COMMON MAN'S FAST FOOD

Fast food is that type of eatable that can be available for eating and served quickly  and is often taken away to be eaten anywhere, any time. 

In olden days  there was at least one  and sometimes many makeshift shop selling some kind of Indian fast food in every town. The hut had an earthen oven and was called bhadbhooja (भड़भुजा) shop. The eatbles were dry roasted and puffed grains such as roasted gram (chana), roasted fluffed rice and corn and some other such items. In our home my mother used to stir fry in ghee lots of dry poha rice along with raw moongfali (peanut), add salt and pepper and fill it in a container with a tight lid. It was always available to us children whenever we felt hungry which was very often. If this was  not available, there was always a container having several left over chapati which we ate with ghee and sugar or with mango achaar or stuffed  red chilly achaar. There were sometimes deep fried (in pure ghee) nanakpara or shakarpala (wheat flour fried cookies, salted or sweet). All these items were clean, heathy fast food for children and active young adults.

There is the sea change in what we used to eat in childhood and what the present generation of children eat. We have now quick cooking Maggi noodles, variety of salted and sweet biscuits, fried potato containing low grade high cholesterol oils, preservative , antifungal agents, flavouring agents, colour, artificial sweetners and more. When children keep eating them everyday they develop toxins in body which have a very injurious effect on health. 

Children in their school days are made to memorise for their examination how babur came to India, how Sher Shah Suri defeated Humayun, how British subjugated moghuls, what poems  Shelly and keats and others including  Indian poets wrote and what was the deeper meaning of their poems. They are never taught how to keep healthy by choosing correct food, what are the dangers of eating the present day fast food, why commercial drinks are injurious to health and such other things which can help them remain healthy in later life.

The British curriculum for mass producing clerks for the government machinery continues in our education system.

It is time we educate early in life our children on how to keep their bodies healthy, why to choose healthy food and other such subjects which are useful to them in life instead of Shelly keats and Shakespeare. Such stuff can wait till they choose it at their graduation level. 

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