Coeliac in Ladakh

Ladakh is not kind to coeliacs. This mountain region at the far north of India, which borders Tibet, is too high to grow much rice. The local people grow barley as a staple food. The main meal you see is often based on white rice, but as I understand it this is distributed by the government.

The problems begin at breakfast, which in traditional food is almost always barley roti/chapati. In addition to the words for wheat flour (Hindi: maida, atta) you need to know the Ladakhi for barley meal (Tsampa). The only option I found in homestays was to bring my own rice flakes and crunch them as if a sullen donkey. Asking for an omelette without chapattis is risky and so one might appear above or below or otherwise contaminating the omelette.

Lunch and dinner can be treated as one, you have to avoid momos (wheat dumplings) which may be offered as a treat. But the staple dinner (rice, dal, vegetable) is not fully safe either. Dal (lentils) cost money and so this may be thickened with wheat or barley. I found this about half the time, especially in roadside cafes. On one occasion the dal was thickened with spaghetti/pasta/noodles which the local people called fin/phin. They were not aware these were made of anything else, and I was not aware to ask about this until I covered my rice in the dal and sat there in despair.

For some reason the tea is a risk. I'm not sure how it could be contaminated, (the old tradition is to add barley meal to a half drunk cup and eat this), but I suspect it is.

Going gluten free in Ladakh (outside of touristic Leh) is a choice between white rice and sickness (the usual Indian rules on contaminated spices apply). My advice is to buy Poha (beaten rice) and eat it dry. Crunchy and safe.

A packet full of lies

India's middle class are growing around the middle. People are starting to take action, and a market for diet and healthy foods has opened up. Unfortunately this market is partly filled with lies and misinformation.

The packet which offends me the most is 'Haldirams diet chiwda". For the benefit of non-Indians, Haldirams is one of India's biggest snacks and confectionary brands, and chiwda is a kind of crispy snack. The brand is generally well regarded for quality, but the snack in question is anything but a diet food. In fact, before concerns about gluten, I used this snack to gain weight. The justification for labelling this particular pack as diet is a fractional reduction in calories and fat compared to the non-diet version, but this doesn't match the claims.

From the front of the packet it's bold:
"Diet"
"Snac Lite!"
"Sensible snacking"
"Mild taste" (ok I'll agree with this one)

The imagery follows up the words; the packet is mostly green (the colour of healthy) with thin vertical stripes... even the packet needs a slimming effect. The detail is not subtle, an image of a tape measure wrapped around the pack. The tape measure continues on the back of the pack, with little but a repetition of the same claim "healthy namkeen" (snack). Apparently this is part of a series of healthy snacks.

The problems begin at the nutrition label... it's not actually healthy. It has 516 calories per 100g (774 calories per bag) of which most come from white rice and palm oil. This is about as far as you can get from healthy, bar the non diet version of the same snack, or foods flavoured with lead, arsenic, maybe a little mercury? It gets worse, it's not just the high calorie density from nutritionally poor foods, it's the "mild taste". If you're a bit greedy like me you can easily finish an entire pack in one sitting, that's a meals worth of calories (1/3 of daily intake). This combination makes it, to my mind, one of the most dangerously misleading foods available.

There are many other high calorie density foods available, what catches my attention here is also the low quality of the food. Cashew nuts at 550 calories per 100g are high, but pro rata match your RDA of protein, iron, magnesium, and nearly vitamin B6 and potassium. This product doesn't contain cashews. It's white rice, which as I have covered before, doesn't have much to offer beyond starch. A big chunk of the energy comes from fat, 28% by weight. The fat is palm oil, which is one of the least healthy and most environmentally destructive oils available. The rainforests of Indonesia will be destroyed and replaced by a barren monoculture thanks to this oil. Of the remaining ingredients only the 15% gram flour (chickpea) offers some salvation. Chickpea has a reasonable protein content for a starchy food, and is digested slightly more slowly. The remaining macro ingredients are starch and sugar, as if this product needed added sugar on top of it's ills.

The most frustrating part, this labelling actually works. I met one person keen to stay in shape that ate this food believing that it was a healthy alternative snack. The lies work.

Tell me sweet little lies

This time around I am rarely concerned with the honesty of the tourist industry, but lies which aim to mislead locals have caught my attention. I will skip over the spread of homeopathic medicine, or the newspaper adverts for BrainoX, for exam performance, or the pyramid schemes... their time will come. My first concern is food.

Food is an issue in India, and many people are malnourished, stunted by diets reliant on cheap white rice. Anyone who can afford it seems to have the opposite problem and gains weight. There are various pieces of local wisdom on the cause, quite often cooking oil is blamed for the rise in obesity. If instead you take a 'post low fat' look at the Indian diet, a big chunk of the calories come from rice or wheat. Sugar, the new food evil, is also consumed in large quantities. Given these influences it would be helpful if the debate was informed by reliable sources.

The bag of milled rice flakes known as poha catch my attention. The bold claims are as follows:

"Low calori" - the front of the pack makes this claim, but the nutrition label shows the standard figure for dry white rice. It's true white rice has significantly fewer calories than vegetable oil for example, but it's not exceptionally low. At 365kcal/ 100g it's between white bread and sugar... I would consider this a lie.

