Vancouver is a city of fitness buffs.
Come rain (as it does) or shine (sometimes), or snow (plenty on the ski slopes, and just enough on the streets to make the city’s inexperienced drivers the laughing stock of the rest of the country) you’ll find people out and about. Running, cycling, rollerblading, kayaking, skiing, hiking – and the all weather favourite – “hitting the gym”- a term I have yet to wrap my sweaty towel around!
Where a devotion to fitness and an active lifestyle are, can the health food juggernaut be far behind? Specialist stores abound, bringing you every conceivable combination of the latest wonder foods, energy drinks, protein bars and supplements, and more vitamins than there are letters of the alphabet.
Being a moderately lazy sort, and more inclined to get my nourishment from a well balanced meal, I don’t usually pay too much attention to all of this. One thing, though, that did catch my eye when I first came across it many years ago, was something called “trail mix”. There are versions of it sold everywhere, from supermarket check-out counters, to gas stations, to airport newsagents.
Trail mix, popularly defined as “a combination of dried fruit, grains, nuts, and sometimes chocolate, developed as a snack food to be taken along on outdoor hikes.
Trail mix is considered an ideal snack food for hikes, because it is tasty, lightweight, easy to store, and nutritious, providing a quick boost from the carbohydrates in the dried fruit and/or granola, and sustained energy from fats in nuts“*.
Lightweight, tasty, easy to store, nutritious… Wait a minute! That perfectly described a simple snack I remember from my childhood – a mixture of puffed rice, roasted channa dal, slivers of coconut and little bits of jaggery. It’s what my paternal grandmother would toss together for me to munch on while I sat reading stacks of comics in her living room. More of a “couch potato” mix, then!
This was a traditional traveller’s and worker’s snack, and while my grandmother gave me slices of fresh coconut in my bowlful of pori akki (puffed rice), the original version would have had slices of copra (dried coconut).
Though each ingredient contains traces of other nutrients, very simply put, puffed rice provides energy giving carbohydrates, the roasted channa dal some protein, and copra a dose of easily digested fat. Jaggery rounds things off with its mineral rich sweetness, and a thirst quenching quality.
If it was the chocolatey, smoky wallé bella (the wonderful palm jaggery from Mangalore), all the better!
So, there you have it! An Indian trail mix, genius in its simplicity! Now, perhaps I should see about marketing it here. 😉
*Courtesy wikipedia.