Traveling Yogi: Eating in India, New York, and Puerto Rico

Ayurvedic perspective on the food systems of Cities

9 min readJan 17, 2020

After three weeks of traveling India, coming home to Manhattan’s East Village was bittersweet. After the most appreciated hot shower of my life, I felt strangely empty inside. It was not just the heart longing for my extended family, but my body yearning for India’s food.

I thought, at first, that it was the spices, and the tropical abundance, and the constant press of people who cared almost too much about whether or not I had eaten. But just two weeks later, I went with my New York family for a week in Puerto Rico. There, surrounded by loved ones, palm trees, and abundant food, I realized: what I missed most about India is the still-strong connection between people, what we eat, and where we live.

That relationship is formally taught as Ayurveda, the ancient holistic knowledge that is the oldest, and still practiced, medical knowledge of the world. Practically speaking, it’s just the on-paper rules of what is natural in traditional, tropical cultures: Take time to savor the abundance of nature.

Jadavpur Market: Kolkata, India

The food system in India is still reflective of a pre-industrial economy, which naturally supports local agriculture. In Kolkata, every neighborhood has a market, overflowing with produce picked from small farms just a few kilometers away. The vendor often wakes very early in the morning in his home village, goes to a farmer with whom he has a personal relationship, and brings that day’s harvest to the city markets by dawn.

It is a riot of color and excitement.

There is a deep cultural love for produce, which flows naturally in a country that has been working and reworking local cuisine for thousands of years. Cooking itself comes not from recipes but from shared time in the kitchen, passing knowledge from generation to generation, interweaving the cuisine with the cultural reverence for teaching.

In my grandparents’ time, and earlier, cooking was a profession reserved for the highest caste of Indian society, the Brahmins. The shifts of time and post-Independence culture has created a new system. Women from villages who come to the cities in search of work have two livelihoods open to them: cleaning, and cooking. (I could write several articles about how soucha, the yogic concept of purity and cleanliness, is a sacred aspect of Indian culture, but will focus on the cooks here!)

Cooking is an honored skill in India, and the women who can cook well will support themselves and their entire family by working four or five homes a day. A lifetime of cooking simple, daily meals for many families gives each working cook a level of expertise that has nothing to do with plating or presentation, and everything to do with daily nourishment. The families that hire her not only depend on her for their day’s meals, but also take the time to train her.

Cooking + Connecting

The cooks often do the food shopping as well, freeing middle and upper class people from the daily concerns of buying and preparing meals. She often brings the freshest foods from her village as well as shops the city markets. I was certainly an anomaly in the crowded bazaars, but it was such a treat to be immersed in the abundance of the freshest food I’d ever seen, that I couldn’t stay away. The vendors often took a parental attitude with me, advising me on what I should buy and charging me less than they should have, despite knowing that I would have gladly paid more.

The care and concern that strangers show for one another, in every context, was as nourishing as the food itself.

There is no bargaining or parental attitude in the grocery stores here in New York, but I always do my best to feel a connection with the people from whom I buy produce. I shop small, as local as possible, and play favorites. There is one stand at Union Square Greenmarket that sells organic produce on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays — those are the first people who ask me where I have been traveling, because they know that the only reason they wouldn’t see me is if I’m out of town! I feel especially connected with them because they are Tibetan, and have spent much time in India. They understand what it means to feel cultural connection with food, and the longing for the abundance of tropical climates.

Winters in New York mean root vegetables; winters in Kolkata are simply a different kind of abundance. Spinaches came in varieties I had never seen before, cauliflower came as cute as a cabbage patch doll, and the carrots were the most vibrant color of red-orange I have ever seen. Without the packaging, and the media-driven expectations for produce to look “picture perfect”, the emphasis on produce in India is on taste. Imagine that.

On Trend

In our western culture, to be health-conscious requires investigative effort because our food system has become an industry scaled beyond the reach of our local communities. Without a tangible connection to the source of food, we try new diets, quantify components of foods, and read the internet endlessly, trying to calculate our way into health instead of intuiting our body’s natural satisfaction with simple foods.

