Exploring the Potential of Diversified Traditional Food Systems to Contribute to a Healthy Diet

The nutrition and health of a population – especially in a largely agrarian country like India – rests on its food and agricultural systems. The report states that traditional diets in India are nutritionally diverse and have evolved from self-reliant, decentralised food systems. But now, food systems in India and the rest of the world are mainly shaped by centralised, fossil-fuel based and industrial, agriculture and food systems.

Citing UN data, the report states that 815 million people – or 11 per cent of the global population – were reported to be undernourished in 2016. In India, 14.5 per cent of the total population was undernourished, 38.4 per cent of all children up to five years had stunted growth, and 51.4 per cent of women in the ‘reproductive age-range’ were anaemic.

Food and agriculture policies in India – right from the colonial period – have severely compromised the country’s ‘nutritional security’. Before the start of the period of economic liberalisation in 1991, the State’s various food security policies had put in place ‘safety nets’ for the population. At the same time, the report states that they laid the foundation of the ‘industrial food system’. The focus of these schemes was eradicating hunger through a ‘production-calorie’ strategy. While calorific deficiencies showed a declining trend in the pre-liberalisation period, protein and micronutrient deficiencies intensified as local and traditional diets and food systems in many regions were destroyed.

Inequalities of caste, class, gender and geography have prevented equal access to resources such as land, water and forests. This has also contributed to malnutrition, chronic hunger and starvation.

India’s economic policies have turned food crops, dairy products and poultry, into commodities by “…taking them out of the reach of those on whose labour the industrial food system was being built.” The economic liberalisation and trade policies starting with 1991 increased corporate control over food systems.

These measures have favoured industrial agriculture, and severely compromised the resource base of traditional food systems. Increased mining, the expansion of urban areas, the construction of highways and dams, and the subsequent displacement of communities, are some ways in which people have been denied access to such resource bases.

The report presents the results of a study on traditional food systems in six villages in Telangana’s Sangareddy district, and Chittoor, East Godavari and Srikakulam districts in Andhra Pradesh. The study demonstrates that a variety of cultivated and uncultivated foods are part of the traditional diet of all the communities analysed. Their diets clearly reflect the agricultural and ecological landscape of the region – for example, there is a high proportion of foraged leafy vegetables, uncultivated fruits, tubers and diverse sources of meat in the diet of Adivasi communities in Srikakulam district’s Bondiguda hamlet, which is located in a forested area.

The study showed that Adivasi communities in Andhra Pradesh’s Srikakulam and East Godavari districts had over 100 different food items in their diets. Even in the semi-arid areas of Sangareddy and Chittoor districts, small farming and pastoralist communities reported close to 80 different food items in their diets.

In all the communities studied, food continued to be sourced from the natural environment through gathering or foraging, as well as cultivation. This is significant, considering that these villages are close to towns and cities, and likely to be impacted by the supermarket and processed food ‘culture’.

The diets of these communities included many different types of cereals, and not just rice, wheat and maize.

A number of plant and animal foods, rich in micronutrients, are part of their daily diet too. These traditional diets are rich sources of nutrients such as iron, calcium, vitamin A , vitamin C and folate.

The communities spoke of how it was difficult for them to continue their traditional cropping practices and food systems due to government policies that have made these practices financially unviable.

Focus and Factoids by Yojet Sharma.