"Healthy and fresh" - Two separate claims. I would argue that as a long-life dried food poha is in fact the very opposite of fresh. It's probably a good candidate for stocking up a survival shelter. When a nutritionist mentions eating more fresh food I doubt this is what they have in mind. Here I'm being facetious, I know India has repurposed the word fresh to mean anything that isn't fried in vegetable oil. As vegetable oil is the popular cause of all ills this food must therefore be healthy. I'm leaning towards a lie.

For your healthy life - meaningless, and deceptive. If you eat this you will be healthy, which is a lie. Note how guarded the UK brands are when they state their processed foods "can be part of a balanced diet".

High minerals & dietary fiber - I will define an easy threshold for high in X to be "if you ate your daily calories entirely of this food, you would meet your RDA in nutrient X". This is of course a flat lie, white rice is neither high in minerals or high in dietary fiber. If you ate 2000 calories of rice you would receive only:
27% of your dietary fiber
22% of your iron
11% of the calcium RDA
33% of magnesium
16% of potassium

Export quality - but is it? And what does this mean, perhaps the absence of twigs and small stones? I'll call this one smoke.

This pack could just be a bad apple, another brand has none of the misleading statements. In fact it's one of the quaint things I love about India, the little nostalgic touches.
"Victory Poha", in a dark military green pack. Established 1947.

On my porch

I strung the long-carried hammock across my porch with the help of a friendly young Australian. It's travelled hundreds of kilometers on my back without use, but now justifies it's weight. I'm wallowing low with my feet pointing to the sky, a clear blue evening sky. The heat has faded now, but it's effect lingers, I am the melted chocolate hanging from the roof. The monsoon is almost overdue, but the rain and clouds which harassed tourists in the dry season are missing. The village is still, there is no wind, the children are not still. First they crowd around the shack of the alcoholic next door. He does the jester routine, they sing. I'm up next, the crowd gathers around my house, laughing squabbling chasing talking. I smile and wait until the "hello" chorus dies down and they scream on.

It's nearly time to leave this paradise. The rain will come, one day. The flow of western tourists has fallen to a trickle, lucky souls enjoying the last borrowed days of sun. I'm not sure I will find this again, I know I have been lucky; renting a house in a roadless jungle village for less than a pint of beer. I have been here two months now, there wasn't much risk of me leaving. The locals have stopped asking how long I stay.

In the town at the top of the hill the shopkeepers recognise me, the journey to the every 8th-day market has become a familiar routine. It punctuates time, which otherwise slips away. A market which would fall on a Sunday is held on the Saturday, as you learn. Market day means fresh fruit, but with the heat and the chaos it will be the cheaper ripe fruit and instantly require eating. There is a fruit frenzy, if I can recruit a friend to share in it. A kilo of mangoes, half a kilo of lychee, grapes, bananas. Can't speak eating mango, in two days it's gone. The fallback is the jackfruit, a giant studded monster that is just so palatable that it is eaten, but not often eaten. You have to plan days ahead for the fruit to ripen, face the adhesive white latex, and a faint rotting smell to get at the flesh. It's somewhere between a mango and a banana, generally quite pleasant.

It's impossible to know where the time goes. I make excuses, perhaps a day or two was spent collecting firewood, laundry, making tea, cooking a little food, if you can call it that. I just about stretch to boiling lentils, adding salt and calling it a dal. The hours may be spent walking, swimming, sunbathing, playing cards. Everyone has their own pet project. I adopted a dog of sorts, not that she shows much loyalty. I get a wagging tail, but she will follow anyone about the village. In the way dogs do she wont eat medicine, but plays the passive aggressive swallowing game without showing a tooth. Nobody wants a female dog. Some nights she sleeps on the porch, I guess when someone finds where she snuck into and drives her off.

It's time to leave, 'just one more day'. It's the refrain.

Textbook failures

When the short but useful learners guide has mistakes you see how a whole state can start asking for your good name.

Here it's "keep quite, wait me, and if you see a mouse don't shrick"

A public announcement

*Feedback noise*

Hello, hello, hello (tentatively spoken)

*Tap tap tap*

Hello, hello

*Squeal*

Information

(Talking in Mizo)

The daily public announcement for the village.

Lifts

I get a lift in the back of a truck. It's definitely one of my favourite ways to travel, I enjoy the road over the roof of the cab, and inhale the refreshing diesel exhaust. After a while I'm the only cargo and I am invited into the cab for the 25km journey. It's just me, the driver (27) and his brothers, age 13 and 15. After a while the driver stops for a drink... The alcoholic kind, a bag of local rice spirit. He asks if I want to drive, I think about it, but reply that I don't know how. I'm not sure I can remember how to drive a car, let alone a truck. His drunk hands are probably the safer bet on the mountain roads.
The journey is tortuously slow. I feel the kilometre stones are mocking me, as the truck bounces along seeming to progress nowhere. It takes two and a half hours to cover the distance, the average speed is below 10km/h, you could run it faster. It's no fault of the driver, Mizoram really does have some of the worst roads I have seen. It's not that rural roads are exceptionally bad, it's that all the roads are bad. Local people lament the increasing duration of journeys, it's getting worse... and everything I have seen is before the monsoon. Day turns into night, at least one of the headlights works!

Journeys

Rules of travelling no. 7

Before any long journey you will suddenly get sick. This coordinated assault by virus, bacteria, amoeba or protozoa inevitably leads to one conclusion. Loperamide hydrochloride, or as I like to say 'the password to India'. In my puritanical manner of travel this effect can be boosted by ceasing to eat or drink for the duration of the journey.

If you're a forward thinking person you can also pick up some dulcolax (guess)