Elixir 2

 I opened up a cherry tomato pack today  to use on a salad and just on a lark, looked at where it was from. Mexico!! Of course!

This time next month, that box worth three dollars might cost a fortune. Should one go easy on the tomato consumption or splurge and regret later?

That brought up that most important question- what is worth fighting over? What is worth paying many times over for?

A couple of weeks ago, I fried up a batch of tapioca chips and posted the picture on my school Whatsapp group, and boy did that resonate with my batchies! Everyone, well, almost everyone, came up with their favorite childhood sneak snacks and the memories associated with them.

Most of the food stuff we came up with were inexpensive, street food kind of edibles - the kind that present day parents would probably shudder to think of (our parents did too) . But the memories they evoked were priceless.

There was talk of how we pulled the wool over our parents' eyes and purchased forbidden munchables and they were none the wiser. One friend and her sister were willing to forgo taking a bus back home and walked,walked! 30 minutes back home just so they could use the ticket fare to buy some fried goodness off a pushcart. There were parents who indulged their kids and bought them everything off a movie theatre menu!And there were parents who worried so much about hygiene, that the kid, even when she was much older, would indulge and hope not to get caught out at her escapade. There were sweets and savouries and drinks and cakes and fruits  and traditional stuff and funky ones. Gradually the discussion expanded to the  experience of tasty stuff purchased anywhere in general. But not the restaurant/storefront kind. More like the pushcart kind. We even talked about the bell rung by a specific pushcart fella, the universal clang announcing the arrival of yumminess that all of  us could hear and identify in a jiffy. Soan Papdi anyone?

Talk shifted to where we would buy said delectables and off we went on a geographical excursion of Kodambakkam and its vicinity. Names of the stores were remembered and their latest avatars if any were discussed. 

And in conclusion, the grand plan was made to  have a reunion where we would go on a  walking tour of our old stomping grounds and taste as many of those goodies( if they were still available) as possible.

Those memories..the way they tapped into our sensory remeberances...the sweetness of a cake, the icy chill of a sherbet, the spicy crispness of a samosa, the gooey milky feel of milk kova, the fluffy airiness of cotton candy,the crunch of butter biscuits,the sour tang of elandapazham, the cushiony sponginess of pazham pori, the starchy crispy chips, the creamy paal ice, the stony sugar rush of kamarkattu, that hit of chilli from mango slices, the gooey theyn mittai...the list goes on. 

At our very basic level, we are merely biological species and our survival depends not on social media or technology. It depends on fulfilling our basic needs..food, shelter..and food is the most important of all.  That was a lesson I learnt during Covid times and again with the Palestinian debacle.

I have always been overweight and I noticed that with age and health issues creeping in, there a certain hesitation about enjoying food. There is this inner dialog about calories and fat and weight and ..well the joy out of food is literally yanked away. 

I don't remember the previous generation being this wary about food. So what changed? Medical advances have pinpointed reasons for the sudden uptick in health issues in our generation. And the solution obviously is also right in front of our eyes- less stress, more active lifestyles.  But our work environment and the social media foghorn does not let us be. There is more money to be made,  another promotion to be achieved, yet another car looks cool, a bigger house..the list goes on. Jobs have become not just sedentary, but they also take up so much more of our time. We have made everything else easier to let us focus on making more money, by working our tails off and leisure is measured out by the teaspoonful.

Notice how in our flashback moments, all of this eating happened while we walked..from school, towards the bus stop, or towards home. Leisurely, long walks that helped us polish off whatever goodness we were cramming into our mouth, but also burning off the calories it came with. Not that we were aware of it or even cared. 

What has changed now? Age has obviously caught up with us and we have more information at our disposal and I think funnily it makes us more aware but less sated. 

Finding that compromise? Rough one. Tough one.

So here's to all my fellow fifty plus ladies, enjoy life, what it offers us and if it happens to be croissants, share it with all of us!!