EATING IS FUN / EATING IS YUCK! A VARIETY HEALTH FOOD COLUMN BY TARA NARAYAN

S TEAMY summer is here and I feel like living on cucumbers, water melons and fruity salads all day long! Cold soups! It’s that time of the year when most niz Goenkars and not so niz Goenkars run away abroad for holidays in Portugal and Spain and London and a friend of mine has just come back from Indonesia (without any of the long, long rolls of cinnamon sticks which I had advised to get, at least one for me)! It’s nice to listen to these stories of friends returning from holidays abroad…while I’m stewing and coping with the current summer time woes of capital city Panaji. Still, not to crib, summer time is great for watching trees bloom gloriously and much else. I mean Goa is a tropical paradise, heal in heaven and heaven in hell at varying times…the fruit of Mother Earth is rarely far from the mind. Think tender coconut water (I still get mine at Rs40 per coconut luckily), tender coconut kernel which is all kinds of good things, the market place currently is offering pineapples in plenty. Also dark purple glossy jamun and the berries of the karvanda or Indian cranberries as I perceive them. Forget mangoes, I ignore them LIFE & LIVING nowadays as overpriced and overrated fruit seeing how they’re priced at Rs600 to Rs800 per dozen/ kg, depending on where you’re buying them – mangoes are cranky prima donna beauties not worth crying over! HELLO, it’s the hefty jackfruit which is commanding my attention anew and it is the fruit which I find sooooo seductive once and forever. How come nobody up there in the corridors of power ever think of having an exclusive jackfruit festival? I mean Kerala knows how to celebrate its jackfruit, it has district level jackfruit festivals to focus on the virtues and advantages of growing jackfruit trees…it’s called Chakka Mahotsavam in Kerala, jackfruit festival. In fact, jackfruit is the official fruit of the state since 2018 and jackfruit growers are running all the way to the bank! The real modern-day jackfruit story dates to the Chambal Jackfruit Festival which took place on June 20, 2022. Yes, this was held at Pachanada, at the confluence of five rivers and one of them being the Chambal river valley areas where the dacoity stories of Bollywood come from! Anyway, there’s a Chambal Foundation which held the Jackfruit Festival and featured here were jackfruit from Indian states as well as the extra colourful jackfruit of Thailand, wish I could have gone for the festival. Goa could have a jackfruit festival too if it wasn’t too snooty about mangoes and especially mancurad mangoes! It is the mighty and more humble in nature jackfruit which yields such delicious golden fruit pods within… never mind that to extract the fruit of the jackfruit you need some skill. Oiling the hands with coconut water, cutting it up in a certain way, extracting the silky firm or creamy soft pods. There are several varieties of jackfruit and some folk just call them “jak,”– “If you’re going to the market just get me a whole jak for me!” It’s worth it, buying a whole jak to unravel at home, extract the golden pods snuggling within at leisure…if you’re asking me it is the jak which is the king of fruit in generosity and flavour! I GREW up on eating the thorny-skinned durians in Penang, Malaysia, and that will always be my all-time favourite fruit of youthful nostalgia. In tropical India I will say jackfruit is best and not mango! By our shallow standards jackfruit is ugly, not so, what’s ugly and what’s beautiful! Never let your superficial senses brainwash you too much. After the coconut I do think the jackfruit has it all – if offers fruit to live for, the seeds are edible. I soak them for a few days and pressure cook them, the leathery peels come off easily and the seeds are eminently delicious included in salads and veggie dishes. Dried out jackfruit seeds make for jackfruit seed flour nowadays held out as the food of the future when famines ravage us and we’ll be dying like flies in pharma-created epidemics and pandemics! Hey, grow a jackfruit tree immediately in your compound by way of insurance from too much foodie need and want… see how the fruit emerges and grows larger and larger, hugging on to the trunks of its parental tree, quite a mesmerising experience to appreciate. Connoisseurs of fruit sing paens to the jackfruit and not the ballerina mangoes of fame and fortune! BASICS: The jackfruit is Artocarpus heterophyllus of the family Moraceae, relative of figs, mulberries, breadfruit. The tree is native to the Western Ghats of south India and generally speaking tropical Asia, Africa, southern America. Even the American Cleaveland Clinic’s Health Essentials diary has doctors recommending jackfruit in a myriad ways, it’s one of the best alternatives to animal meat which they consume too much of in the countries of the West (meat is