I'm Elise Hu and you're listening to Ted Talks Daily in today's talk, journalist and researcher Aparna Pallavi helps us reframe what we put on our plates.

She explains how a more Western centric definition of what's delicious food creates shame around indigenous foods and how that can damage our health, ecology and cultural identities.

Let's fix this problem. Apana shares how? Take a listen to this talk from Cape Town Women 28.

Last year, I was living with this indigenous family in India. One afternoon, the young son was eating and at the sight of me, he quickly hid his car behind his back.

It took a lot of persuasion to get him to show me what he was eating, it turned out to be moth larvae, a traditional delicacy with the media, indigenous people. I cried, Oh, my God, you're eating these. I hope there's a little left for me. I saw disbelief in the boy's eyes, you eat these? I love these, I replied. I could see he did not trust me one bit. How could an open, educated woman like the same food as him?

Later, I broached the subject with his father and it turned out to be a mighty touchy fish. He said things like, oh, only this son of mine likes to eat it. We tell him, give it up, it's bad he doesn't listen.

You see, we gave up eating all this each back.

FYI, I asked. This is your traditional food. It is available in your environment. It is nutritious and I can vouch for it delicious. Why is it wrong to eat it? The man fell silent. I asked, have you been told that your food is bad, that to eat it is backward, not civilized? He nodded silently. This was one of the many, many times in my work with indigenous people in India that I witnessed shame around food.

Shame that the food you love to eat, the food that has been eaten for generations is somehow inferior, even subhuman. And this shame is not limited to out of the way icky foods like insects or rats maybe, but extends to regular foods, wild vegetables, mushrooms, flowers, basically anything that is foraged rather than cultivated. In indigenous India, this shame is omnipresent. Anything can trigger it, one uppercase vegetarian schoolmaster gets appointed in a school within weeks.

Children are telling their parents it's yucky to eat crabs or sinful to eat meat. A government nutrition program serves fluffy white rice. Now, no one wants to eat red rice or milk, it's a nonprofit reaches this village with an ideal diet for pregnant women. There you go. All the expectant mothers are feeling sad that they cannot afford apples and grapes. And people just kind of forget the fruits that can be picked off the forest floor. Health workers.

Religious missionaries, random government employees and even their own educated children are literally shouting it down at the indigenous people that their food is not good enough, not civilized enough. And soul food keeps disappearing. A little bit at a time. I'm wondering if you have ever considered whether your communities would have a similar history around food. If you were to talk to your 90 year old grandmother. Would she talk about foods that you have never seen or heard of?

Are you aware how much of your community's food is no longer available to you? Local experts tell me that the South African food economy is now entirely based on imported foods. Corn has become the staple, while the local sorghum, millet, bulbs and tubers are all gone. So are the wild legumes and vegetables while people eat potatoes and onions, cabbages and carrots. In my country, this loss of food is colossal, modern India is stuck with rice, wheat and diabetes, and we have totally forgotten foods like huge varieties of tubers, tree saps, fish, shellfish, oil seeds, mollusks, mushrooms, insects, small non endangered animal meats, all of which used to be available right within our surroundings.

So has this food gone? Why are modern food baskets so narrow? We could talk about the complex political, economic and ecological reasons, but I am here to talk about this more human phenomenon of skin. Because she is the crucial point at which food actually disappears off your plate. What does she have to? She makes you feel small, sad, not worthy, subhuman. She. Creates a cognitive dissonance, it distorts food stories. Let us take this example, how would you like to have a wonderful, versatile staple?

That is available abundantly in your environment. All you have to do is gather it, dry it, store it, and you have it for your whole year to cook as many different kinds of dishes as you want with it. India had just such a food called Bajwa, this flower over the. And I have been researching this food for the past three years now, it is known to be highly nutritious in indigenous tradition and in scientific knowledge for the Indigenous, it used to be a staple for four to six months a year.

