An ode to pulses,

Reading time: 8 minutes

I put on those glasses less than a decade ago. Not rose-colored shades, but those ugly matrix style ones that reframed and re-contextualized my baseline understanding and knowledge of the world. And ever since then, I’ve been attempting to Google “how to decolonize my life” as if WikiHow would magically spit out a five step process to help me rid of that gross, oily sensation of being a horrid byproduct of a far reaching systemic rot, perpetuated through a million different nodes in a million different ways.

Needless to say Google had little to offer and I had even less to give back. So I’ve been building my own lexicon based on material gathered from writers, activists and general not-basics who’ve been at this for decades. For me, it seems to have filtered down to two main institutions that I consider to be almost trigger points at this time. Education and Food Sovereignty.

in which I throw shade on the Food Pyramid,

Milk has been propositioned to me, all my life, as some sort of elixir of the gods. How dare I disdain this fatty goodness; so consummate in its wholesomeness that it had to have its own adjective. Milky.

I mean sure, it looks good in ads but taste wise, dubious at best. To each their own, I’d say but I was a weirdie for believing milk to be unnatural. Why drink milk from a cow when we no longer drank our own mother’s milk? In India, we used to get packets of milk that we’d have to boil because they came unpasturized, but nothing got rid of that godawful, metallic taste after it coated my mouth in a flavor that I could, as a 10 year old, only refer to as ‘animal taste’. I could barely even stand the smell of it.

Soon enough, came the food pyramids with teachers and randos trying to educate us on how the food pyramid decreed all things required for a healthy diet– yes, the determining authority on what kind of lifestyle we’re all leading.

Milk is sacred in Indian mythos and plays an incredibly important part in the Indian subcontinent diet but here I was, an East Asian with a lactose intolerant predisposition to this holy nectar. It wasn’t a make it or break it situation though, because milk is rarely used directly in any form of cooking other than ghee maybe, and after I contracted Hep C in grade four, even the ghee had to come to a hard stop in our family meals.

Soon enough, came the food pyramids with teachers and randos trying to educate us on how the food pyramid decreed all things required for a healthy diet– yes, the determining authority on what kind of lifestyle we’re all leading. The Food Pyramid. What that meant was Indian folk being told to drink milk and eat meat despite a massive majority of the population being vegetarian and a large minority not even eating tubers to avert himsa– violence.

The Food Pyramid is absolute because it is science. It is science because it comes from our science books. Science books written by the rational yt man. Culture and commensalism be damned, to disobey science is to be a backwater dweller.

Despite all the haranguing about what is encoded in science as ‘good for you’ — It’s not like Hindus decided to ditch vegetarianism, nor did the Jains decide to throw their eons old culture to suddenly ‘get with the times’. But the food pyramid persists, and continues to tragically be used in textbooks with the unspoken exoticization and invalidation of any non-Western diet.

Truly, I understand the good intention of having a “standardization of food for health reasons”, but considering the food pyramid is the brainchild of two Swedish men from the 70s and now mainly upheld by the USDA, I don’t feel any kind of immense pressure to acknowledge it as a determining factor in what a ‘healthy diet’ consists of. Especially because of its reductive treatment of non-Eurocentric diets and dismissal of— this being my biggest gripe— the one food group that stands heads and shoulders above all the rest. Pulses.

The arbitrariness of vegetables,

According to Wiki, “Vegetables are parts of plants that are consumed by humans or other animals as food.

While…

In 2018, when I found out that pulses are not actually ‘missing’ from the food pyramid, but instead lumped in with the vegetable food group, buried under legumes and other vegetables of a totally different ilk, I felt a little upset, somewhat betrayed and pretty goddamn indignant about the sheer banality of the food pyramid. It did not represent the immensity of the food that exists out in the world, the vast range of sustenance that kept our ancestors ancestors alive, allowed them to build empires to celebrate the food that they nurtured and harvested.

Most things that you may know from your heritage and love, that is not a staple in the Western diet gets thrown under “Cereals” or “Vegetables”. Modern pyramids have expanded their definition of “healthy” with a little bit of Diversity&Inclusion spice to make sure they’re still kosher with the liberal progressives.

Behold. An early food pyramid that has all the food you’d ever need to eat. Unless you’re a barbarian.
An updated food pyramid, circa 2000s.

Anyway, pulses, the thing I would consider my soul food is so obscure that I just have to call them specifically by their name when asked what my favorite kind of food group is.

“What kind of food do you like to eat?”
“I love lentils.” I say.
“What are lentils?” people ask.
“They go into stews and soups.”
“Oh, you like stews and soups.”
“No. I like lentils. They’re pulses from legumes— seeds that grow in pods.”
“Beans?”
“…. I do love beans.”

