I
think it’s the Multigrain bread.
It
sat there this morning, staring back at me from its customary position on the
breakfast table. The Spartan ruggedness of its rough, craggy surface hinted at
a new era of deprivation and restraint. The bland, in-your-face brownness made
you yearn for the warm, golden excitement of toasted white bread. The dry,
almost parched sensation as you bit into it, just lingered in your throat and
settled there; a sullen, lumpen reminder of the luxuries you’d forsaken in the
pursuit of health. The broken, grainy texture as you swallowed the bread harked
back to bygone eras of hardship and suffering, the kind you only remembered as
black and white pictures in history books or on television documentaries. With
all those people lining up in the streets for bread during times of great
hardship like the World Wars or the Great Depression.
It’s
the Multigrain bread indeed.
That
little, brown square of doughy sustenance, resting innocuously on my plate, ominously
symbolic of the healthy lifestyle changes that I could no longer escape from. Beaming
with undulating pride, gloating with the aura of victory, suffused with the
warm glow of triumphalism. Ah, so you’ve finally admitted defeat, old sport.
You’ve joined the brigade of the health freaks – it’s a lifetime of multigrain
bread and skimmed milk and green tea and meals that are devoid of joy and
carbohydrates.
While
it may look like I bear a sullen resentment towards Multigrain bread that led
to the rant above, this really isn’t true. The truth is I don’t even dislike
Multigrain bread. Sure, it isn’t as good as white bread, but it isn’t bad at
all. There is an inherent, satisfying crunchiness that gets enhanced when
toasted just right, there’s a discreteness to each bite that feels deliberate
and definite and there’s a rugged, earthy texture, a grainy-ness as it breaks
down between your teeth, which gives you an outdoorsy feeling that breaks
through the urbanity of day-to-day life. Within the universal maxim that health
and taste have an inverse equation (the healthier a product, the less likely it
is to be tasty), Multigrain bread is really quite all right.
If
I had to pick a healthy breakfast item I didn’t like, it would be Oats. Yes, that
soggy, amorphous and lumpy mass that sits apologetically in your bowl, begging
to be eaten before it coalesces into an even more congealed and inedible
collection of misshapen agglomerations. Its white, characterless demeanour and
spongy, sticky elasticity ensures that it’s almost always partaken in stony
silence, with only the odd disgruntled snort breaking the funereal pall. Like a
sullen teenager, it’s angst-ridden presence and air of self-loathing alienation sucks
the joie de vivre right out of your morning as it glares back at you with
insouciant indifference. So why eat the damn thing, one might reasonably ask?
It’s
probably a combination of vanity and the fact that I don’t want to end up like
one of those obese Americans that get wedged in the doorway each time they
decide to get out of the house. I’m not in the carefree 20s any longer, and the
general lack of any form of exercise has begun to make itself visible in the
form of a slight yet embarrassing layer around the waist. In simple terms, it’s
a paunch. Since I don’t dress like a gym-going Delhi-ite, it isn’t very
noticeable to most people, but I know it’s very much there, lurking in the
shadows, expanding at a pace so glacial you think nothing’s happening until one
fine day it suddenly assumes an enormous proportion and it’s too late to do
anything about it.
So
I’ve made a few changes towards a healthier diet, although it all falls in the
token gesture category. It’s the beginner, entry-level, lazy everyman type
changes - so while there’s skimmed milk and multigrain bread, one isn’t going
to the extremes of health bars, protein shakes and egg whites. While salad is
attempted for the first three days, the biryani backlash strikes on day four
and by the weekend you let yourself go completely; a decadent, hedonistic orgy
of calories far outstripping any minuscule gains made by any early-week
restraint.
In
short, it’s the kind of selective giving up of stuff that wont do you any good
at all, but will at least make you feel like you haven’t stopped living. At the
same time, there is the satisfaction of feeling like you’ve finally done
something about it, a sort of moral victory that you can bask in even if it
wont make any real difference. The problem is one fine day someone might come
along and tell you that you were wrong all along. Like it happened with cigarettes. Imagine this - it’s the
1950s, and even though advertising is fairly new, you can see through most of
it for the guff it actually is. So you don’t fall for the macho imagery
projected by the Marlboro man or the adventurous spirit of the Camel chap. But
then you see a Doctor come in an ad and say that smoking’s good for you. I
mean, it’s a Doctor, for god’s sake – and you’re hooked to the damn thing,
until a couple of decades later everyone concludes that it actually is harmful
for you and lung cancer is only a matter of time. How would that make you feel?
Every
day, someone somewhere in this world decides that something tasty is bad for
you. Eminent researchers and august organisations are continuously classifying
and reclassifying what you consume into different levels of good and bad – like
processed meats were recently reclassified by the WHO as being as bad as
cigarettes and alcohol. And if this isn’t enough, studies are conducted with
the express purpose of confusing you even further by saying that there’s good
fat and bad fat, or good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, or that multigrain is
pointless if it isn’t also organic and so on.
I’m
no longer even sure. Maybe it wasn’t even multigrain bread. Perhaps it was wholegrain
bread all along.
