It’s a cliche that food cooked with love is the best, but in Kerala thousands of women have proved that cooking with a sense of shared humanity can produce a delicious meal. Every morning, when women start preparing the packed lunch their husbands will take to work, they boil a little extra rice and add a few more vegetables to the stew.
The extra portion, along with condiments, is placed on a banana leaf, tied up neatly as a pothichoru (food parcel) and wrapped in a sheet of newspaper for protection. Later, volunteers from the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the youth wing of the state’s ruling Communist party (Marxist), will visit homes to collect the meals.
