Q1.
Activity 3: Find out about food preservation practices at your family by asking the elders at home. Write at least one such practice.
Answer
How to do this activity
- Choose an elder at home — your grandmother, grandfather, mother, father or an aunt.
- Ask them three questions: What do you store for the whole year? How do you make it last? Who taught you this?
- Watch them do it if you can, and note the steps in order.
- Write it down in your notebook in your own words, with the name of the person who told you.
Sample answer (one practice, written in full):
“My grandmother makes badis every year in March. She soaks urad dal overnight, grinds it into a thick paste and beats it well with her hand until it becomes light. She adds salt and a little ash gourd. Then she drops small lumps of the paste onto a clean cloth spread on a cot, and keeps the cot in full sunlight. She turns the badis every day. After four days they are hard and light, and she stores them in a steel tin with a tight lid. They last us the whole year. She learnt this from her own mother in the village.”
Other practices you may hear about at home:
| Practice | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Grain stored in a steel drum with dried neem leaves | The drum keeps out moisture and insects; neem keeps pests away |
| Mango or lemon pickle made every summer and kept under oil | Salt removes moisture, oil keeps out air |
| Papads and badis dried on the terrace before the rains | Sun-drying removes moisture |
| Amla or ginger murabba made in thick sugar syrup | Microbes cannot grow in very sweet syrup |
| Fish or prawns salted and sun-dried along the coast | Salt plus drying removes almost all the moisture |
| Milk boiled twice a day in summer | Heating kills most of the microbes in it |
| Water kept in a matka | Clay keeps water cool without electricity |
| Roasted and ground masala kept in an airtight steel dabba | Roasting removes moisture, the tight lid keeps out air |
What you will notice: nobody in your family had to learn the science of microbes to do these things. They learnt them from their own elders, and every single practice turns out to remove moisture, air or warmth. That is what Disha found too — traditional practices carry real science inside them.