Book Review: Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right by Kalpish Ratna

Most of us have only the vaguest idea of what happens to our food once we have swallowed it. We know it goes somewhere, and we trust that the body will sort it out, and beyond that our curiosity tends to stop at the plate. This incuriosity is remarkable when you consider how much energy we pour into deciding what to eat, how many diets we adopt and abandon, and how many hours we spend reading about superfoods and fasting windows and the correct sequence in which to consume our macronutrients. We are obsessed with food and almost entirely indifferent to digestion, which is rather like being fascinated by cars and refusing to learn what an engine does.

Gastronama sets out to correct that imbalance, and it does so from an unusual vantage point. Kalpish Ratna is the shared pen name of two practicing Bombay surgeons, Dr. Ishrat Syed and Dr. Kalpana Swaminathan, which means the book arrives not from a nutritionist or a wellness personality but from two people who have spent their working lives with the human body open in front of them. That perspective changes the temperature of the writing considerably. There is no evangelizing here, no promise of transformation in thirty days, and no interest whatsoever in the food moralism that treats certain ingredients as virtuous and others as sinful. What there is instead is a patient, thorough account of what actually occurs inside you between the first bite and several hours later, told by people who find the process genuinely interesting and assume you will too.

The title, it should be said, does the book a slight disservice. A reader expecting a conventional guide to good Indian eating, a list of what to embrace and what to avoid, will find something rather more demanding and rather more rewarding. The authors work from a simple premise: that if you understand what food does to your cells, your hormones, and your organs, you will not need anyone to hand you a list, because the correct way to eat becomes reasonably obvious on its own. So they explain the machinery. They describe how the body reads a food, how it decides what to do with it, and what happens when it is given more than it can use, which turns out to be the crux of a great deal of modern illness. One of the more unsettling revelations, delivered without any apparent wish to alarm, is how little excess the body actually tolerates before it begins to suffer. Our idea of moderation and the body's idea of it are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of trouble lives.

The book was shaped by the pandemic, and the authors are explicit that the experience sharpened their conviction. As surgeons who had watched how thoroughly obesity, diabetes and hypertension prepared the ground for a virus to do its worst, they came to regard the phrase "lifestyle disease" as a euphemism that lets everybody off the hook, and Gastronama is their attempt to shift responsibility for health from the hospital, where it usually arrives too late, back to the kitchen, where it might still be useful. The next microbe, they suggest, will not necessarily arrive with a cure attached, and the only reliable insurance is a body that is not already compromised. It is a sobering thought to encounter in a food book, and it gives the whole enterprise an urgency that most healthy-eating titles never attempt.

Around the science, there is a good deal else. Ayurveda is treated seriously rather than decoratively; cooking techniques are examined for what they do to the food chemically rather than merely how they taste, and there is a persistent thread on eating locally and seasonally on the grounds that what is good for the body and what is good for the environment tend, conveniently, to point the same way. The writing carries the particular pleasure of listening to experts who have not lost their enthusiasm, are erudite without being forbidding, and are capable of the occasional flash of humor about the absurdities of how we behave around food.

It is not a book that will suit everyone, and it does not try to be. Readers looking for a quick set of rules, a meal plan, or reassurance that their current habits are fine will be disappointed, and some have been. Gastronama asks for attention, and it repays that attention with genuine understanding rather than the comfortable illusion of it. But for anyone who has ever suspected that the diet industry thrives on keeping them ignorant, who has wondered why nothing seems to work, or who has simply never been told what their own body is doing all day, this is an unusually clarifying book. It offers no shortcuts, only comprehension, and then leaves you to do what you like with it. There is something quietly respectful in that.

Title: Gastronama: The Indian Guide to Eating Right Author: Kalpish Ratna (Dr. Ishrat Syed and Dr. Kalpana Swaminathan) Published by Roli Books Available on Amazon and Flipkart.