The Lean Indian Cookbook

What ever happened to good old-fashioned home cookin'? Canned foods, boxed mixes and frozen dinners have created a new convenience that many of us have come to depend on. All of our most cherished foods come ready-made, like ice cream, mayonnaise and bread, and we hardly ever realize that such things can be made at home. In recent years, people have become more conscious of health and fitness, partly to cure some of the problems that such food has produced, and partly because of the culture. It's often a "quick fix" for the problems associated with our sedentary lifestyles in the work place and at home. In theory, such lifestyles are great, but, in practice, they become much more difficult to maintain. Most health issues start in the kitchen and in the supermarket. If people cooked more often for themselves, and cooked leaner, the culture of food would have a new meaning. This new fitness-focused lifestyle and our new consciousness about the foods we eat has induced some changes in the cultural status, and the meaning, of traditional cuisine; it's all taking place outside the range of vision of nutritionists, ethnographers and columnists writing on healthy eating. Few actually seem aware that the traditional concerns about about the ethnography of food--the cooked and the raw, the pure and the polluted, the commensurable and its absence, the sanctified and the profane--have merged now with a new, more fluid politics of food. This new self-awareness has introduced a new sub-culture of food within certain culinary traditions--the sub-culture of healthy eating, while maintaining cultural traditions. In our Lean Series of cookbooks, we sought to make some of the most culturally-iconic dishes healthy again.