Sadhana

Eat all mangoes. Eat every mango you can. The small, juicy, fibrous, nameless ones you pluck off that old tree down the gully. The planted-a-Dussheri-seed-but-never-grafted Dussheri-ish mango from your masi’s garden in Bhopal. Blushing Sindhuras. Sweet Kesars. Yes eat as many of those beautiful Alphonsos from Devgad packed carefully in cardboard boxes as you can. But also eat Pairi, Neelam, Ratna. And Sindu - a cross between the Ratna & the Alphonso which is slowly gaining more ground because climate change has wreaked havoc on the finicky Alphonso - ask farmers, yields have been down for a few years now, talk to farmers. Eat with the season. Eat the early mangoes from the south - Mankurad, Badami, Banganapalli, Imam Pasad in late April-May. Eat your middle-India mangoes - Kesar, Bombay Green, and also Malgova and Mallika which are late season bloomers from the south, and your Himsagar, Gulabkhaas, beauties from Malda and Murshidabad - try to lay your hands on a Champa, Saranga, or Kohitoor in May-June! And go both hands in, into piles of Amrapali, Chausa, Malihabadi Dussheris, Langdas in July. This is just the tip of the mango iceberg, there are so many more loved & delicious varieties - India has near 1,500 varieties of mangoes. Why would you eat just one? Of course have your favourites but also look at our beautiful biodiversity - please cherish it! Eat widely. Eat greedily. Eat because these mangoes are so delicious. Eat in RESISTANCE TO LOSS, eat like these mangoes might disappear because some of them already are!

Sheel pls don’t eat tier 2 mangoes There are only two mangoes worth eating in the world, in order: 1a) Alphonso from Devgad (if you can verify). The soil + sea breeze on the slopes gives it a distinct flavour, unmatched 1b) Alphonso from anywhere else in Konkan 2) Imam Pasand The rest are mere fruit. Come to London, I will supply!

There’s a whole genre of what I call ‘CPG-racism’ where the same product has different formulations and textures and fundamentally, experiences, in the global south and one of the most egregious examples is a bloody kitkat. You think you love a kitkat in India and you have one from Europe or US and realise you don’t even know what a kitkat tastes like! It’s not just about climate adaptation (the usual excuse is “oh, we adjust formulations for tropical shelf stability”). That’s partly true, but it doesn’t explain the full extent of the quality gap. It’s fundamentally a margin play. Companies know they can use cheaper cocoa butter substitutes, lower-grade ingredients, and more sugar to hit a price point in markets where consumers either don’t have the reference point of the “original” or where the brand halo does enough heavy lifting that people don’t question it. Yeah you can always buy a UK version (which is a whole different legacy recipe afaik) at an outrageous ++ on Amazon but you shouldn’t HAVE to. Just want a good kitkat once in a while ffs.