A healthy obsession

The important thing is that she said what she did when it was virtually unacceptable. And she did it in ingenuous ways.

She was an ordinary middle class Mumbai housewife with growing kids and a kingsize yen to do something more with herself. That desire led her to a post-graduate diploma in nutrition at the Catering College in the early seventies. Emerging with a conviction that institutions killed intuition, she set about experimenting in her own kitchen, whipping up nutritious concoctions for family and friends.

Vociferous about her emerging ideas on food and health, she soon acquired a certain visibility and a reputation for eccentricity. ‘‘That Vijaya Venkat,’’ people were likely to say in those days with a disbelieving shudder, ‘‘she’s the one who doesn’t believe in drinking milk!’’ I should know. I was one of those who thought of her as a bit — well, anyone who wanted to banish wheat and make curd out of groundnut milk had to be crazy. Yet her ideas were intriguing.

Enough at least to tempt a lot of people I knew particularly in newspapers and advertising agencies to try out the dabba service she launched in 1989 when she set up a Health Awareness Centre in a quiet corner in Dadar. The Centre, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this weekend, has clearly grown from those humble beginnings. Today it dispatches packed lunches, offers personal counselling and nutrition classes and hosts interactive programmes on health and nutrition. An estimated 6,000 people have been through its portals and many more reached through seminars and the press.

It is difficult to compress Venkat’s philosophy. But, simply put, she believes good health is within everyone’s reach and can be achieved through food. Apart from the no-nos (salt, sugar, oil, chemicals, refined foods, meat, milk, etc) eating habits according to her must synchronise with the three phases in which the body functions (8 pm-4 am internal repair; 4 am to 12 pm waste disposal; 12 pm-8 pm digestion). She opposes immunisation and would treat illness with rest rather than medicine. She also believes in the effectiveness of food to heal not only people but also the earth claiming that it is the values and habits we have adopted that have led to negative environmental consequences. The unhealthy addiction to tea for instance, she would argue, is responsible for wasteful land use; the same plot could have been used to grow a greater quantity of nutritious fruit.

Today, with the spread of greater environmental and health awareness — thanks to other local practitioners and the popularity of books such as Fit For Life — Venkat’s views do not sound as outlandish as they once did. The important thing is that she said what she did when it was virtually unacceptable. And she did it in ingenuous ways. The dabbawallahs for instance doubled up as couriers ferrying notes, bills and cheques between the Centre and its clients. When a prominent ad agency was considering taking up a pro-Narmada dam account (Venkat is a fervent opponent), the Centre sent out notes in its dabbas and by evening a protest had been drummed up and the agency changed its mind.

She is also firm about her goals. In the initial period, when her dabba service became popular enough to warrant a waiting list, she had no hesitation in calling it off and making it mandatory for everyone interested to undergo nutrition counselling. ‘‘I did not want my work to be reduced to a catering service; if people came seeking food I motivated them to seek health.’’

Firmness doesn’t always win friends, though. Over the years I’ve met people who’ve been critical of Venkat’s methods; others whose descriptions of baked puris and jaggery karanjis would probably be unprintable. Venkat herself remembers being called all kinds of things — ‘irresponsible’, ‘mad woman’, ‘faddist’ etc etc.

This morning, though, when I stepped into a pastry shop intending to buy an unabashedly sinful chocolate cake, I was stopped short by a basket on the counter filled with odd-looking packets. They turned out to be: sesame thins, potato crisps and other delicacies — baked not fried, whole wheat not regular — and I thought to myself that given time, and perseverance, even the mad starts to make sense.

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