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.