By Preeyanka Shah
[Preeyanka Shah is a 2005 Westborough High School graduate and a 2009 Duke Universiy graduate.  She is currently on a Fellowship with Indicorps serving at Adharshila Learning Centre in a remote village in southwest MP in India.]

Before coming to Adharshila Learning Centre, I had no idea what a grain of wheat actually looked like.  My ignorance evaporated one day when I helped my neighbor, Devika didi wash wheat in a couple of metal buckets.  Although it seemed to be a mundane, yearly task for her, I was excited by the idea of making flour.
    Adharshila Learning Centre is an NGO-run boarding school and organic farm based in rural India, twelve hours by bus from Mumbai.  Most of the students are from subsistence farming communities where most, if not all, of the food production process is done at home.  Since arriving here, I have partaken in various elements of the food creation process, from sowing vegetable seeds and harvesting lentils to grinding the wheat for a day’s flour and making chili powder from scratch.

    Before coming here, I thought of flour as coming in paper bags at Stop and Shop and crushed red pepper as coming from bottles.  Though my Girl Scouts leader owned chickens and I knew where eggs came from, in the back of my mind, I believed that “real eggs” were found in the refrigerated section of the grocery store.  Food production, to me, did not extend beyond the shelves of the local supermarket.
     I never knew so much could be involved in preparing chili powder.  We meticulously pulled off the ends of dried red chili peppers, one by one and washed off the dust on the peppers that had accumulated after days in the sun on top of Devikadidi’s roof.  The vivid red wrinkly peppers produced an appetizing aroma, evocative of sun dried tomatoes and red bell peppers with the added pungency of heat.
    While I experience the beauty of this way of life, there is also an ugly side to subsistence farming.  The community in and around Adharshila do not have enough to eat even when there is enough grain; there are not enough vegetables, fruits or dairy to provide adequate nutrition.  One of the main cash crops that has emerged over the last few years in the region is soybeans which will probably be sold as livestock feed.   The growing of cash crops has diverted field space from food for the people who actually live here.  It makes me question how intricate this web of food production has become and how our food consumption habits impact people in the developing world.
      It startles me to think how disconnected we have become from our food’s origins.  Do you ever stop to think how your food made its way to the supermarket?  Do you think about what goes into the ground to fertilize the food you consume?  Do you think about the people who picked your fruits or grew the feed for your meat or perhaps your food is produced by machines?  What is the real story of the food you eat?
    There is power in knowing exactly how the food you eat reaches your dinner plate from the time it was sowed in the ground.  To know personally the people who worked the crops, the cows who plowed the soil, the children who weeded the fields and the ladies who prepared the food.
    We should all take a deeper look at the story behind our food.  After my time in India ends, I likely will not give up buying produce from the super markets back in the States but I will certainly miss the incredible freshness of food straight from the garden.  Still, when I buy that pack of berries, that box of cereal or that bag of flour, I will be thinking about everything that went into it, especially the people behind it.


Preeyanka Shah is a 2005 Westborough High School graduate and a 2009 Duke Universiy graduate.  She is currently on a Fellowship with Indicorps serving at Adharshila Learning Centre in a remote village in southwest MP in India.