Food Values Beyond Nutrition - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 551

with chemical fertilizer and ground in the power mill, yet these latter were their daily
fare with few exceptions.
These interviews from the 1990s and early 2000s revealed the ways a shared assess-
ment of decline in flavor and nutrition in everyday food was embedded in broader
narratives of ecological and community deterioration. Thus, the loss of flavor result-
ing from transformed technologies and ongoing economic pressures meshes with many
other aspects of the ways food bears meaning and emotion, and transacts the social
order—both its moral solidarity and its hierarchical discriminations.
To demonstrate these pervasive ideas, I present here thoughtful reflections from
a few persons who experienced, in their own lives and households, the pressures of
expanded desire for cash and all it can purchase; not just things but also futures for
children. They clearly posit trade-offs of flavor for money and associate these with
other still-less-tangible shifts and losses. These speakers are unaware of how thor-
oughly the processes they identify and critique have already been discussed by social
theorists addressing the “great transformation” from moral to market economies—a
transformation that lies close to the core and heart of modernity experienced as con-
joined material and moral change.11 However, they are acutely and critically aware of
a complex, intimate set of consequences affecting their everyday existence.
In one conversation from 2003, an educated farmer, Sohan Lal, speaks about why
the need to increase crop production leading to cash trumps outright any inclination
to grow foods that are less profitable but more flavorful, even for home consumption.
His mother, Kesar, plaintively asserts her strong preference for indigenous wheat
known as deshi gehu (local wheat), or lal gehu (red wheat). As noted in the previ-
ous section, indigenous wheat has just about vanished from this region. Although
it requires far less water than modern wheat varieties, and might be life-saving in
drought years, its yield is not profitable. Kesar says, “I would like to plant indigenous
wheat, but he [Sohan Lal] doesn't let me plant it. He says [to me], 'who is even smell-
ing this wheat?' [meaning there is no value to it, nobody bothers with it].”
A little embarrassed, her son, a school headmaster and a successful and knowledge-
able agriculturalist, commented defensively, “Red wheat's production is very small.”
My colleague, Bhoju Ram Gujar, an old friend of the household, then provocatively
addressed his fellow teacher, Sohan Lal: “She is thinking you should grow some to eat in
your home.” Sohan Lal's rebuttal resorted to a generalized position: “Today people pay
more attention to earning money than they do to eating.”
Bhoju continued to push or even needle Sohan Lal, as this three-way exchange followed:

Bhoju : If someone gave you some money would you sell the clothes you are wearing
and the food you are eating?
Sohan Lal : Yes I can sell them, we might even sell our bread for money.
Bhoju [addressing Kesar]: It seems to me that in your family are two ways of
thinking: old-time thought, which is to eat good things and local things. And new
thought, like your son's. He thinks about earning money. Which do you like?
Kesar : Eat well, and don't worry about money. Who needs money? We need good

food.