Nice India Food Pictures photos

25 l 365

Image by daendorphin
So many pictures and none that I liked so I'm putting this one up as a consolation.
:(

Taken while I lived in India of two little beggars.

Such beautiful girls, such beautiful smiles :)

-

For Attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run their fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.
People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.
- Audrey Hepburn


24//365
February 5th 2011 11:58 pm

Auroville 016 ------------------------------------------ Organic solution

Image by Pandiyan
This is a farm inside Auroville. Acres of cashew plantation with a lot of other trees and plants interspersed. While I have heard of huge farms in developed countries being managed by few people, Indian farming is labour intensive. Abroad they manage the work through heavy industry-grade machinery.

This farm is the labour of one man who uses people only for activities such as construction or harvesting. There is no electricity connection here. That tall windmill does all the pumping. Few solar panels provide limited power. There are no chemical fertilisers used on this farm.

The green revolution of 1960s made India self sufficient in food. It was important for a new independent nation to grow enough food and more importantly feel self-sufficient. Green revolution introduced a lot of new concepts - crop rotation, fertilisers, extensive irrigation projects such as dams and canals and so on.

But the need for wholistic planning and sustainable efforts are slowly being felt now. The negative effects are slow to manifest. Lands losing their fertility, upset ecological balance, water shortage, low pest resistance and such. True agricultural scientists in India do not blindly ape the west any more and the focus of many scientific establishments is finding methods and means which have a local relevance.

And there is some growing interest in organic farming. There are educated people giving up lucrative corporate jobs to become new age farmers. Studies have shown that productivity of many organic methods is low in inital years but more than makes up in the long run. Needs patience and a lot of knowledge.

And our friend who runs the farm is no technophobe. He restores classic motorbikes.

Check out all the Auroville Pictures in my stream.

Cuban Farming

Image by davethetemp
The picture above sums up the most extraordinary aspect of Cuban life today, the return to non-petroleum based agriculture. As to why I find this so amazing and important, I'm going to have to give some historical background.

I know, you're here for the travel bug stuff, but trust me this is good. Some of the stuff I'm writing here I remember from discussions with our guides, the rest came from a Harpers Magazine article from March of 2005 entitled "What will you be eating when the revolution comes?" Well worth tracking down if you want to know more.

Cuba in the 1980's: Despite the US blockade, agriculture in Cuba looks like North American agriculture. Lots of tractors (Russian), cattle (Canadian) and, thanks to Soviet overproduction, lots of petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Massive subsidies from the Soviets and sympathetic countries around the world allow Cuba to feed itself just like everyone else.

Cuba 1992: Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union set in motion the collapse of Cuban agriculture. No more cheap fuel for tractors. No more petroleum based pesticides and fertilizers. Production plummets. The average Cuban adult male goes from 3000 Calories per day to 1900. There isn't enough grain to feed the cattle so they are slaughtered and eaten. Cubans today refer to the early and mid 1990's as "The Special Period." As the deprivation became severe, the number of people fleeing to the US skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, Cuban agronomists had been thinking about farming differently for some time. The amount of calories in fuel, pesticides, fertilizer and transportation consumed in food production always exceeded the yield.

The solution was to revert back to older food production solutions. We drove past several hundred farms in all our travels that week and never saw a working tractor in the field. Farming is manual labour. Gone were the North American cattle. In their place were the cows typical in India and Latin America, the kind with the long fold of skin hanging below their necks. They (like the oxen above) feed themselves from the grasses on the sides of the roads. Chickens run free and subsist on bugs and weeds.

The Cuban diet is back up to 3000 calories a day. I saw bags of rice from Vietnam at one of the ration stores but just about all the other food I saw was raised on the island itself.

Since North American agriculture is as dependant on plentiful, cheap oil as the old Cuban system was, I wonder sometimes if I saw a glimpse of our future on those fields.