IRRESISTABLE CHOCOLATE….It was Chocolate Day on February 9, 2022! Is chocolate good for you? No as well as Yes – find out why before you go fida over it. The market is full of all kinds of chocolates good, bad and ugly.
By Tara Narayan
Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! – A variety food column
NOWADAYS almost every day is some special day or another and I didn’t know that we also have a Chocolate Day. Until on February 9 my friendliest neighbour WhatsApped me a Happy Chocolate Day and I was tickled by the idea – for who doesn’t love chocolate no matter how humble or how classy up the ladder of wealth? Undoubtedly, Cadbury is the most famous label of chocolate and this time around on my first celebration of Chocolate Day I went out and bought half-a-dozen Amul dark chocolates which come in several tempting flavours including my favourite orange…plus some chocolate walnut brownies, chocolate rum balls, plus truffle chocolate cake.
And we had a chocolate feast with staff, friends and neighbours. Then when I unwrapped my Amul chocolate bars I realized that although the dating was just a year old, it looked like the chocolates were really older chocolates re-packed and re-dated…there was faint whitish residue on the much hardened up chocolate. After tasting it I really chucked it all out although for a while I thought I’d go down to the Amul Parlour down the street where I live currently and complain bitterly, for these Amul chocolates are expensive chocolates at a Rs100 or so a bar…I guess with the Covid-19 lockdowns nobody was buying chocolates, so old stock is being re-packed, re-cycled, with consumers none the wiser.
I know my chocolate though having indulged in chocolate joys of high class and low class chocolate over the years. In comparison, I thought, the Cadbury plain milk chocolate packets which a friend presented me on Chocolate Day were more honest chocolate – real dark, fresh and with a melting texture. This is to say if you’re buying chocolate, beware. It is not old stock being re-cycled in new packaging and on new dating…inside, it’s another story altogether. Not really rotten but not edible either and flavorless. That’s Amul for you, sorry, post-covid unethical behaviour to con consumers.
THERE are chocolates and chocolates of course and the world has been in love with chocolate of a myriad denomination since it was invented. Two real life stories to do with chocolate I will never for they still haunt me. A young woman who was a friend researching a book once confided in me, “My rich grandmother used to put a Cadbury piece in my mouth to get me to sleep every night!” I was appalled and told her so and she smiled and shrugged, she loved her grandmother and so what if her teeth were rotten…personally, I’m convinced one should rinse out one’s mouth after eating chocolate or for that matter any of our rubbish industrial foods which are seriously dead foods to die for and not live for! My friend got married and soon after something happened and she died in the middle of the night with her hubby waiting for dawn to come before doing anything about getting her to hospital.
ANOTHER story which makes my heart ache. Of a young man coping with aggressive slum situations who one fine day had his eldest sister suffering from epilepsy fits (triggered undoubtedly by a nagging vicious mother) die in his arms – he tried to put a Cadbury chocolate in her mouth to see if he could revive his sister to life again. The man confided in me, “That day all ideas of a god somewhere died in me and I tried to kill my mother!” Whenever I eat Cadbury these two real life stories come to mind.
SHOULD we stop eating chocolate? Of course not, occasionally I will sit down and consume a whole Cadbury’s fruit and nut bar or something else chocolaty which catches my fancy. I can cry over fine chocolate too for all the memories it stirs up! I don’t eat chocolate as routine though but wait to eat it only with the friend who presents me with it over an occasion…and now there’s Chocolate Day to sell more chocolate good, bad and ugly. I would say eat chocolate less and less and only on Chocolate Day if you value your good health.
Most chocolate is not healthy food. Eating too much chocolate and candy sweets is associated with consuming refined sugar and this not surprisingly contributes towards our diabetes, coronary heart disease statistics… some say eat dark chocolate only for this contain antioxidants and actually add to heart health!
