Got up at 5:30 this morning to go with Sanju and the wardens of the orphanage to Akshaya Patra’s headquarters to tour their kitchen. They cook for about 15,000 kids a day in Bangalore, and across the country their kitchens cook school lunches for over a million.
First we had to go through a security checkpoint, which we also had to do when parking at the mall, and when entering the theater to see Endhiran. They always have you pop the trunk. We may be annoyed at the US becoming a security state, but it pales in comparison to India. We arrived and met a very well dressed, barefoot, Hare Krishna, who explained their whole process to us. We took off our shoes and put on their temporary sandals and hair nets. Then we walked in.
This place was huge, and really efficient. Huge, huge vats of rice, beans, and vegetables, all arranged well. There was rice goop everywhere, as the vats lightly boiled over, but the place was very clean, clearly a priority. They don’t chop anything by hand–all of the produce is sliced by machine, even the coconuts, it appeared. They had automatic pestles to grind the spices, too. All a far cry from the backwards kitchen at the orphanage.
We have huge industrial kitchens in the States, also cooking lunches for thousands of kids. And those kitchens have the same goals–cook as much food as cheaply as possible. But we cut corners in all the wrong ways. We cheapen the food by cooking it at some factory in another state, freezing it, and shipping it in. We also cheapen it by using chemicals and additives to increase the shelf-life, and by leaving it devoid of spice and flavor. One of Sanju’s friends said that it would be just unheard of to leave out the spices from these dishes. I bet at one point Italians would’ve thought it unheard of to make pizza without oregano, or lasagna without ricotta. Didn’t stop us from doing it.
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