covid-19 food habit

If food is an expression of love, a food business is, at its heart, a love story. And these women are proof that love has no bar.

For most people, the twilight years of life are meant to relax, put one’s feet up, and enjoy one’s remaining years. They’re hardly a time for the hustle and daily grind of setting up a whole new business. But these women are not most people. At 68, 77, even 90 years old, they set up food businesses that have become the talk of India. Their motivations may differ – for some, a lockdown activity, for others, a lifelong regret of never having earned their own money. But all of them have one thing in common – drive, talent, and a real love for food and feeding people. If food is an expression of love, a food business is, at its heart, a love story. And these women are proof that love has no bar. This Mothers’ Day, we bring you the stories of these women who inspire with their empires.

Urmila Asher, Gujju Ben Na Nasta

“A hustler all her life” is how her grandson and business partner Harsh describes Urmila Asher, the talent behind Mumbai-based Gujju Ben Na Nasta, which, as the name describes, offers a range of Gujarati snacks. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, the 77-year-old who lives in a chawl in Mumbai and used to be a cook for NRI families in London and the US, began to make pickles just for the family. But what began as a lockdown activity has now turned into a full-fledged business, complete with a retail store, a cloud kitchen, a YouTube channel with more than 26K subscribers, and travelling to deliver TEDx talks.

During the lockdown, Harsh, who’d had to close down his luxury bike rental and corporate gifting businesses, noticed his grandma’s tenacity and keenness to stay active in the kitchen, and, given the wave of home-cooking enterprises that marked the first lockdown, he smelt a business opportunity. He asked her if she’d like to turn it into a business, and sent out a WhatsApp message blast about homemade pickles for sale. Within 20-25 days, the duo had sold almost 450 kg of pickles. Now, having expanded to a range of snacks such as dhokla, khandvi, gathia, chakli, thepla, and more, they have trained more staffers so that Urmila can relax a bit and focus on the YouTube channel instead of being in the kitchen for 15 hours a day, while Harsh focuses on the business and marketing. Future plans for this dadi include retailing on Amazon and Flipkart, and making Gujju Ben Na Nasta a household name while continuing to do the thing she loves – cook and provide for her family. (98213 24901; gujjubennanasta.in)

Harbhajan Kaur, Harbhajan’s

“Vela baithna bimari da ghar hai” (To sit idle is to invite disease) is something Harbhajan Kaur says frequently. The 95-year-old is a living advertisement for her words, given that she is the talent behind the much-loved Harbhajan’s – Bachpan Yaad Aajaye, a five-year-old Chandigarh-based business that started, as all the best things do, over a cup of tea. Sitting with her daughter on her 90th birthday, Harbhajan could reminisce about many things in life – her childhood in Punjab’s Tarn Taran Sahib filled with delicious food made by her mother and meetha made by her father, her marriage to a Punjab Services officer, the charmed life they led post his retirement in the 1980s in Chandigarh when they enjoyed going out to explore new restaurants and dishes (she tried a soufflé for the first time) and she would always ask for the recipes and try them out at home.

But the widow who had been educated only till the eighth grade also voiced her one lingering regret – that she had never earned her own money. Her daughter asked why she couldn’t start now. She’d been cooking since she was a child and she was passionate and curious about new recipes, so it made perfect sense. Once Harbhajan said yes, the entire family then swung into action – reaching out to home chefs and food bazaar organisers and making sure she had all the ingredients she needed so she could just focus on the thing she loves – cooking. Her first product (for a pop-up) and her bestseller is the besan ki barfi, based on a 100-year-old recipe handed down from her father, but she also makes seasonal sherbets, pickles, chutneys. Some press interest followed, including an interview that was shared on social media by Anand Mahindra, which went viral and prompted the family to build her online and retail presence. During the pandemic, with the help of her grandson who is a trained chef and granddaughter who’s a designer, plus the rest of the family, the venture became more business-oriented, even retailing on Amazon. (Instagram: @harbhajansmadewithlove)

Iti Misra, home cook

Traditionally, most Balinese family compounds were protected with a moringa tree. It was a highly nutritious food, medicine and a magical talisman all rolled into one. Over the course of recent decades, it came to be considered as merely peasant food – and as part of old mystical superstitions. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the workforce of Bali’s crashed tourism industry returned to live off the land, people once again began to latch onto the benefits of the marvellous tree that grows like a weed.

Having heard about moringa’s nutritional benefits, my wife and I started eating it on a daily basis during the pandemic. It grows freely in the west Balinese village where we lived, and we quickly realised that it was incredibly versatile as a cooking ingredient.

Eaten alone, moringa leaves are reminiscent of peppery spinach but Balinese cooks typically add a variety of freshly pounded local herbs and spices to the simmering vegetables to serve as a leafy stew. We dropped raw leaves into smoothies; cooked them in omelettes, soups, stews and curries; and chopped them to create delicious, peppery seasoning for egg mayonnaise sandwiches and salads.

I planted two 6ft cuttings and within a year and a half they were taller than our two-storey house. Much of our fence line became a living, edible fence of moringa.

Despite the fact that the plant is freely available almost anywhere on the island, you’d rarely, if ever, see it as an ingredient in warungs (local eateries), let alone on a tourist menu. However, a few chefs, perhaps tempted by a nutritious and flavourful ingredient that is freely available, are reviving the tradition.

Moringa features on the ever-changing menu at the increasingly famous tourist spot Rasta Café Medewi in the west coast surf-town of Medewi. “I try to cook whatever local produce is in season and moringa is almost indispensable in that it’s available year-round,” said Nafisha Dewi, the café’s chef, as she prepared soup made with moringa leaves, pumpkin, aromatic ginger (known sometimes as sand ginger), garlic, shallots, candlenut, chilli, coriander, lemongrass and coconut milk.

