Posted by Or… I’ll take French Fries, Sesame Chicken, Pizza, Enchiladas and Fettucine Alfredo With That!
This morning I tried making porotas for the first time. Whole wheat flour, ghee, salt and water. Make the dough. Roll it out, fold over, roll out again, repeat a few more times. Then cook it up. One could probably avoid the ghee and use a light oil instead but ghee adds a certain desi-ness to food. Anyway, I forgot the salt which turned this flat-bread into a Tuscano-ishtyle porota instead. Still, it worked well enough. My mother, in her infinite culinary wisdom, reminded me that porota is not conducive to losing weight. She’s right, of course, but by how much.
We have an obesity epidemic in these United States. People point to pre-packaged foods laden with salt, chemicals, preservatives, & high-fructose corn syrup, fast food, microwave dinners, portion sizes run amok, not enough fruits and vegetables, too many carbs, too much protein, not enough protein, good fats, bad fats, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol and the latest whipping boy, Pink Slime. Remedies include Atkins, The Zone, Southbeach, Paleo, Nutrient-Dense/Calorie-Light and the oft-repeated Balanced approach. Liposuction and gastric bypass aren’t uncommon. There are still too many other fads to count. And we’re too sedentary.
However, the French eat a high carb/high fat/high calorie diet and as a people, they’re not overweight. Rice is consumed in huge quantities in Asia. Argentines are among the top red-meat eating populaces in the world. The Germans can’t be too far behind in love of red-meat and they drink huge quantities of beer (a calorie-dense/nutrient light beverage if ever there was one). Italians eat a lot of pasta.
The common thread among these countries is that they have a national cuisine; a food culture native to their shores that has been worked on for generation upon generation. Everything interlocks.
A while ago, Time Magazine did a photo essay showing what families in different countries ate in a typical week and how much was that expenditure. Below you’ll see what the American family displayed.
While I have friends that eat much more healthfully than the Revis’, I think they’re not atypical of most American households. Heck, they don’t even look unhealthy. It’s easy to say Americans have too much fatty foods or fast food and not enough of this or that or that or this. But look at all the slides and you’ll notice the inconsistency of Americans’ food choices as compared to the other lands.
In Amrika, we mix and match a lot because we don’t have one dominant cuisine. After leaving my parents’ house, I don’t stick to the same cuisine either. Bangladeshi, Chinese, Malay, pizza, pasta, Mexican, soups, salads, burgers, steak… and the list goes on. So yes, Italians eat large quantities of pasta but there are other elements of their cuisine that help them along. When Americans make pasta, we make pasta. Do we really have a true Italian dinner? Maybe if you come from an Italian family but what happens when you have Mexican or Chinese food.
And furthermore, we mix and match cuisines between meals. Cereal for breakfast, a burger & fries for lunch, Thai for dinner. There’s no easy fix to that. Yes, we would benefit from less processed/chemically-manipulated foods. But if we don’t understand cuisine from a holistic standpoint, I don’t think we’ll solve our problems.
Which brings me back to those porotas. My parents don’t consume a holistic Bengali cuisine, breakfast through dinner. We’ve all cut back on quantities of rice and carbs but to what avail. My mother sometimes doesn’t even eat rice with dinner, something I consider Bengali sacrilege. Most of my relatives back in the motherland are pretty healthy; a few have diabetes but that’s more down to genetics or over-indulging in mishti (sweets), not the main cuisine itself. They consume a lot more rice and carbs than we do. Even if I did eat a holistic Bengali diet, there’s not guarantee it would do the trick in this land, which is decidedly unlike the the motherland (except maybe the New Orleans delta in terms of geography/climate). But I think it would be better than mix ‘n match. Now all I have to do is just stop these cravings for Thai or Malay or Chinese or Mexican or burgers or steak or fried fish…
