Fair warning, the following facts are meant to alarm you. Various global consumer reports conclude that most poultry farms feed antibiotics and ground up chicken bits to their chickens! In certain cases, the consumption of hormone-injected broiler chicken may even be a primary cause of the early onset of puberty amongst teenagers.
Much of processed milk that we insist our children take is possibly inundated with cholesterol, allergenic proteins, and bacteria. Anxious about what’s on your plate yet? We catch up with a few young foodpreneurs, who are attempting to remind Kochiites of the old adage—you are what you eat.
Fed up
Dr Anwar Hassain, who is currently practising at AIMS Edappally, was certainly irked by what he heard of the poultry market. So much so that the 29-year-old teamed up with three friends, and jointly invested close to `50 lakhs, to launch an e-store called Healthywings in an attempt to revolutionise it.
“We aim to bring to your doorstep, superior-quality, free-range naadan kozhi. We procure Aseel chickens—which are fed on papaya powder/maize/wheat and take almost 200 days to mature—from our five-acre farm in Palakkad,” states Dr Anwar. This online poultry store will soon start selling Karinkozhi (used in Ayurvedic treatments), farm quails, free-range ducks, and organic eggs.
`351 per kilo. Details: healthywings.in
Worth the squeeze
A scientifically-balanced cup of sugarcane juice is what you’ll find at Cane Home. This Chullickal-based
outlet co-owned by Aadil Basheer, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Horticulture from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, serves sugarcane juice mocktails that have no white sugar, water, ice, artificial flavours, or milk.
“After investing close to `30 lakhs we make our products from organically-cultivated sugarcane grown on leased 30-acre farms in Pollachi and Coimbatore,” explains 28-year-old Aadil, whose sister, a dietician, is also developing a batch of maida-free millet cookies and hydros-free jaggery.
`90 per litre. Details: 7200092723
Got milk?
Safar Akbar, an app developer and new-age diary farmer, claims that documentaries like Food Inc aren’t far from the truth. “It’s one of the reasons why my friends and I started an online diary service called Paalkuppi.in. Unlike major outlets who siphon away the (good) fat content of milk and package the rest—our initiative door-delivers, unhomogenised and unpasteurised farm-fresh milk mere hours after procuring it,” states 27-year-old Safar. Their startup currently serves a brand of vitamin and enzyme-rich milk from their 25-cow homestead in Pukkattupadi.
`60 per litre. Details: paalkuppi.in