Eating less, eating better?

The new market economy has signalled a change in eating habits. In the rural areas, the consumption of more fruit and vegetables and less of cereals is a healthy trend, signifying a diversified and a better quality 'food basket', says GAIL OMVEDT.

ARE Indians, even in rural ones, eating better these days? Anyone noticing the flourishing of vegetables and fruit in market places might think so. Rural markets now see not only mounds of tomatoes, onions and brinjal to provide some variety in diets, but also pomegranates, grapes, chikkus along with the usual bananas. Eggs, too, are visible as never before, not to mention the varieties of packaged junk and non-junk snacks lining shops springing up everywhere. And, while many poor farmers line the highway with stalls of fruit and even set out chairs and simple stands selling the Indian version of "lemonade," poor women now are increasingly earning their livelihood not just by labouring in agriculture itself but by buying vegetables wholesale and selling them in retail in villages, large and small.

Many of the die-hard sloganeers of "food security" are disturbed by this new trend. Marxist economists like Utsa Patnaik feel that India is selling out its agriculture to western control of seeds and western consumption; romantics like Arundhati Roy think that farmers in irrigated areas are growing "cash crops" at the expense of their own nutrition. For Marxists and romantics alike, there is only degeneration in the new market-oriented rural economy. The very terminology of "cash crop" versus "food crop" indicates the parameters of this way of thinking: "food" means wheat, rice, jowar, and the like, while everything else - including fruits and vegetables as well as flowers and cotton - is somehow nonfood. Leave aside that they themselves may like fruit; the poor depend, they think, on foodgrain, and their degree of well-being can be measured by the amount of foodgrains they can consume. The problem of falling off-take from the Public Distribution Systems (PDS) thus becomes a major worry. To them, the fact that Indian farmers have been putting more energy into growing fruit and vegetables is a sign of neo-colonial enslavement, not a diversifying diet.

Now, however, there is interesting new evidence, brought forward by agricultural economist C. H. Hanumantha Rao, that what is going on is really a process of upgrading rural diets. The evidence that the demand for foodgrains in rural India is not growing but declining is, argues Hanumantha Rao, a healthy trend, with the smallest consumption of cereals indicating a diversified and better quality "food basket".

Citing statistics from national surveys, he shows that per capita cereal consumption for India overall has declined from 15.26 kg a month in 1972-73 to 13.4 kg in 1993-94; there is a smaller decline in urban areas. (The decline holds for every State except Orissa, which retains a high consumption at almost 16 kg in 1993- 94, and Kerala, which went from eight to 10 kg). Generally, it has been greater in the relatively better-off States, while the "BIMARU" States are consuming almost as much foodgrains as before.

The most significant fact is that this decline has been greater among the top 70 per cent of expenditure classes - greatest of all among the top 30 per cent of rural people, whose per capita cereal consumption has declined from a whopping 19.03 kg in 1972- 73 to 14.77 kg in 1993-94. It is only among the poorest 30 per cent that there has been a slight rise in consumption of food grains from 11.36 kg in 1972-73 to 11.76 kg in 1993-94. For the poorest one-third, an increase in prosperity clearly means having a little more to eat; but for the rest it means eating better, eating less cereals and more of other kinds of food. It also means having more income to spend on goods other than food, and more opportunity to spend it. Hanumantha Rao also shows that the average per capita expenditure in rural areas went up from Rs. 44 a month to Rs. 281 in the nearly 20 years covered, while the average cereal price went from Rs. 1.17 per kg to Rs. 5.08. Clearly, though cereals cost more these days, they represent less in terms of daily expenditure, and leave a much larger amount for other kinds of food and other goods and services. He argues that the declining need for heavy manual labour due to mechanisation, and an increased availability of other goods with the development of market infrastructure also are related to the decline in consumption of foodgrains. He concludes that the majority of the rural population has reached a "saturation point" for consumption of foodgrains and that this is happening even for the poor, and is a factor to be welcomed (Economic And Political Weekly, January 20).

Hanumantha Rao's conclusion should be surprising only to those who have gone on thinking in terms of the "food crop/ cash crop" dichotomy. If it goes against some "intuitive" reasoning to understand how eating less cereals means eating better, it would be useful to think just how much rice or wheat 11 kg a month - about 400g a day - amounts to. For an urban middle class person, it seems like a high amount of pure carbohydrates. And people new to village or new to India - as I was myself decades ago - find it somewhat amazing just how much rice, or how many bhakris or chappatis, people are able to consume. Some of this is due to hard physical labour; but some of it also is due to a poor diet; one makes up in quantity what is not easily available in quality. And there is also a matter of food habit and lack of nutritional knowledge: bhakrichatney, the traditional diet of the poor in Maharashtra, has become almost institutionalised; bhakri is often replaced by the more prestigious chappatis, but the habit of eating vegetables has simply not developed. Milk, sugar and grain foods are enough, many think, to feed children.

Some attribute a more monotonous diet to commercialisation; many in villages also feel things were better in the old days, remembering how they used to raise everything for home consumption, including vegetables and spices, interplanted in their fields. And it may well be true that the era of PDS, the initial era of cash crops, with low incomes and at least of foodgrains available cheaply in ration shops, actually saw a worsening of nutrition habits. But now this seems to be changing.

The fact is that except for cases of real malnutrition, income levels everywhere seem to be related negatively to amount of food consumed.

In the United States, it is the working poor who gulp down huge quantities of meat and potatoes, while the health-conscious middle classes worry about their calories and cholesterol.

In India, it is still true that it is the middle class people, not the poor, who have large hefty bodies and big stomachs - but the poor, to maintain even their low level of body weight, have in the past had to eat large amounts of foodgrains simply because they could not afford the higher quality diversified diet.

Now this is changing. Even if the initial spurt of development resulted in more monotonous diets and a monoculture of cash crops, the new market economy seems to be diversifying food consumption as well as consumption of manufactured goods. Educated daughters-in-law, watching TV and looking at new life styles, are also trying out new cooking methods, even if it is only to make idlis and dhoklas along with the usual chappati-dal vegetables. Perhaps it is the food equivalent of the "flexible specialisation" of post-Fordist forms of production - but the changes are real; the dynamism of the rural areas is seen in consumption as well as production. People may by eating less when measured purely in terms of cereal consumption, but most of them are eating better.

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