In many ways, it is very similar to your local Amarula, except that it is a flower, not a fruit, where the forests are rich, people can still get enough to eat for the whole year and enough spare to sell. I found 35 different dishes with Mahwah that no one cooks any more. This fort is no longer even recognized as a food, but as raw material for liquor. You could be arrested for having it in your house.

Reason, shame, I talk to indigenous people all over India about why my home is no longer eaten and I got the exact same answer of used to eat it when we were dirt poor and starving. Why should we eat it now? We have rice or wheat. And almost in the same breath, people also tell me how nutritious mawas there are always stories of elders who used to eat Mahoma, this grandmother of us, she had 10 children. And still she used to work so hard, never tired, never sick.

The exact same dual narrative, every single bit. How come? How does the same food get to be seen as very nutritious and a poverty food almost in the same sentence? Same goes for other forest foods I have heard story after rending story of famine and starvation of people surviving on trash forest out of the forest. Because there was no food. If I dig a little deeper, it turns out the lack was not a food policy, but of something respectable like rice.

I asked them, how did you learn that your so-called trash is edible? Who told you that certain bitter tubers can be sweetened by leaving them in a stream overnight? Or how to take the meat out of a nation or how to set a trap for a wild rat. That is when they start scratching their heads and they realize that they learned it from their own elders. That their ancestors had lived and thrived on these foods for centuries before rice came there and were way healthier than their own generation.

So this is how Foodworks. How she works, making food and food traditions disappear from people's lives and memories without even realizing it. So how do we undo this trend? How do we reclaim our beautiful and complex systems of natural food? Food given to us lovingly by Mother Earth, according to her own rhythm. Food prepared by our foremothers with joy and are eaten by our forefathers with gratitude. Food that is healthy, local, natural, varied, delicious, not requiring cultivation, not damaging our ecology, not costing a thing.

We all need this food, and I don't think I have to tell you why. I don't have to tell you about the global health crisis, climate change, water crisis, soil fatigue, collapsing agriculture systems, all that. But for me, equally important reasons why we need these foods are the deeply felt ones, because food is so many things. You see, food is nourishment, comfort, creativity, community pleasure, safety, identity and so much more.

How we connect with our food defined so much in our lives. It defines how we connect with our bodies because our bodies are ultimately food. It defines our basic sense of connection with our existence. We need these foods most today to be able to redefine our species as humans within the natural scheme of things. And are we needing such a redefinition today? For me, the only real answer is love. Because love is the only thing that counts, Shane.

And how do we bring more of this love into our connections with our food? For me, love is in a big way about the willingness to slow down, to take the time, to feel a sense. Listen and Choire. It could be listening to our own bodies, what do they need beneath our food habits? Beliefs and addictions. It could be taking time out to examine those beliefs. Where did they come from? It could be going back into our childhood.

What foods did we love then and what has changed? It could be spending a quiet evening with an elder listening to their food memories, maybe even helping them cook something they love and sharing a meal. Love could be about remembering that humanity is vast and food choices differ. It could be about showing respect and curiosity instead of censure when we see somebody enjoying a really unfamiliar food. Love could be taking the time to enquire, to dig up information, reach out for connections.

It could even be a quiet walk in the famous. To see if. A certain plan speaks up to you, that happens, they speak to me all the time. And most of all, love is to trust that these little exploratory steps have the potential to lead us to something larger. Sometimes the really surprising answers. And indigenous medicine woman once told me that love is to walk on Mother Earth as her most beloved child. Due to the trust that she values an honest intention and knows how to guide our steps.

I hope I have inspired you to start reconnecting with the food of your ancestors. Thank you for listening.

Hi, I'm Sally Russian, while a host of a new podcast from Ted called Drop, every week you'll travel to a different location around the world, get lost in a new vibe and tap into a surprising idea. Next up, Oberammergau, Germany, where you find a 400 year old passion play that's wrestling with a dark past that's been dropped from Ted Chicot pin drop on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen.

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