List of annotated sources

Food INC--details on the current animal production industry

Fast food nation - more details on animal processing

Interview relatives to use their knowledge of Bengali culinary tradition

http://www.who.int/topics/food_additives/en/   -- chemical risks of additives in our food now

Heritage Diet

Fahema Patwari

Heritage Diet

            The world we live in has been completely transformed and revolutionized in the past century but somehow the Bengali people have managed to keep changes to their culinary traditions at a minimum. Bengalis, since 1911, have mingled with the world and have spread to the far reaches of the globe. In spite of that, the Bengalis’ passion for their rich culinary traditions has ensured the fact that those culinary traditions would survive globalization and remain mostly untouched.

            It is of course impossible for any sort of tradition to remain completely untouched over the span of a century. This is especially true for those Bengalis who have emigrated and must add distance from the home country into the equation. Most of these changes are not very obvious and can go completely unnoticed without further research.  

The main example here would be the meat that we Bengalis outside of our home country consume. Traditionally, most of our meat came from local farms and were killed using halal methods. However, our livestock are now raised in mass, fed corn products covered in herbicide, and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones. They are still killed in a halal manner where the animals are killed with a minimal amount of pain but the way they are raised would by no means be considered halal.

Fortunately, this is not the case yet in modern Bangladesh. Bengali farmers still tend to prefer a crop-based mix farming method and keep their cattle fed mostly on agricultural crop residues.

            As a still developing country, many things have stayed the same in Bangladesh. Fish are still caught fresh from fresh water rivers by local fishermen, crops are still harvested by local farmers, chicken are kept in spacious coops with natural amounts of sunlight laying a natural number of eggs, and all are sold in the open market. The difference now is, with the creation of refrigeration, farmers and fishers have some time to spare before his produce will go bad. While the quality of food available in Bangladesh has stayed the same, the variety of foods available has increased drastically. Bangladesh already has 60 varieties of fruit growing over the span of 3 seasons. With innovations in technology, any food can now be had out of season.

            The situation is slightly different for us Bengali’s living in the US. Food is not quite as fresh as what we would have eaten 100 years ago. To get the great variety of foods that we now see in the very industrial city of New York, we must import our food over great distances. Nothing is quite as fresh and the likelihood of having preservatives in our food is much higher.

            Bengali preparation of food is something else that tries to cling to its old ways. Bengali women still attempt to use century old tools in the kitchen. They still use the bothi-- a scythe-shaped cutting instrument, the chaki belona—a wooden pastry board with rolling pin, and the sil nora—a grinding stone. Fortunately, Bengali women have added more modern devices like the food processor and the espresso machine to their collection of kitchen appliances. The kitchen setting has only changed (mostly for my kinsmen/women outside of Bangladesh). The kitchen used to be an entity completely separate from the living quarters, often located across a courtyard. There were no gas stoves. Women had to do their cooking on small clays stoves at ground level. All the women of the family would come together for this task. Since an extended family would live in quarters surrounding a pond, everyone would come together for a massive amount of cooking. Once the cooking was done there would be a separate area for everyone to come enjoy a meal together. Since there could be no refrigeration of leftovers, there would be no leftovers.

            This is absolutely not the case in my house now. Leftovers reign supreme in our kitchen. Cooking is still done in bulk but now it’s meant to last for a few days. The meals themselves, although not eaten now as quickly as they used to be, are still apparently the same. The basic components of a Bengali meal have not changed; rice is still the constant in every Bengali meal and is eaten at least twice a day with different vegetables, fish, and/or meats. Most of these meals are cooked from scratch (at least in my household), meaning we know everything that goes into our meal. We use the same core ingredients that were used a hundred years ago with the same spices that were used a hundred years ago: turmeric, ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin, and pepper.

            Bengali food has weathered a century of industrial and agricultural changes, adapting only where needed. This would not have been possible if either our people had been less passionate about our food or if the core ingredients had not been so simple and easily attainable.