“I Hope These Kind Of Conferences Enable Us To Eat Without Fear” - Dr. Valsan Vethody

Dr. Vethody started by saying that people have the view of Sri Lankan food as very spicy and some people say that in the Ramayana it was one of the reasons Raavana was hot headed. He went on to say that in the Ramayana there were also very level headed people present. “I don’t want to talk more about Sri Lankan food, because the culture and the values related to our food and your food is more or less the same. Especially, when it comes to the State of Kerala, our food and your food is 99.99 per cent the same. It is basically rice and coconut based, and even the sweets are mostly jaggery based,” he said.

He went on to say that this is not the first conference that happens to be about food and life in the world. He also said the theme of this conference – Food and Life, is widely researched upon. “Universities after universities, countries after countries, have been spending billions and billions of dollars on doing research about what we should eat, and what we should not eat. Yet we still don’t know what to eat and what not to eat,” he stated.

He gave an example that on the other hand, if we give a dog food, within one sniff of it the dog realises whether he should eat it or not. He also hopes that these kinds of conferences might take us one day to the stage of without looking at food labels and sniffing, without getting too many comments from people, we spontaneously accept our food, and eat without any fear. “In spite of all the research 70 to 80 per cent of people are on prescription drugs, all for food related diseases. I hope that these kinds of conferences give us some kind of program so that the younger generation benefits,” he concludes.