India makes more milk than any country on Earth. Italy has 400 cheeses. India has roughly zero aged ones. Ever wondered why? What India does have: paneer (acid-set, fresh), chhena (softer, fresh), khoa (reduced milk solids), dahi, lassi, buttermilk, ghee. So, it’s either fresh acid coagulated, fat-preserved or liquid ferments. No aged solids.

India has a strange blind spot when it comes to eggs. For starters, we have, against all common sense, declared it non-veg, which automatically comes attached with moral baggage, and then on top of that, even in families that eat meat, the idiotic idea that eggs are “heating” (taseer) reduces its daily/weekly consumption. From first principles:
An egg is a complete biological starter kit. Protein, fats, micronutrients, packed in a self-contained, cheap, scalable unit.

If you had to design a “default human food” from scratch, you’d find it difficult to find something that looks too different from an egg

There is no single word in the world of food that elicits more fear and loathing than FAT. It doesn't help that the scientific establishment has thoroughly confused the layperson over the last 70 years with conflicting messages about dietary fats 🧵 For starters, the sugar lobby shifted the blame to fats in the 1960s nytimes.com/2016/09/13/wel…

A few protein facts to cut through the Influenza led Infogeddon 🧵 Most gymbros are overthinking protein and most old folks are not getting enough for basic body maintenance. Surveys regularly reveal that more than 80% of Indians do not get enough protein in their diet. Older women are often the worst affected

What did people eat before European colonisation?

Here is one specific vegetarian example from Tamil Nadu. This meal is typically made once a year as part of a religious celebration to remember ancestors Unsurprisingly, none of these dishes contain the following ingredients: Chillies 🌶️ , Tomato 🍅, Potato 🥔 , Cabbage, cauliflower, beans, carrot 🥕 etc. Because all of them arrived post-colonisation.

The #TSATU rabbit hole has always been one of the less appreciated things about @amitvarma's podcast. The links he shares in each episode's show notes are an incredibly rich source of pointers to build a nuanced and wide understanding of the subjects being discussed. That said, any listener of the podcast will also know that Amit tends to reference a few ideas more regularly than others. So I thought I might do a quick and dirty analysis of all links shared in every episode's show notes

The Anatomy of Onam Sadhya (in collaboration with @dataheartist, who did the illustrations and visual design) The dishes span a range of flavour profiles, and we have captured the taste profile (sweet, salt, sour etc), aroma profile (bold, floral etc) and texture/mouthfeel (gravy, creamy, crunchy etc)

A thread to aggregate all the food related misinformation mythbusting posts of mine in collaboration with various nutrition, fitness and medicine experts on Instagram 👇🏼 Food misinformation on social media - part 1. This covers the most egregious examples instagram.com/p/Ca4kZI9PDsA/…

A thread to aggregate all the food/dish algorithms I’ve made (in collaboration with other experts) 🧵 The Amaklamatic Chutney recipe generator docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

This year, there’s a good chance that (some of) your parents or grandparents have been furiously reaching out to “experts” on WhatsApp, YouTube and TV to find out if Pongal/Makar Sankranti was to be celebrated on Jan 14 or Jan 15. The confusion stems from the fact that this year, the Sun enters the zodiac sign of Capricorn in the afternoon of the 14th, and since people like to celebrate their festivals in the morning, some “experts” have been recommending celebrating Pongal on the 15th

Indian print advertisements over the years. A thread

A few random observations about this 1/n If it wasn’t already evident, the south and east are largely meat eating while the north and west are significantly vegetarian

I’ve done my fair share of business negotiations, but nothing could have prepared me to parlay with a thuggish rhesus monkey who stole my spectacles at the Jakhoo temple in Shimla earlier today. I was, rather fortuitously, helped by an imposing alpha male monkey If you are wondering how on earth I managed to enlist the services of a large monkey to retrieve my spectacles, I will have to tell you the whole story, but since I’m currently trekking to see the Chadwick falls, this will have to wait till my phone gets connectivity

What connects the customary late afternoon/early evening rain in Bengaluru and the Nepenthes fly-trapping pitcher plant? It’s Madagascar. Intrigued? Thread... Around 120 million years ago, the Indian landmass parted ways with the Antarctic and Australian landmass. And around 88 million years ago, a giant underwater volcanic eruption called the Marion hotspot occurred, and it went on for 2 million years.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and accomplished orator who was amputated and beheaded on the orders of Mark Antony for his scathing criticism and opposition against the man. But before his hands and head were non-consensually separated from his body, he authored a work on ethics titled "De finibus bonorum et malorum" ("On the ends of good and evil”) in 45 BCE.

When I was in high school, my English teacher told us this fascinating story of India’s electrification drive in the 1960s. The government sent armies of electrical engineers village by village to bring what would be a disruptive change - light after dark. And it wasn’t easy because electricity was a newfangled thing and understandably, village elders regularly resisted what the 1960s equivalent of WhatsApp (hearsay and gossip) told them - this was a scary bit of technology that was dangerous.

When you add a pinch of baking soda and a teabag to the pressure cooker when cooking chickpeas, you are using the chemistry of acid-base reactions and also exploiting the ability of sodium bicarbonate to break bonds in pectin. When you add gram flour (besan) to yoghurt and whisk it to prevent it from splitting in a kadhi, you are experimenting with the physics of emulsions. When you whip air into egg whites for cakes, you are dealing with foams

Uwe Hohn, Neeraj Chopra's coach, and the only man to ever throw a javelin over 100m did not win an Olympic medal because East Germany boycotted the 1984 games in Los Angeles As throws reached 100m during the mid-80s, the design of the javelins changed to push the centre of gravity 4 cm ahead, which reduced throw distance because it's harder to throw something that is more front-heavy

The erstwhile school librarian of my late father’s village, Gopalasamudram (near Tirunelveli) used to maintain an annual handwritten diary of literally everything he learned during the year. This is the diary from 1956 The list of Melakartha ragas in Carnatic music

Flavour memories combine and interfere with subsequent aroma detection. For instance, anything with vanilla will taste mildly sweet even if it contains no sugar because we associate vanilla only with sweet dishes. This is a trick one can use to reduce the intake of added sugars. Adding powdered cardamom to your tea can make it taste sweeter with a relatively smaller amount of sugar. Incidentally, umami can make a smaller amount of sugar linger for longer, so using glutamate-heavy ingredients like walnuts in desserts lets you use lesser sugar

What connects two 18th century German physicians/naturalists, the Nawabs of Arcot, and winged termites with South Indian cooking? A thread... Johann Andreas Murray was a Swedish physician of German descent who studied under Carl Linnaeus, who pioneered the binomial nomenclature of all living organisms, a system that we continue to use today.