carcinogenic)…in fact, unripe jackfruit fruit is being promoted as vegan meat and available canned. Which reminds me the other day I found a most scrumptious raw jackfruit veggie being retailed in a local khanvala at St Inez in Panaji and was happy to buy it, even if only I ate and relished it three days in a row from the fridge! Raw jackfruit shaak is a Goan Gaud Saraswat Brahmin delicacy I’ve learned. No fish? Niz Goenkar families serve raw jackfruit kappam or shaak … and no demands for fish are made presumably. Nowadays with many people realizing the importance of going vegetarian and vegan and not just for reasons of better health parameters, there are quite a few meat alternatives coming up in haute cuisine circles – soybean meat analogues have been here for some time, but now raw jackfruit flesh is doing the honors…go check it out. COMING to jackfruit ripe. The ripe jackfruit pods offer up a whole host of goodness by way of flavonoids and and lignans of plant compounds which fight inflammation (primary cause of disease in body beautiful)…eating fruit like jackfruit helps reduce oxidative stress amongst other things. Jackfruit like most fruit is potassium rich and potassium combats sodium and blood pressure while its fibre lowers cholesterol, prevents and fights…right, inflammation. However, there is also this clause about too much potassium too resulting in negative issues, if you have kidney problems you may want to go easy on hogging on even too much potassium rich fruit. But this is not say don’t eat jackfruit! Eat jackfruit, just don’t overdo it. A portion of 100 g jackfruit offers 95 calories, 2g protein, 0.6g fat, 3g fiber…phytochemicals, also vitamin C and B vitamins which are pyridoxine (B6), niacin (B3), riboflavin (B2), foLIFE & LIVING lic acid (B9), not to mention calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, traces of this, that…holistic goodness. Don’t forget to eat jackfruit every day if you can get the right variety, Goan varieties are basically the firm-fleshed kappam variety and the soft-fleshed juicy rassa variety which goes into making juices and what is called “jackfruit papad” or “saat” – that is dried out jackfruit juice which can be stored and used as desired during the winter months for flavouring a host of goodies on the dining table. So, jackfruit anyone? A neighbour of mine who has jackfruit trees in her sister’s estate in Anjuna gave me a bunch of jackfruit in a plastic bag…and I’m sorry to say it was a mix of fermented jackfruit without flavour, mixed in with some of the finest, sweetest jackfruit pods, I had to wash out the lot, chuck the sour and keep the deliciously sweet to eat while seeking a welcome break from life’s tiresome domestic demands. This is to say, hey, let’s have a jackfruit festival in Goa and teach people how to treat a whole jackfruit, cut it, extract the pods and what all to do with fruit of the jackfruit apart from eating it fresh. Jackfruit pods stay very well refrigerated. Postscript: Sorry, sorry, I’ve just learned that Goa has had some jackfruit festivals, very low-key ones, courtesy who else but festakar Marius Fernandes of Divar island who curates all kinds of festivals. So a couple of Ponsachem fests have taken place in Goa where all manner of jackfruit goodies have stolen the show…jackfruits small and big; jackfruit pickle; jackfruit jam, the outer layer of the jackfruit makes for much loved by cows fodder! There’s more trivia…healthy coffee from jackfruit seeds made from 60% crushed, roasted jackfruit seeds and 20% fenugreek and cardamom and voila, meet “Jaffe.” A new coffee hoping to compete with traditional coffees in Kerala and Karnataka. Yes, what cheek! As if anything can take the place of traditional roasted beans filter coffee in a Madrasi or Kannadigga home and never in my heart at least! Dear Marius is also promoting jackfruit timber art and craft…and Indian Council of Agriculture’s home scientist Sunetra Talaulikar has demonstrated recipes for jackfruit halva, bajia or fritters, etcetera. Historian Dr Fatima Gracias da Silva (author of “Cozinha de Goa” says jackfruit is endemic fruit in Goa, we should put it to everyday use and be proud of it! There are many Goan Hindu recipes using the tender unripe fruit as a vegetable and also sweet and savoury preparations. The Portuguese took the jackfruit to Bahia in Brazil in the 17th century and to Sao Tome in Africa in the early 19th century.” There is jackfruit wine, kheer, pudding, jellies, jams, papad, jackfruit puree “patholyo,” jackfruit sannam, jackfruit vodde, jackfruit “dhone”…hey, I remember vividly my New Zealand sister Kalpana Ullal’s mother-in-law Sugandhi-amma making “jackfruit leaves podi idli” which she called “kotte idli” or “gundu idli.” (Sigh) Sugandhi-amma is gone with the wind but I remember her as dearly as I remember the kotte idli she used to send us every Ganesh Chaturthi.