The historical devastation of India has left many Indians believing we’re naturally small-made, injury-prone & needing diets, herbs, medication and monkishness. And that if something in our last 300 years made us evolve this way, then it is our fate to stay this way.

We matter-of-factly say things like “Indians have bad knees”.

In reality, getting enough protein, minerals and exercise (esp as children) will bring out our best!

The nutrient levels in vegetarian home cooking is shocking at times. It’s not inherent to being vegetarian or the cuisine, but in its erroneous transmission, scaling & adaptation & the economic factors that contribute to it.

There are entire weeks where folks i know eat just 15-20 grams of protein a day.

This attitude affects even the advice of indigenous medicine practitioners, and likely has for a long time. I wonder how much more effective traditional interventions would be if they swallowed your pride & started caring about “western” quantification.

(for example, the obsession with “Himalayan Salt”. You can tank the entire progress of a nation in one decade with a wide enough iodine deficiency during childhood. if you don’t want artificial iodine, you shouldn’t have moved civilization inland and scaled your population to 1.3 billion. Use iodized salt, or at least don’t deprive kids.)

Even our idea of rich food is defined more by its interaction with historical imperial & class divisions, rather than our intuitive sense of inherent value. You can see this pervasively, such as in the use of whole spices (as opposed to powdered or crushed spices) and ghee to show off opulence rather than because those methods lead to culinary superiority, in heavy festival fare, in the utter Mughlai dominance at event cooking.

The first retort one gets when they say this is “these were specifically designed to work as annual treats unlike now when sweets and oily dishes are available daily” .. well, yes, in that case: what better chance than an event to maximise the social good of providing tasty mass nutrition?

As a vegetarian, I have my deep issues with festivals that involve mass sacrifice of non-rudimentary lifeforms, like with Bakrid/Eid, but are these festivals not achieving the social ideal of mass nutrition much better than our current “indigenous” ones?

Instead of scaling the most nutrient dense and practical ingredients of traditional vegetarian food to modern life most Indians scale terrible snacks or “clean”/”pure”/”sacred” foods to match the remaining hunger or interpret the hunger and deprivation as good.

Healthy, nutritious, medicinal, safe, sustainable, calorically sufficient, practical are not automatic synonyms. Ex.

A massive Hamburger = nutritious, not healthy
Cucumber salad = healthy, not nutritious
Lentils and rice/meat & veg + spices = healthy, nutritious in the right amounts

We have a traditional food like sambar, one of the best “lentil stews” of any cuisine in the world, and then water it down till the lentils are just for texture. I have seen a quantity if just 1/2 cup of lentils by dry weight for an entire family of four, over nearly two meals, when it should be 1/4th cup minimum (40-50g) per person per meal.

We have a nation that has taken to peanuts in every shape and form but only adds a tiny smattering of it to staple rice dishes like Puliyogare or Chitranna or Poha, focusing on oil, salt and taste, and barely offsetting the empty carbs of the white rice. Which is tragic, because adding the right amount of peanuts actually makes the dish much tastier and more interesting.

And then because we eat like this, we don’t have the energy to even go for a walk, all through the work day we crave caffeine and high calorie snacks, we then order/cook the veg portion of your meals with way too much oil just to satisfy/overshoot the caloric deficit.

On top of this, you have supposed experts unironically recommending things like bottle/ridge gourd — i.e glorified mildly medicinal glasses of water– as primary staple ingredients of that veg portion several times a week.

The only reason we’ve nutritionally hung by a thread as a nation instead of tanking is we’re saved by iodised salt and our hyperdependance on milk & milk products. i wouldn’t be surprised if our milk craving comes intuitively/physiologically from our deracinated daily cuisine.