The hand that cooks the food for most Asian families

The hand that cooks the food for most Asian families

Shoma A Chatterji, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

Women are responsible to a great extent for the passage of
food from the farm to the table. Yet, when it comes to
consumption of the same, they hardly get a fair share. It is a
well known the fact that women are and have always been actively
involved in agriculture to a large extent. Yet, when it is time
to dine, they eat the last and get the least.

In most Asian families, culture and tradition demand that men
eat first, then children and finally, women. Thus in poverty-
stricken societies as ours, this descending order of eating takes
the woman in the family as its primary victim.

In a field survey on the Order of Eating covering 1056 urban
families in and around Mumbai in the 1990s, the following
observations were made --

o The mother did the daily marketing in 78.22 percent of the
families;

o She cooked the food in 93.56 percent of the households;

o It was the mother again who served the food in 91.48 percent
of the households;

o She cleaned the table/eating space in 62.78 percent of the
cases;

o She controlled the finance in 22.44 percent of the
households;

o Only 34.47 percent of the children attended to the mother
while she ate;

o About 58.62 percent of the mothers received some help with
housework from other family members;

o The mother ate along with the family only in 5.86 percent of
the families.

If this be the situation in a city like Mumbai, one shudders
to think what the scenario would be in the rest of India. The
small and random sample notwithstanding, the survey revealed that
women have little power over the allocation of food for
themselves. In very poor families, women might not get to eat at
all since there might be no food left to eat.

In a survey of Jat families in a Punjab village by Bory
Horowitz and Madhu Kishwar, 12 out of 14 women said that they sat
down to eat only after everyone else had finished. A food
consumption survey by the same team revealed that when the demand
for extensive labor on the field increased, women were made to
work for 15 hours a day -- much more than the men did. But when
it came to eating, they got a meager 2,169 calories per day
whereas the men got 3,112 calories.

This comes as a shock when one also learns that India wastes
foodgrain worth over Rs 10,000 crore a year, according to a
government report. An estimate by the ministry of food and civil
supplies placed the total preventable (post-harvest) loss of
foodgrain at 10 percent of the gross production -- about 20
million tones per annum which is roughly equal to the total
amount of foodgrain produced annually in Australia (India Today,
Aug. 30, 1999). The article stated that the foodgrain wasted in
India in 1998 could have fed up to 117 million people for a year.
This is nothing short of alarming. But had this come about, one
wonders how many of these 117 million people would have been
women!

A report by the U.S. Presidential Commission on World Hunger
(1980) stated that the problem of undernourishment of women and
children is largely ignored by the powers-that-be because this
section of the population is relegated to the fringes in
societies plagued by hunger and poverty and thus pose no threat.
The report also said that these women could not afford
supplementary food during pregnancy. They had to work on the farm
till the very last day of their pregnancy in cases where they did
not go to their natal homes for delivery. A comparison of body
weights among 29 married couples revealed that on average, men
weighed 8.4 kilos more than their wives.

In Arabic Islam, it is common for a boy to be nursed till he
is two-and-a-half years old, but the girl is weaned away from the
mother's breast when just one-and-a-half.

Lisa Redhorn and Mary Roodkowsky in Who Really Starves? Women
and World Hunger write that in many countries, men receive
nutritional priority because they are the wage earners. This does
not stand the test of either logic or time because not only are
many women wage earners but also many of them are the heads of
families -- a phenomenon steadily increasing across the world.

Many Asian cultures, say the authors, "forbid fish, seafood,
chicken, duck and eggs along with certain vegetables for women on
the flimsy plea that they are 'hot' for women. In some cultures,
women are not permitted to drink milk because of the belief that
it causes sterility." Depriving wives, daughters, sisters and
daughters-in-law of food is a common punishment meted out in
patriarchal societies.

Women are central to the efforts to overcome hunger and
malnutrition in many places because they play a major role in the
production of food. In Gambia -- a land ravaged by civil strife
-- women form a major section in wet-rice cultivation and in
Cameroon, over 60 percent of the labor force in food-crop
production consists of women. In Zimbabwe, women contribute
significantly both to market-oriented agriculture and agriculture
for direct consumption.

Pregnant women in urban India are constantly advised to make
fruit a major part of their daily diet. Juxtapose this against
the fact that the country wastes about 30 percent of its fruit
and vegetable production worth Rs 28,810 crore annually -- an
amount more than what the UK consumes in a year. Consider this
also vis-a-vis the dictates of fasting as a ritual imposed
exclusively on women from childhood till death. Indian men rarely
go on fast.

When they do, they do it to serve their own ends -- medical or
spiritual or for a public cause intended to fetch them fame.
Indian women are both socially conditioned and filially forced to
go on fast very often for the welfare of others -- brothers,
husbands and children. More often than not, fasting is imposed on
widows although going hungry serves neither their purpose nor
that of others. It is supposed to be a kind of "penance"
practiced for having lost their husbands.

Thus in most cases, fasting implies heightened
undernourishment and malnutrition among women. On the one hand,
we waste food and on the other, we waste our women by denying
them the right to food. The only way we can resolve this gross
imbalance in food distribution and consumption is perhaps by
following the dictum: "Give bread to those who have hunger; and
to those who have bread, give a hunger for justice."

The article was published in commemoration of World Food Day
which fell on Tuesday.