food sources in India. It is politically safe, offers protein to our still severely protein-deficient country, can be scaled up rapidly in production and retail and is easily cooked and consumed.

Many Indians who don’t eat other meats are starting to eat chicken.

But all this comes with horrific hidden costs. Industrial production of chicken is achieved through broilers that lead entirely unnatural lives, pumped with growth hormones (they are generally killed in two months, which is shorter than the growing season of most plants) and antibiotics to overcome the diseases that come from over-crowded cages in which they are raised (antibiotics also help with weight gain). The cruelty is terrible, and so are the medical issues for consumers, as those hormones and antibiotics find their way onto our plates.

And what does it result in? Meat so tasteless that chefs, who privately detest broiler chicken, even as they like the profits it brings, call it the paneer of meats. Chefs will confess their personal preference for desi chicken, raised with greater freedom to roam, more variety in their diets (chickens are omnivores, but broilers are fed a standardised diet, much of it based on unsustainably harvested fish meal). However, desi chicken is tough and has less meat than broilers and few consumers see the value of it.

Kadaknath chicken could bridge this gap. Because it is visibly striking, consumers feel they are getting something different, and the claims being made for its health benefits are further reinforcement. Some of these claims sound questionable — for example, the claim that Kadaknath has much more protein. Kadaknath is a kind of desi chicken, and like any free-ranging, desi chicken it has less fat and more muscle than broilers, but it isn’t clear how its protein is somehow concentrated.

As of now, at least, because of their small number and high value, Kadaknath chickens are raised with space to roam and multiple food sources to peck at, and their eggs, which are small and dark, are valued as much as the meat. Kadaknath offers consumers a chance to have chicken as it should be consumed — but there’s nothing stopping industrial farmers from raising them broiler-style, and this could happen if we demand Kadaknath only as black, “healthy” chicken, rather than as properly raised poultry.

Trust the Taste Buds
So, does it matter what diets we follow if the ultimate results can be good, even if not intended? In just one way all these diets seem rather sadly, and perhaps unnecessarily, failing. Every diet and fad ingredient comes with copious recommendations of health benefits, purificatory potential, ancestral appeal and every other value one could want, except the one that might seem most intrinsic to food, and that is flavour. When it comes to trendy diets, taste is the one aspect that doesn’t seem to be trusted.

All these diets start by approaching food with suspicion. When food is examined with suspicion, and not from its fundamental ability to provide sustenance and savour, then you are closing off the essential reasons why we eat and limiting yourself to a clinical kind of consumption that might lose some calories, at least initially, but doesn’t build a great relationship with food. Many foods sold for specific diets can be delicious, but how often will we really admit to wanting them? Diets make us divide food into healthy = dull; and yummy = bad.

This could really be a mistake. For one, it is why diets are notoriously short-lived. Anyone who seriously switches to millets may end up realising why people prefer rice and wheat. There are many millets, each with their own characteristics, but most are heavy to eat, or have to be eaten hot, since they can cool to coarse ( jowar) or chokingly jellylike (ragi) consistencies. The awkward truth is that millets are often best eaten mixed with rice or wheat, making them more palatable and easier to cook.

In his book The Doritos Effect, Mark Schatzker explores the links between flavour and nutrition and comes to a surprising conclusion — food that tastes better is often more nutritious. Schatzker starts by looking at produce typically sold in supermarkets abroad, which is selected for its looks (bright red tomatoes), ability to be transported long distances without spoiling and low cost. Taste is a relatively minor concern, which is why many food lovers prefer to shop in farmer’s markets where they can get produce that isn’t as perfect looking, but which tastes way better. This might seem like an indulgence, but when scientists have tested the nutritional profile of these foods they nearly always score higher than supermarket produce. Because they are not artificially sped to maturity, not pumped with water and chemicals, and allowed to mature to peak condition, they taste better, and also contain far more nutrients.

Schatzker’s book is an exploration of how this relationship has been thrown out of gear by the science of flavouring, which has found ways to trick our taste buds into craving foods, like the titular Doritos, that hook us onto unhealthy foods. The really sad consequence is that this has made us distrust taste — if I like this so much it can’t be good for me. But Schatzker tracks down producers of chicken, tomatoes and other food grown for its flavour and shows how it is generally more nutritious as well. We need to trust our taste buds — and that might come by training them to appreciate a diversity of flavours, rather than a lot of just a few. Sugar provides a perhaps controversial example. It is now one of the most demonised of foods, much as we crave it. But long before we developed mass production of sugar and overdosed on it, sugar was a seasoning, like spices, and used sparingly to help develop the overall flavour of a dish. It isn’t uncommon in traditional Indian cooking to add small amounts of sugar this way, and this gives us the sweetness we crave, but in a controlled way.

Diets also tend to prescribe us foods, rather than really encouraging us to explore what is around us and which might work as well. Almond milk is widely available because it is prescribed as the alternative to dairy, but it is a product with considerable problems. It is an ecologically draining crop, exacerbating droughts in California where most of the world’s almonds come from, and adds further environmental costs in its shipping — and it doesn’t even taste that good.

Cashew milk could count as a local product, given the wide cultivation of cashew in India, where it grows on scrub lands where little else grows. It is a product that provides huge amounts of employment in places like Kerala, and has secondary benefits in the cashew apple. And cashew milk is delicious in a way that almond milk is not, yet it is not being sold the same way here since the diet diktats that we receive only talk about almond milk. It is an example of a healthy, ethically sound and sustainable product that is also really worth making part of our diet simply because it tastes so good.