FeaturesGoyaOctober 30, 2023Uttarakhand, regional cuisine, Cannabis

Salts, Cannabis And Poppy Seeds: Gifts From The Mountains

FeaturesGoyaOctober 30, 2023Uttarakhand, regional cuisine, Cannabis

Shriya Malhotra embarks on a historic (and personal) inquiry into regional food practices, including the use of local, wild, and foraged ingredients like cannabis and poppy seeds — framed in the context of the changing lifestyles and livelihoods of Uttarakhand.

Several years ago, I became curious about documenting food traditions, driven by the unique ingredients I noticed in a few recipes: bal mithai, one of the many desserts popular in the Uttarakhand, which always transports me back to summer vacations as a teenager; beautifully assorted pissi noon salts; and bhang ki chutney , a condiment that is ubiquitous in kitchens across the state.

At first glance, bal mithai looks sculptural, incredibly beautiful almost to the point of being inedible. Like a river-pearl-encrusted pile of jenga, but made of fudge. Or 3D stacks of dominos that were devised in an alternative universe, where everyone is possibly high. It is soft, chewy and intensely sweet. The most interesting fact about this sweet is that, in its earlier form, it was covered not in what seem to be excessive sugar balls from a homeopath, but sugar-coated khus khus or poppy seeds.

Bal mithai. Illustrations credit: Shriya Malhotra

Food Rituals in Uttarakhand

Unless you have visited or lived in Uttarakhand, you probably haven’t tasted Garhwali and Kumaoni cuisine. These foods and their methods of preparation are distinct from most others: they are lightly spiced, if at all; quick to prepare; uniquely textured, and extremely nourishing — in order to sustain the dietary requirements of the region.

In Uttarakhand, people's lives are inextricably tied to the health and produce of their land. 90% of households are engaged in rural livelihoods, most of them women. Only a few ingredients are used in meals, most of which are local and seasonal. People face grave food insecurity, largely resulting from climate change impacts, which range from water shortages to high rates of urbanization that cause shifts in disease burden.

My maternal grandmother's family was from Kumaon, and her memories were preserved and communicated to us in the ways that we collectively participated in meal and food rituals: eating citrus with black salt, cooking food in mustard oil or attempting to make bal mithai from condensed milk. Through her stories and handwritten recipe books, I learned about the lasting psychological turmoil of growing up during the Bengal famine; and of seeing the poverty and scarcity of life in the Himalayan foothills. Food, she reminded us constantly, is an everyday art; a site of sharing that encompasses a ritual for well-being, like medicine — its distribution is a social construct; and the preparation and consumption of plant-based foods contain remedies that are increasingly lost in a rapidly digitised online world steeped in disinformation.

As a teenager, summers with family were spent visiting the Himalayan foothills, unperturbed by obsessions with time, and aspiration of elsewhere. We spent days gathering wild berries like hisalu, learning to identify and cook foraged greens like sting nettles, watching people thicken their lentils with fibre-rich cereals, and forming an unusual appreciation for the nutrient-rich kuttu or buckwheat.

Sil-battas remain a kitchen staple, and a vivid reminder of villagers working in their front yards or on rooftops with an assortment of dried ingredients. There is something pleasing about the textured outcomes from these hand tools, unlike the smooth pastes from a mechanical food processor. Interestingly, many of these food preparations, their gathering and consumption, relating to medicinal plant traditions, have existed in parallel in the Altai region of Russia and in the Caucasus.

Nowadays when I visit villages of the region, it is alarming to see this food knowledge become obscured; it is increasingly replaced by accelerated and aspiration-driven lifestyle shifts supported by propaganda, marketing and advertising.

But, there is something to these food traditions, perhaps a lesson in basic survival — learning that you can make drinks from rhododendron flowers by turning them into a syrup, or that dehydration is a great way of preserving foods, or that infusing salts in one’s diet may remind us to drink water, or that a single, large mid-day meal can suffice. And, the myriad of ways in which different berries can treat assorted ailments. It is also reassuring to see cannabis plants growing wildly and boldly, particularly given the standard vilification of the plant. Every visit for me is marked by a new food remedy or recipe, an adventure hunting for wild berries and other interesting plants — each an effort in resistance to the overly processed and mass manufactured foods that have slowly, but inevitably made their way into the region.