Nafisha Dewi (pictured left), chef at Rasta Café Medewi, uses moringa leaves in many of her dishes (Credit: Mark Eveleigh)

While Bali is predominantly Hindu, this western side of the island also has a large Muslim population. Dewi was Hindu until she married her husband Rasta and entered the Muslim faith, but both recall moringa being a favourite family dish during their childhoods.

“We used it not only as food but also often as medicine,” Dewi explained as I tucked into a second helping of her delicious soup. “My mother would treat our bruises with ground moringa leaves mixed with salt.”

It’s so pure that just a handful of these tiny leaves can cancel the effect of black magic

“That’s right, we still also mash the leaves to put on cuts,” Rasta interrupted. As a hired driver, he often visits other Indonesian islands. “The only people I know who don’t eat moringa are the West Javanese,” he recalled. “They believe so strongly in the magical cleansing power of moringa that they use it to wash dead bodies before burial. They think it’s very strange that we Balinese eat it!”

Both Dewi and Rasta also agreed that witches and sorcerers – aspects of Balinese belief that, even today, remain very real – can never eat moringa: “Anyone who’s involved in black magic must avoid the tree at all costs,” Dewi said. “It’s so pure that just a handful of these tiny leaves can cancel the effect of black magic.”

While native to northern India, 13 species of moringa are found throughout the world, from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso to Brazil, where they are used as traditional cures for everything from conjunctivitis to gonorrhoea to malaria. The tree is known in English as “drumstick tree” (due to the shape of the seed pods) or “horseradish tree” (as its roots taste similar to horseradish), but the fact that it’s also commonly referred to as “mother’s best friend” and the “never die tree” would seem to imply that its benefits were not entirely unknown to the British.

If there is one disadvantage to moringa, it’s the high nitrogen content in the leaves. Although this makes them excellent fertiliser, fresh leaves begin to break down within minutes of being picked, which means that distribution is really only viable in dehydrated form. While gardeners in northern climes have lately been experimenting with growing this hardy plant, it is most often available only as relatively expensive powder.

Since the leaves decompose quickly, moringa is often sold as a dehydrated powder (Credit: Westend61/Getty Images)

“We’re very lucky to have easy access to fresh moringa on Bali,” said Australian-born chef Dom Hammond. As research and development chef at the island’s iconic Potato Head complex, she has experimented widely with the use of local ingredients in plant-based fine dining. “One amazing thing about moringa though is that apparently it doesn’t lose any nutrients in the drying process, so moringa powder is equally nutritious. It seems that this plant could be a solution to food shortages and nutrition all over the world.”

Known for its innovative approach to protecting the environment, Potato Head serves “zero-waste” cocktails (enhanced with offcuts and trimmings from fruit used in the kitchen) with moringa salt; while the menu at the complex’s Kaum restaurant boasts a Central Javanese soup with moringa leaves, snake gourd and fresh coconut cooked in turmeric broth.

“There’s so much you can do with the leaves, but I’ve been experimenting with other parts of the plant too,” Hammond said. “Once the flowers are dried you can even fry them as a delicious alternative to mushrooms.”

In fact, the Balinese use every part of the tree. While the leaves are most commonly boiled for soup or jamu (a medicinal pick-me-up drink), the sword-like seed pods can be stir-fried or used in a stew. It’s said that the root is poisonous but that a small section brewed as tea is a remedy for intestinal worms.

It seems that this plant could be a solution to food shortages and nutrition all over the world

And perhaps because Balinese farmers noticed that the tree seemed to be almost impregnable to parasites and insects, the bark is often chopped and mixed with uncooked rice, aromatic ginger and water to create a traditional skin-enhancing body scrub.

“When I was a kid, my grandma used to cut the moringa bark into bite-size pieces,” Nanta told me, “then she’d chew it into a paste and rub it over our skin.”

Ni Putu Yuliastuty, chef at Fivelements Retreat, picks fresh moringa from the resort gardens (Credit: Mark Eveleigh)

Balinese chef I Made Tantra Wijaya recalls the same remedy. However, these days, with infinitely more finesse, he incorporates moringa into the raw-food menu at Fivelements Retreat. Wijaya’s colleague Chef Ni Putu Yuliastuty now harvests moringa in the retreat’s kitchen-garden every day and has become an expert at using it in smoothies, vegetable-based green juices, soups and salads.

“Even though we grew up with this plant as part of our diet, I never realised it was so versatile,” she said.

“It’s peppery so it adds good flavour to anything,” Wijaya added, as the pair worked together in the kitchen. “Sometimes with natural medicines we say, ‘more bitter more better’. In the old days, Balinese women would wean their babies off the breast by smearing juice from moringa leaves around their nipples. Times have changed though. These days they’re more likely to use toothpaste.”

It seems that there are potentially endless uses for moringa and, while the Balinese are steadily reviving a few of the most time-proven, it’s amazing to realise that the rest of the world is yet to open its eyes to the full potential of the “tree of life”.

BBC Travel’s Forgotten Foods offers hope for the world’s “lost” foods through chefs and purveyors who are bringing them back to life though cooking and cultivation.

Urmila Asher, Gujju Ben Na Nasta

Harbhajan Kaur, Harbhajan’s

Iti Misra, home cook

Pratibha Kanoi, Mommy’s Kitchen

Meenakshi Meyappan, The Bangala

Radha Daga, Triguni Eze Eats

Kokila Parekh, KT Masala

It’s so pure that just a handful of these tiny leaves can cancel the effect of black magic

It seems that this plant could be a solution to food shortages and nutrition all over the world