I would say don’t buy all the hype of how good chocolate is – a lot depends on what kind of chocolate and how much of it you eat day in and day out. Chocolate is high in sugar and saturated dairy fats and a no no even if it is seen as high energy food (releasing energy quickly because of the small amount of caffeine), mostly chocolate is high glycemic food and high calorie food and leads to excess weight which is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
You don’t want to hear this but healthier sources of the antioxidant polyphenols in chocolate are beans, pulses, fruit and vegetables. Chocolate is mostly refined carbohydrate, okay. A little is fine, a lot is damaging to health as also vis-à-vis dental health if you don’t wash up your mouth post-chocolate binging. I am told that during the manufacturing process of cleaning, fermentation, roasting time and temperature, “dutching” (alkalising) and addition of extra ingredients to the cocoa (emulsifier or sugar, for example) can almost completely remove the polyphenols from dark chocolate too.
Of course nothing is going to stop people from eating chocolate but don’t get children addicted to it please. Poorer families are particularly vulnerable. Learn to eat banana or some fruit or a handful of peanuts instead…easy to say, hard to do of course. Chocolate is an irresistible nasha for far too many! All I can say is educate yourself about chocolate and enjoy it to live or to die! It’s the sum total of what we put in our mouth constantly which makes the vital difference life and longevity, okay. Eating good chocolate once in a way is better than eating bad chocolate every day!
SOME RICE TALK!
FORGET chocolate, Chocolate Day is over with, goodbye. I think we should also have a Rice Day. I’ve had rice on my mind lately, ever since I got these variety of rice samples from Arunachal Pradesh at one of the organic food expos in town…there was rice from Chhattisgarh, the Punjab, and the samples of native rice varieties I gathered and bought at the Arunachal Pradesh stall. So I have been re-discovering the wonderful flavour of say Khaw Tai Khamti Lahi rice from Arunachal Pradesh…slow cook and eat with a dollop of ghee or mustard oil and mashed boiled potato, a little honest lemon pickle to kick up a feeling of living the good life occasionally!
Next, have you heard of the Aadim Javaphul rice, Kalamali Dosa rice, brown rice…this is real rice, my friends. I had also picked up a packet of “Arug Jevik Chawal – kism Dubraj,” Rs90 kg. Plain, unlabelled, can’t remember if this was from Dante in Chhatisgarh. Anyway, after treating myself to these varieties of organically cultivated native rice, I feel l can’t eat my usual routine urban-sourced rice like kolam or even basmati anymore! I’m so spoilt. Point is the above rice varieties are not available in Goa. In Goa I have to be content with the very best rice which is farmer Nestor Rangel’s silky red or brown rice of the khazan lands of Goa. There’s Jyoti (parboiled brown rice with bran) which he sells only in 5kg bags at Rs350; but he’s got 2-kg brown rice packs at Rs160 too.
You must know how to cook these natural rice varieties: Wash once so that you don’t wash off the bran which is nutrients plus, plus. You may soak overnight or at least an hour before cooking the rice. Nestor says his “ukde (boiled) brown rice is processed hygienically, boiled and dried in stainless steel boiler of a German make mill where no human hand is involved, therefore, it is brown rice fully sterilised.”
His advice on cooking procedure: “Boil soaked brown rice in pressure cooker and just before the whistle near blow steams in about ten minutes, put off the gas and leave it for half an hour. Ensure lid and knob of pressure cooker is not open during these 30 minutes. Thereafter, check the rice for it softness or if there is excess liquid and accordingly cook more (though it’s not required) as per your requirement and enjoy our healthy brown rice!” Enjoy! I wish these organically cultivated red or brown rice varieties would also be available as rice flour to steam-cook and relish.
In country homes of Gujarat we have this tradition of steam-cooking rice flour with green chilli-ginger-ajwain seeds…savoured with cold pressed tilt or sesame seed oil. Similarly, bajra or pearl millet flour is steam cooked in garlic and ajwain-spiked water or buttermilk – piece de resistance fare. Oh, there’re several steam-cooked flour recipes, some combine with ground pulses. These steam-cooked flours are full of flavour and utterly yummylicious, I’d say food to live for.
All this is to say get into movements seeking to clean up our eating habits as also our good earth and environment. Don’t know about you but I am in search of clean air, clean water, clean food….increasingly harder and harder to find! Better still create or re-create our lost worlds of mother earth if we truly want to live the good life and not this constantly bad life which so many of us live willingly or unwillingly, complaining and grumbling about it but doing nothing for money or for love.