Anuradha Sridharan

  Mayo or Mayonnaise has become so popular in India, that almost every urban household has a jar stocked up in their pantry. It is liberally spread on top of sandwiches or used as salad dressings to get the creamy texture. The original version of mayonnaise was made with egg yolks, lemon juice (or vinegar) and oil.  My post is all about the vegetarian/eggless version of Mayo. Are we so addicted to the taste that we don’t bother to look at what goes behind an eggless mayo? A popular Indian food blogger with 1M+ followers on Facebook shares a picture of Veg Mayo and asks her audience to share ideas to use it in various ways. Given her “influential” status, how much difference could she make if only she writes about the harmful ingredients in such packaged foods? She would help millions of people to make informed food choices, but NO…she chose to collaborate with such junk food brands and crowdsource recipes to increase adoption and consumption of such junk foods....

This incident happened more than a year ago. D had just got down from the school bus one afternoon. D: take this, amma (hands me 3 tiny beans wrapped in newspaper) Me: wow, are these beans from your school garden? D: no these are cowpea. You have to make curry with it now. And I made a simple cowpea beans thoran (hardly a tsp) and she had it with rice and ghee for lunch that day. She had experienced the garden to plate cycle - right from sowing the seeds, watering the saplings, harvesting the beans to eating a healthy dish. Ever since that day, whenever I make cowpea beans - both the fresh green variety and the dry black eyed beans (lobia/kaaramani) that go into a dal, she eats happily and asks for second or third helping. This second incident happened a few weeks back. D loves idlis and dosas but prefer to eat them ONLY with molagapodi (dry chutney powder mixed with gingelly oil). She wouldn’t touch the chutney. On rare occasions, she would taste tomato chutney but w...

My daughter D and I had a long argument last night. Just like Maggi is reserved for one Friday a month, D is allowed to have 1 pack of Lays chips one Monday a month. As much as I would love to completely eliminate all such junk from her diet, there are a few junk foods that D loves and keeps demanding them whenever we go out. So I started to moderate them using this “once-a-month” strategy, which seems to work well for us. So yesterday being a Monday, she got her April share of “green Lays chips” and finished the pack in the evening. She only gets the Rs.10 pack, no buddy pack, share pack, party pack etc etc.  Around 7:30PM, I was making dinner and she came to the kitchen. “Amma, do you know my friend got cheese slice in her snack box today? Will you pack a cheese slice for me too in tomorrow’s snack box?” She goes to a summer camp these days and been observing the snacks that other children bring. Her regular school doesn’t allow ANY junk food and I continue the same sn...

You might have heard of this quote - “ Show me your friends. I’ll show you your future ” When it comes to health and wellness, we can rephrase the same quote as “ Show me your fridge. I’ll show you your future health ”. On the occasion of World Health Day (April 7th) today, I highly encourage you to take a look at your fridge and make a note of all the packaged food products you have in stock - juices, sauces, jams, spreads, readymade salad dressings, processed cheese etc. Take some time to look through the ingredients of each of these items and decide if the little convenience such products give is really worth compromising your health.  With the onset of summer, we tend to load up our fridge with sugary processed squashes, syrups, tetra pack juices and aerated drinks. Apart from the high sugar content, they are also high on preservatives and other food additives, with very little fruit or vegetable in them. Here are 30 healthy alternatives that will keep...

A few days back, I had shared my compilation of analysis of packaged foods to a few mothers, who then circulated it among other friend groups. The visits to my blog increased 10X in the past 2 weeks. There were many comments and messages too, mostly encouraging and supportive.  As I wrote in this post , I like to analyse my blog statistics on a daily basis, to understand which articles are most popular.  During the past 2 weeks, when my master list got circulated, the top 3 articles that received the maximum hits were on 1. Flavoured Greek Yoghurt 2. Brown Bread 3. Pediasure and Horlicks Growth Plus Although the sample size is small, this gives an indication on the popular foods that urban Indians perceive to be “healthy”. Greek yoghurt has become extremely popular in urban Indian cities, primarily because of the “ high protein ” hype. Although the plain/natural greek yoghurt seems okay in terms of its ingredients, the flavoured ones are loade...

This is one of the topics that many blog readers have asked me to write about. A recent green tea ad by Tetley caught my attention, which in turn led to this blogpost :-) Tetley claims that their green tea contains 5X more antioxidants than an apple. Check out their ad if you haven’t seen it yet. The ad seems to convey this message - “ eat whatever junk you want. If you drink green tea, all your sins will be washed away! Your internal system will be cleaned ”. So the underlying promise is that green tea does jaadu pocha (sweeping and mopping) inside your body.  BTW, in the ad, in very fine print, there is a line - "Green tea consumption is not expected to counter the effects of unhealthy lifestyle or food habits". Wait a minute, but isn't the whole point of the ad all about Deepika eating unhealthy foods and cleansing it with green tea? Earlier, Lipton claimed that green tea helps to reduce belly fat. I had also written about it in detail in a separa...