They’re not unknown. Canada is one of the largest producers of pulses, India is next. Yet most people barely have any idea what they are, what they do or how they taste. Indian food is associated with thick curries yet no one — I mean no one, unless they’re Indian— thinks of dal. One of the absolute baseline staple dishes of India. The one dish that I could and would eat every day for the rest of my life.

Pulses bring you love.

Pulses are ancient. Older than rice, older than wheat. They are high yield, drought resistant crops, don’t require much fertilizing, are far more disease resistant than many other cash crops that get way too much PR on that terrible pyramid. They’re high in dietary fiber, high in folate, iron and protein. The entire plant—the legume, actually nourishes the soil they’re grown in and are thus vital for crop rotation. That’s how freaking badass they are, yet they get no love.

Lingering and parasitic post colonial/imperialist systems perpetuate a specific narrative to push their exploitative agricultural practices. These systems and attitudes are the blight that reduce the diversity of our human experience into five tiered pyramids. To maximize profits, to create extractive systems, our sustenance must be stripped of its stories and sacredness.

The vigor of capitalism in the food industry honors no culture, no sanctity. Thus the act of eating becomes a vulgar bodily function that we might engage in three times a day, a byproduct of an instinct to survive. We may enjoy cooking, eating, entertaining but without the stories to honor and share, we can only depend on random food pyramids to tell us what our is good for our body instead of the knowledge that we may inherit from ancestral heritage from the spaces we exist in.

I am by no means a nutritionist, and I am definitely not a respected authority on any field that may involve nutrition, but I don’t need a doctorate to know that tiered diagrams are a reductive, trashy version of what our ancestors knew and what we could possibly experience on a culinary level. And most importantly, science textbook or not, I know that pulses and legumes are a whole goddamn pyramid unto itself.

As a reward for making it to end of this dissertation length rant, please enjoy my personal Dal Tadka recipe, illustrated by yours truly.

Meimei’s Dal Tadka

For pressure cookingFor dal masalaFor tadka

1 cup masoor dal (red lentils)

– 1/2 cup chana (split chick pea) dal

– 3 cups water

– 1tsp oil
1 bay leaf

1 tsp cumin/jeera

1 tsp kasuri methi

1 onion, small diced

1 1/2 tsp finely chopped garlic

1 red chilli

1/4 tsp turmeric

1 tsp MDH Kitchen King

1/4 tsp chili powder (adjust to taste — but this dal is generally not meant to be very spicy)

2 tsp salt

2 tomatoes

1 cup water

2 tbsp parsley or coriander
1 tbsp oil for tadka
1 dried red chili
1tsp mustard seeds

Method

1. Preparing the dal

  • Wash the dal while rubbing the starch and flour off the dal. The water will turn white, drain it out. Do this two more times until water runs clearer.
  • Drain off the water and transfer to a pressure cooker.
  • Add 3 cups water and 1 tsp oil.
  • Pressure cook for 20 minuets.

2. Cooking the Masala

Optional: before you make your masala, score the top of the tomatoes in a cross and dip tomatoes in boiling water to peel the skin off easily. That is, if you’re not a tomato skin fan.

  1. In a medium sized pot (or the pressure cooker itself, I like to keep things to two pots) heat 2 tbsp oil, then add the chopped garlic, cumin, bay leaf, kasuri methi and wait for the smell to hit your nostrils. Once the fragrance has been released, add onions and saute until golden brown.
  2. Add chopped tomatoes, turmeric, MDH’s Kitchen King masala, chili powder, and 1 tsp salt into the superbly amazing smelling mixture.
  3. Mix the tomatoes into the masala and saute it for a bit until soft and mushy, visually representing a chunky, orange tomato sauce.
  4. Add in the cooked dal, along with any water its sitting in, and mix into the masala.
  5. Simmer and stir occasionally for 10 to 15 minutes until mixed well and settled into a thick, soup-like consistency. If too thick, add 1 cup water. Taste and check for salt, season some more if needed

3. Add tadka

  1. In a separate, small pan (ideally cast iron) heat 1tbsp of oil and add 1tsp mustard seeds and dried red chili, when it sizzles, pour the oil and spices into the dal. Mix it in.
    It will crackle and pop. Be careful, that shiz will burn you.

Eat your face off! Have it with rice, roti, chapati or frankly, just spoon it into your mouth, nobody’s stopping you.

Note: You’ve probably made a lot. Good for you! Now you can eat this for a whole week with an assortment of different side dishes. My favorite combo is dal with rice, fried egg, and kimchi. The dal will keep well for anywhere between a week to a week and a half.