There were no food trends in India. Just ancient cuisine that had been honed to perfection over the past several thousand years, and the abundance created by the tropics. Even in winter, the markets were overflowing with produce picked from small, local farms and brought every morning to the cities, freshly picked.

Convenience

Just in case you’re too busy to send your cook out to the market, the market will come to you.

This man carries his basket of vegetables from home to home, bringing the farm directly to your door. And what a bounty! It was such a pleasure to purchase produce from him, because he genuinely cares for each of his customers. If he did not have what you asked for, the regret in his face was real, and he made sure to have it for you the next time he came.

Compare that to the parallels here in the US: Peapod, Blue Apron, even Amazon will deliver groceries to your door. You never get the chance to see the produce in person, you don’t know where the produce was picked, or who picked it. The environmental impact of shipping and trucking the groceries to your door, plus the packaging materials required, far exceeds Kolkata’s solution to the same problem.

And speaking of ways that India has the upper hand over us… Kolkata street food has inspired a wave of New York City restaurants that charge 100 times the price of the original. There’s nothing like the real deal —

Not only are the ingredients locally sourced and made to order, but you also have the pleasure of watching the preparation. I also loved the custom of standing by the cart while eating street food, because it creates a natural connection between the person who prepares the food and the one who eats it. Community!

Sustainability

There is nothing I can say about the sweet shops of Kolkata that will do them justice, but I can speak to the wonder of their single-serving bowl and spoon. Made of two layers of leaf, the bowl is biodegradable, as is the little wooden spoon.

The single use plastics I saw were much thinner than the ones here in the US, but are soon to be banned in Kolkata, which is a great move. Because the culture has been sustainable for so long, the people have developed the habit of throwing garbage anywhere and everywhere: the streets, the lakes, the rivers. With the introduction of plastics, the accumulation of garbage is leaching chemicals into the water system.

Many people carry reusable tote bags, but plastics are still commonly used everywhere I have traveled.

I was living in DC when the city first introduced the five-cent plastic bag charge. That was eye opening to me — I hadn’t considered the environmental impact of using plastics, because our trash is very out-of-sight out-of-mind here in the US. Now, I use and reuse the plastic bags that do come into my home. It means taking the time to consider whether I’ll go to the market, and if yes, to pack reusable bags into my little backpack. It takes a moment of consideration that is well worth the slight time and effort.

Puerto Rico

Landing in Puerto Rico carries the same joy as landing in Kolkata: that first gust of humid air speaks to the body. Memories are conjured and I feel a relaxation, a trust in tropical abundance of love and heat and nourishment to come.

I had been to Ocean Park, Puerto Rico a dozen times before this trip. It’s close, I love the people there, and all the ways the culture reminds me of India. My first stop is the beach, and the second stop is the fruit stand.

I have a true love for papaya. They are my most photographed food, to be honest.

My life of yoga naturally drew me into a fully plant-based diet about a decade ago. Still, I was surprised when the man at the local fruit stand recognized me. He greeted me effusively, like local family. With my mother with me, I translated his Spanish into Bengali for the first time. The translation of tropical languages, skipping over English entirely, was just as sweet as the watermelon.

I declined the offer on a plastic carrying bag, and just walked home with this whole melon and ate it poolside.

The obvious luxury of abundant, delicious food is not without a darker economic backdrop. Monsanto has a strong presence in Puerto Rico, and 80% of food is imported despite the island’s tropical climate. Just as in New York, the fruit stands are owned by immigrants, and are also less frequented than the large scale grocery stores. Whole Foods has not made a landing in Ocean Park, yet, but for lentils and organic vegetables, I went to a comparable store. Even there, most produce reflected what we would want to eat here in New York: apples, berries, kale, celery. But organic options were limited and priced accordingly.

The one thing that is reliably organic is the coconut.

There is a local movement towards local farming and local economics, which is a revolutionary change that I wholly support. I imagine this was the status of the American food system one generation ago, before the heightened awareness of pesticides and their deleterious effects on our health. The blessing in Puerto Rico is that much of the produce is imported from the Dominican Republic. It’s not far, which means that the shipping impacts are fairly low and the tropical abundance is delightfully high.