Eating Milk and Fish Together.

     

(7 Dec ‘07)

     If you eat fish and milk together, you will die, it’s a lethal combination, the proteins combination is not meant for human consumption, are comments I’ve heard I don’t know how often. However, I, like all my family members, grew up on dudh-bhaat-maasa and still love eating it. A lot of my community, the GSBs, eat it too, as do some Bengali and Oriya friends. Pick up any western cookery book and you’ll find recipes for soufflés and bakes with fish and milk based sauces. Nothing happens to anyone who eats those. I attended a talk where a dietician announced that the above combination was contraindicated. I asked her whether it was a proven fact or a myth. She confidently said it was the former. I then decided to do some homework on the net to find out why this myth persisted. Couldn’t find any to validate it. Fish eaters don’t believe it, others do. Mexicans, Eskimos, coastal folk the world over don’t even think about it.

     The maximum written on it is possibly in Jewish texts where details about kosher food are discussed. These days the Jews make a great difference between meat, fish, and milk dishes, both in cooking and eating. They derive this difference from the second book of Moses, in which it is written Ex. 23.19: You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk. On this basis they conduct a lengthy and subtle discussion how to handle meat and milk the right way, and they have written many books about it. They have two different cooking-utensils, one for the meat, the other for milk dishes. I was surprised at the number of rigid rules the Jews have to follow. Don’t touch this, don’t use that, worse than orthodox Hindus.

     Ayurveda dominates our thought processes at cellular level. I know so many people who will not touch curd when they have a cough, or at dinner, or with something ‘cold’ (this isn’t about temperature, but as contrary to ‘heaty’ food ---only another Indian would understand this). Indeed, in the hospital where I work, I actually get shouted at for having served curd or rice or citrus food at night. “Are you going to make us sicker?” they ask. Modern science has increased cumulatively. Knowledge is added on, questioned, analysed continuously. Ayurveda has got stuck in a groove because it is less transparent, less open to questioning and research. Each company/doctor might have his or her own methods for making the same chooran or mixture. I strongly believe that those who evolved this branch of medicine several thousands of years ago had scientific minds. They’d be appalled to find, in the year 2007, people blindly following what they’d done. I believe they had logical, curious minds. I believe they must have challenged myths and striven to find the ‘truth’. Quite unlike what we are today.

     One gentleman to whom I posed this ‘is milk-n-fish a deadly combo’ question said, “Why ask for trouble? Maybe it’s not proven, but why defy something that everyone says? There’s no smoke without fire. There must be some truth in it.” My point is, the truth, if indeed there is any, might be miniscule, not worth considering. If you don’t want to eat milk and fish, by all means abstain from it. But do not make shocked sounds and insist that others follow your rules/beliefs.

     One of the best examples I can give of a myth I ‘broke’: in Feb-Mar 1980, I saw the annular eclipse in spite of the fact that I was nine months’ pregnant. My doctor said there was no harm in it. And my sister’s mother-in-law, an old conservative Gujju lady, said she hadn’t read or heard of anything contrarywise in the religious texts, and she didn’t believe in superstitions. My child, now an adult, was/is healthy. About the logic of ‘why take a chance’, I’d say, if there is a doubt of a risk, don’t take it. But if something’s absolutely safe, there is no risk involved at all, see the difference?

     I am now an ‘elder’ and by Indian norms, I should be obeyed because ‘I know better, having been through so much’. Because I’ve spent longer years on this earth, I can now confidently say that older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser. How old were Jesus/Buddha/Jnyaneshwar when they spread their message(s)? Obeying an elder blindly means you’ll be making his/her mistakes, not your own.

     And now I’ll go back to my meal of dudh-bhaat-masaa.

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