In the here & now: Why eating local matters

There’s a haze, a softness to this time of the year in namma ooru. Winter is on its way out, the mornings are still nippy, but by noon the sun begins to really glow. It’s also harvest season, with Sankranti just done, the fields cleared, and pantries full of seasonal goodies.

If we pay close attention, our appetite undergoes changes too. We might find ourselves craving something warm, nourishing and light. But this is also the time when seasonal food could get a little confusing, with strawberries from Mahabaleshwar, apples from Himachal, leafy greens from faraway farms, flooding our online feeds. It’s tempting, even exciting and I have given in to this trend a few times myself — cooking undhiyu and sarson ka saag when the craving struck. But in retrospect, I think it’s worth asking: all this is seasonal, but for whom?

Go local

In late winter, it’s possibly easy to assume that if something is “in season” somewhere in India, it must be seasonal for us too. But seasonality is, and rightly so, regional. The local food calendar is shaped by its own weather, including patterns of rainfall and temperature shifts, and agricultural cycles. When we buy someone else’s seasonal produce, we’re adding distance, including packaging, and transport emissions, to our plate.

Food miles may sound like an abstract concept, and I’ve talked about this a few times here, but it’s real. Produce that needs to survive long distances calls for cold chains, more plastic, more storage, more fuel, and more often than not, more handling. 

This doesn’t mean we must never eat an apple from Himachal again. But it does mean we can be mindful of what becomes routine. Seasonal eating, at its heart, is about eating from the landscape we live in, because that’s where our everyday choices have the most immediate impact.

Regional stars

This is a season of steady abundance here in our state. We can find tender greens, beans, gourds, citrus, and the last wave of winter vegetables. We can also find harvest ingredients that are used in festive cooking, sesame, groundnuts, jaggery, and fresh rice.

Here are some ingredients and meal ideas that help us stay anchored to the ethos of seasonal and local:

Greens and leaves that can be quickly sautéed into a palya, mixed into a dal or tovve, or sambhar. Some varieties of greens, especially sabbasige or menthya, can also be chopped fine and mixed into akki rotti dough.

Beans and legumes, with avarekalu being the most widely preferred, but even simple local beans like togari kaalu, alsandekaalu, can be used to make usli or kootu. These can also be dried in the sun and preserved for the next season.

Citrus, especially heralekai, mosambi, chakotha, are perfect for this in-between weather, and they can also be pickled or turned into bitter-sweet-spicy gojjus, to last through the next season too.

Groundnuts and sesame, which bring warmth without the heaviness of other nuts and seeds, can be employed in a wide array of condiments and snacks, like chutney pudi, barfi or laddoo, and roasted snacks.

In fact, the ellu-bella mixture from Sankranti, which typically lasts through the first two months of the year, is a great in-between snack for an instant boost of energy, minus all the manufactured sweetness or flavour of store-bought stuff.

Jaggery, especially in harvest-time treats, is at its best during this season, because it is fresh and soft. Jaggery can be used in quite a few different ways in everyday cooking, right from sweetening the ragi porridge in the morning, to adding a dash of flavour to bedtime drinks, like warm milk with a pinch of turmeric and cinnamon powder. Jaggery is also typically consumed with a glass of water after a warm bath, or about a half hour before a meal.

This season is gentle and it is aligned with the elements of nature, neither too cold nor hot. If we can honour that and focus on our meal consumption, we can do away with the sense of urgency that social media dictates, about rare ingredients flying off the supermarket shelves. The real briskness in our days should come from eating what’s right for the season, the planet, and our health. 

Eat hyper-local

• Let’s try a simple rule for the next few weeks: one hyper-local, seasonal ingredient per day. Add a seasonal bunch of greens to your lunch.

• Make groundnut-onion chutney instead of buying a packaged dip.

• Snack on chakotha or guava sprinkled with salt and red chili powder.

• Eat a fistful of ellu bella when evening hunger pangs strike.

(Ranjini is a communications professor, author, and podcaster, straddling many other worlds, in Bengaluru. She’s passionate about urban farming and sustainable living, and can mostly be found cooking and baking in her little kitchen, where, surrounded by heirloom coffee kettles and mismatched tea cups, she finds her chi.)