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Honey bee publish details |
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| Category |
Recipes |
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| Title |
An Analysis of Culinary Wisdom |
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| Details |
Background
In 1997, the Honey Bee network mooted the idea of organising shodhyatras- journeys on foot to document and share grassroots wisdom, practices and innovations. Twice a year, during the extremes of summer and winter, a team of volunteers walk from village to village, discovering new facets of rural life, felicitating innovators at their doorstep and encouraging women and children to put their best foot forward.
Since May 1998, 11 shodhyatras have been held in places like Saurashtra, north Gujarat, central Gujarat, Kutch, Rajasthan Maharashtra, Uttaranchal, Tamil Nadu and even Ladakh.
During the first shodhyatra, from Gir to Gadhada, few women participated. So in subsequent shodhyatras, volunteers began talking to women about their lifestyle, diet, and their knowledge of various plants. Recipe and embroidery contests were held. To inculcate awareness about the environment among the youth, biodiversity contests were held. In eight biodiversity contests held so far, 166 students participated and shared their knowledge about indigenous plants and their uses. Twenty-one students were felicitated.
The recipe contests involves sharing recipes made from uncultivated plants, were very popular. Shodhyatra volunteers collected more than 200 recipes. Of these, 112 have already been analysed on a number of parameters.
- Which part of the plant was used for cooking: the flowers, bark, roots, leaves, or the fruits?
- Is the plant available all through the year or only during specific seasons? What time of the year was the recipe prepared?
- Where is the plant obtained from: grasslands, wetlands, forests, creepers, fields, or marshy lands?
- How does it taste?
- What are the benefits of the recipe: Does it aid eyesight, build stamina, heal wounds, cure diarrhoea and other stomach ailments like constipation, acidity, or is it beneficial for pregnant or lactating mothers?
- Who is the recipe beneficial to: all age groups, infants or elderly people?
- From where or whom was the recipe sourced by the contestant? Natal home, in-laws, friends, others? Or is it self-made?
- Is the recipe still in use?
Some Insights
- Parts Used: Of the 112 recipes, 49 used leaves, 20 used fruits and 10 used flowers Roots, bark and other grains were seldom used.
- Seasons: Ingredients for 59 recipes were found during the monsoon. Twenty-five recipes had ingredients found round the year, 16 had ingredients found only in winter and only eight recipes had ingredients found in summer.
- Source of ingredients: Forty-nine recipes sourced ingredients from farms, 41 from the forest, 11 from the borders of the farmlands and four from the kitchen garden itself.
- Taste: Most of the recipes were sweet. None were sour or bitter.
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Health benefits: Only 31 participants answered this question. Nine of them said their recipe was used to build stamina, seven used it for body pain, five each for diarrhoea and eye problems and one for constipation.
- Usage: Eighty-four recipes were for general purposes. Only two recipes catered to adolescents and one each for old people and cattle.
- Source of recipes: Nearly 71 per cent of the respondents sourced the recipe from ‘other’ people. Ten recipes were learnt from in-laws, while only two from natal homes.
· Prevalence in diet: 95(or 84per cent) of the recipes are still a part of the daily diet. The rest remain only in public memory.
In their constant struggle for survival, rural folk experiment, innovate and often generate creative solutions to local problems. There is very little awareness about this among the masses. Through shodhyatras Honey Bee aims to overcome this societal inertia and generate respect for local knowledge. The learnings from shodhyatras will be verified and added to a computerised database, along
with names and addresses of the innovators and the communicators.
Honey Bee hopes that these shodhyatras will be the cradle to nurture the spirit of collegial learning, experimentation and innovation at the grassroots. |
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| Volume No. |
Honey Bee, 14(3): 17, 2003 |
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