PHILOSOPHY
We aim to revive India’s age-old traditions of farming and basic food processing methodologies that used to retain full nutritional value in our traditional superfoods like desi ghee, edible oils, spices etc.
DEFINING PURITY
In common parlance, Pure food is only understood as one without any adulteration. At Gaonvala we have redefined food purity as something much more than just lack of adulteration. A pure food is one which retains its original nutritional richness throughout the stages of production, processing and packaging till it come to the kitchen of the consumer.
Going beyond our absolute commitment against food adulteration, we at Gaonvala only procure nutritionally superior native(desi) variant of food or cash crops, we use nutrition retaining time-tested ancient methods for basic processing and ecologically friendly, nutrition retaining packaging alternatives.
REVIVING PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS OF PURITY IN OUR DAILY SUPERFOODS
Whenever we get a chance to visit our villages or lesser known countryside, more often than not we come across folklores about superpowerful ancestors who possessed unbelievable levels of strength and stamina.
With no access to any food supplements, protein shakes or exotic superfoods, all they relied for their phenomenal physical might were the common essential oils, cereals, spices, ghee and other dairy products which in those times were at their purest and were supreme-foods, much more than today’s so called superfoods.
With the advancements of modern science and industrial revolution came new chemical compounds, came new food additives and came more disguised industrial techniques all of which gave the food adulteration industry bigger fangs and opportunities. And today, we aren’t left with even a single basic food item which is unadulterated.
Researches in crop science which gave way to hybrids and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and evolution of larger machines in mills and chakkis with high RPMs to process raw farm produce further reduced the nutritional richness of our essential oils, spices and cereals.
Gaonvala has completely eliminated these post-industrial revolution experiments with our daily superfoods. It has restored the use of native crop variants for its raw material, time-tested age-old methods of processing and packaging of farm produce so as to revive the original potency and purity of our essential superfoods.
HUMAN IMMUNITY & ITS BIGGEST SOURCE
Our most common superfoods like Desi cow ghee, almond oil, jiggery, mustard oil, green tea are the richest reservoirs of anti-oxidants, vitamins and innumerable other special minerals which boost our immunity. But unfortunately, it has become almost impossible to find them in their nutritionally rich and unadulterated form.
Good nutrition is fundamental to improving immunity. The immune system is the body’s defense against disease and infection and it has long been established that several factors influence the function of the immune system including stress, sleep and nutrition. The WHO guidance on diet, especially during the current pandemic states that “good nutrition is crucial for health, particularly in times when the immune system might need to fight back” (WHO, 2020). Providing a diet high in nutritious foods rich in vitamins and minerals supports optimal function of the immune system by providing antioxidants to slow damage of cells caused by free radicals or assisting in T-cell production.
Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic and the likes of bird flu, swine flu which have kept on emerging in the last few decades have repeatedly emphasized that our most dependable shield against deadly viral diseases is our immune system.
ADDRESING COMPROMISATION OF PURITY AT THE LEVELS OF PRODUCTION, PROCESSING AND PACKAGING
Like every dimension of human life, modern science has revolutionized how we produce what we eat, how we process what we eat and how we package and store what we eat
At the level of processing
At the level of production
At the level of processing
At Gaonvala, we have revived our traditional age-old methods of basic processing of the raw farm produce like cold pressing of mustard seeds, almonds, groundnuts, coconut etc. in a wooden ghani for edible oils, like traditional pounding mechanism for extracts like Lakadong turmeric, Ashwagandha, Amba Haldi (Mango Ginger), Dry Ginger, Amla (Gooseberry) etc. like vedic bilona method for desi ghee
Innumerable scientific researches have revealed that our age-old basic processing methods for essential superfoods retain more than 30-40% more nutrition (especially vitamins and compounds) vis-a-vis the modern industrial processing of crushing edible oilseeds, spice grinding, grain pulverising etc.
Our most common superfoods like Desi cow ghee, almond oil, jiggery, mustard oil, green tea are the richest reservoirs of anti-oxidants, vitamins and innumerable other special minerals which boost our immunity. But unfortunately, it has become almost impossible to find them in their nutritionally rich and unadulterated form.
Good nutrition is fundamental to improving immunity. The immune system is the body’s defense against disease and infection and it has long been established that several factors influence the function of the immune system including stress, sleep and nutrition. The WHO guidance on diet, especially during the current pandemic states that “good nutrition is crucial for health, particularly in times when the immune system might need to fight back” (WHO, 2020). Providing a diet high in nutritious foods rich in vitamins and minerals supports optimal function of the immune system by providing antioxidants to slow damage of cells caused by free radicals or assisting in T-cell production.
Lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic and the likes of bird flu, swine flu which have kept on emerging in the last few decades have repeatedly emphasized that our most dependable shield against deadly viral diseases is our immune system.
At the level of production
During the last few decades, researches in crop science have introduced hybrid variants for almost all food crops, cash crops, fruits and vegetables and even Genetically Modified(GMOs) variants for some of them. Most of the hybrid and GMO variants grow in lesser time and give much higher yield per unit area as compared to native (desi) variants.
However, as far as the nutritional potency and richness is concerned, the hybrids and GMOs compromise on it either to increase the yield or to enhance one or more commercially significant attribute of the concerned crop. For example : to make the fruit size bigger or to produce more number of fruits per plant, cross pollination is done only keeping the fruit in mind but the nutrient absorbing capacity of roots and stem remains the same. Therefore,
the same amount of nutrient gets divided into larger number of larger
fruits. The GMOs produce even greater anomalies in the nutrient value of the
crop.
Moreover, the hybrids and GMOs require far more fertilizers and pesticides without which it is impossible to grow them.
That’s why, the overall nutritional potency and richness of a hybrid or GMO
variant undergoes a major compromise.