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.
By noon, the parcels are being distributed among 40,000 patients in the state’s hospitals. In Indian hospitals, food is not provided free. Patients from poor families miss out on some meals because they cannot afford to pay.
It is also a rule in Indian hospitals that every patient must have a spouse or relative attending to them at all times – to run around for medicines, arrange tests or fetch a nurse. The attendants also receive a free food parcel.
It can be very stressful for the families of hospital patients throughout India. Their relatives’ illness alone is worrying, then there is the cost of treatment. Although hospital admission and consultations are free, patients must pay for tests and medicines.
On top of that, there are accommodation costs: many people sleep on the floor in the ward or on benches in corridors because they cannot afford a hotel or hostel. Eating in restaurants is beyond many people’s budget. The arrival of the parcels is welcome.
“When we hand out the parcels, you can see the gratitude in their eyes,” says Surya Heman, a civil servant and volunteer with the federation in Cheruvaikkal. “It’s a very emotional moment.”
The beauty of the scheme, which began in 2017 with 300 parcels, is that, apart from transport, no costs are incurred – no special community kitchen, with its gas and electricity bills, cooks and cleaners, is needed. The meals are cooked as an extra portion in homes. Nor is there any burden on the person cooking the meal, beyond adding more rice, vegetables and maybe fish.
Federation volunteers say they ask every family to prepare one or two parcels but many make five or six. Some homes prepare 10.
“It’s not only homemakers but working women, too, who prepare the parcels. My mother is a teacher but she does it,” says Meghna Murali, a law student and youth worker who organises parcels in the Ernakulam district.
When Heman sees patients and relatives opening the parcels, she often notices something. “The women tend to cook a better meal than the one they would for their own families. To make it nicer, they make a little more effort, adding a piece of fried fish, pickles, chutney and poppadum,” she says.
Jaya Kumari, who lives in Cheruvaikkal, says her husband helps her prepare the meal “and even though I’m asked to prepare only two or three, we usually prepare eight to 10 parcels. Because I want to surprise the person, I usually add some fried chicken to the vegetables,” she says.
The meals are prepared 365 days a year, with no break for festivals or bank holidays. During Onam, a harvest festival and Kerala’s most important, the sweet dish payasam – a confection of rice, nuts and jaggery sugar – is added to the parcel; at Christmas, a piece of plum cake is included.
No family is overburdened; their contribution is limited to making parcels on three to five days of the year because the federation distributes the load. On 1 January, the schedule is prepared and clusters of villages will be given dates for cooking.
A week before the appointed time, volunteers such as Heman call the families in the areas they oversee – perhaps 100 to 200 families – to alert them. A day before, she reminds them again, just in case. On the day, she collects all the parcels and delivers them to hospitals within the district. At the larger hospitals, more than 1,000 can be distributed in a day.
This being Kerala, one of India’s most progressive states, the pothichoru scheme has a purpose beyond feeding families with limited means. Whether it is literacy, life expectancy, healthcare, working conditions, palliative care, computers, broadband in rural areas or gender equality, Kerala ranks ahead of most other Indian states.
“The aim of the scheme is not just to mitigate poverty but to create an ethos of equality, to remove caste and religious differences, and to teach the young to care for the community. Basically, it’s to teach them one simple message: be human,” says AA Rahim, the DYFI president.
When his wife was admitted to the government medical college in Trivandrum recently with bacterial meningitis, Rahim happily accepted the food parcels. “I can tell you that home-cooked food when you’re in a hospital is very comforting,” he says.
Had this been elsewhere in India – where upper-caste parents protest if a low-caste person cooks school meals, where low-caste people are served with different cups and plates in roadside eateries, and where Muslims and Hindus tend to avoid each other’s food – someone in Rahim’s position would have questioned the provenance of the food, along with the religion and caste of the hand that made it.
But Kerala’s food parcels have no identity markers attached to them. The woman cooking the meal has no idea of the caste or religion of the beneficiary and vice versa.
“In the six years of the scheme, I have never handed out a parcel and been asked whether it has been cooked in a Hindu or Christian home or the cook’s caste. People accept it gratefully as food, just food,” says Murali.