Cooking with Cannabis

Uttarakhand has a long cultural history of cannabis consumption. Contrary to popular belief, the history of cannabis unites mystical traditions of different religions with health-related knowledge systems of the time. Cannabis sativa is one of the world's oldest sources of food, fibre, medicine and oil. It remains a significant part of Uttarakhand’s culture, which is why since 2018, the state government has encouraged its production for small-scale and folk uses. No, consuming foods with cannabis is not intoxicating, or illegal, but there is a fair amount of confusion surrounding its regional and cultural uses.

Several years ago, an uncle asked me if I had tried Bhang ki Chutney, which I assumed contained bhang. It turns out that the recipe is based on roasted hemp seeds, which add flavour and texture, but have no psychoactive effects. The seeds are known as an excellent source of protein, omega and amino acids. They have been shown to help address high blood sugar. The lack of understanding around cannabis and the medicinal food properties contained in different parts of the plant have been shrouded due to its status post 1985. However, this seems to be changing with the distribution of state cannabis licenses, and, a hopefully reformed approach towards cannabis in everyday life.

Another unique food discovery in Uttarakhand has been the making of pissi noon or locally flavored, often colorful ground salts — usually made with Himalayan pink salt and infused with different spices, including hemp seeds. The basic flavours include turmeric and red chilli salt. According to some sources, these salt recipes were introduced to the diet as an inexpensive flavour and a way of inducing hydration as people tend to forget to drink water in the winter months.

The food and the ways in which they are crafted reflect the knowledge transferred on the Silk Road —cannabis in the form of hashish, and as a material or fibre used to make ropes and clothing, was an important cash crop for communities living at high altitudes, particularly in the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau. Opium traders from Afghanistan for instance were known to traverse the Hindu-Kush mountains with opium resin as a way of reducing their anxiety.

Talking about poppy and hemp seeds in food tends to make people uncomfortable. But cannabis consumption and production in India is historic, extending to 300 BC. Not unlike many parts of India, cannabis plants grow wild and plentiful in the region, particularly near water sources. The recipe for pissi noon is similar to chutneys that originated in Nepal as well as in Tibetan food culture — simple, quick and delicious, well-suited to small farms and agrarian lifestyle. One of the reasons these recipes are so bare-bones is the regional poverty experienced by people. This has been compounded with the confusion over vilified plants that have been scheduled as dangerous drugs by Europeans and Americans. And there are additional reasons the plant has been obscured not just from production but distribution.

In the Himalayas, cannabis plants were a traditional source of income for locals, but in 1985, when India’s government criminalized the plant, people were stripped of an economic livelihood. The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act effect has been the criminalization of cannabis consumers and producers, in a country where its use — for medicinal, spiritual and recreational purposes — extends back to millennia and across social groups. The negative branding surrounding the plant has been a disservice to the variety that grows wild in these hills.

It is perhaps unsurprising that rural communities around the world have had ancient relationships with cannabis. The growing legislation allowing for recreational and medicinal cannabis worldwide, as well as a harm-reduction approach towards the consumption of drugs in general, means it is time in which to hope for the revival of traditional knowledge, to alleviate the pressures of modernity and its related livelihood and lifestyle transformations. There is a propensity to divide and standardize, according to regions of India – in terms of commodifying and marketing foods. The freshness, nutritional or ethno-botanical values of the plants in Uttarakhand are different, more isolated and displaced than in other parts of the country, due to British colonial occupation.

In an era dominated by synthetic, processed and manufactured medicine, people increasingly find themselves turning to traditional plant and herbal remedies, sometimes even the occult — seeking remedies that can heal and improve the quality of life. One of these plants is cannabis, which remains, “one of those herbs that defies simple or cultural understandings.“[i] As the state increasingly caters to its branded identity through foods and jams, candles and salts for middle and upper class tourists — we are also left to wonder about the suburbanization of these mountains.