Typical Bangladeshi platter is not ,“Unhealthy“
[TLDR: Bangladeshi Food can be healthy, nutritious and also delicious, the world just doesn’t know it, and we are also forgetting our roots. ]
Growing up in this era of self-care, while making our diet plans, we tend to exempt our cultural food with avocado, berries, asparagus, and all those rare exotic veg-fruits westerners show us on YouTube/dedicated articles.
In the process, some people kinda strictly avoid deshi food as it’s called highly rich aka unhealthy!
But our regular daily lunch table does not look like Your_lil_cooks homepage! All the food is not that high in calories, and we don’t eat all those heavily spiced-aroma-blended foods in our daily life, tbh.
It’s just that our food is so delicious that you cannot simply avoid all those delicious bhortas, which consist of only three ingredients (salt, chili, and one kind of veg). Even in some areas of Bangladesh, bhorta-bhaat means a no-oil meal; they don’t use any oil to prepare bhortas. Not all those armageddons of frying and mixing 6 kinds of spices and making one simple dish!
And Shaak! (leafy greens) I have rarely seen people on Insta talking about it. Most probably, kids don’t like it anymore! You can find 20 different types of leafy greens (shaak) in the market and can make 60 different types of dishes if you are good at permutation-combination! Damn.
People know only about spinach, sigh! They miss all the delicacy of our leafy green daily meals:
Shaak-bhorta (mashed leaves),shaak-bhaaji (stir-fried leaves),shaak-maacher jhol (soupy curry of leafy greens and fish).
And with all the varieties of vegetables, you can get all the nutrition with too few calories!
And I wanna skip the seasonal fruit part; I can’t finish it in one writing!
The problem lies in our daily habits: overly cooked food, using too much spice for no reason just to make the food yum, forgetting the actual flavour of the food. The new generation doesn’t even like maach, shaak as everyday staple food. I have seen kids crying because their mums force them to eat bashar khabar daily and don’t let them diet!
We can also maintain a healthy diet with our own food. We just need to know portion control, add more protein into it, and love the OG flavour. If we deeply love our roots and love ourselves as well, we can find the perfect balance!
Some photos added (found them on different cooking groups on fb)