Why you should give the yellow pea a chance

The yellow pea has come to underpin the food economy in India and the world yet it rarely receives the attention given to other protein-rich food.

What is common between Mysore Pak and Motichur laddus, the Prussian army, vegan bodybuilders, famous chef Rene Redzepi, the top IPO on the New York Stock Exchange this year and the possible next Prime Minister of Canada?

The unlikely answer is Pisus Sativum, the common pea, which can be green, brown or, mostly these days, yellow, in which form it is dried, becoming a commodity that has come to underpin the food economy in India and, increasingly, the rest of the world.

This is an unusual situation for one of the oldest cultivated crops, but one which has never received the focus given to other ancient crops like wheat or rice.

Even among pulses, the vast protein rich and flatulent family it falls in, dried yellow peas rarely receive the attention given to other beans and lentils, or even fresh or frozen green peas. Yellow peas were valued because they dry and store well, and are one of the few pulses that flourish in cold northern climates.

In past centuries this made them a key source of protein for the poor in Europe, inspiring the nursery rhyme: “Pease pudding hot, Pease pudding cold/ Pease pudding in the pot, nine days old.”

In 1867, a German cook devised Erbswurst, a sausage of yellow pea flour, pork fat and onions, which stored exceptionally well, and could be boiled into a nutritious soup. The Prussian army ordered it as one of the first manufactured military rations, and during the two World Wars it kept many Germans from starving.

The factory in Heilbronn that made it became the headquarters for Knorr, the Unilever brand, and on a trip there some years back the factory head told me they still made Erbswurst occasionally, using antiquated machines. Last year it was finally discontinued, provoking an upsurge of nostalgia with pea sausages trading at high prices on eBay.

Eastern India has ghugni, the snack made from yellow peas boiled till they are slumping soft, but few other recipes specifically call for safed vatana, as they are called here. Yet, for quite a while we have been eating more and more of them.

In one of the few academic studies on the trade in pulses, by Raj Chandra, PK Joshi, Akanksha Negi and Devesh Roy, in Pulses for Nutrition in India, they note: “NSS data show that from 1988 to 2009, the per capita consumption of all pulses, except yellow pea, declined. For yellow pea, per capita consumption over that period increased substantially, by 73 percent.”

Stealth product
This very high percent rise is partly explained by being from a low base, but this simply makes the question more curious – if we never had much demand for yellow peas, why are we eating so much more of them now? And the answer is that we often don’t realise we are eating them.

Yellow peas have become a stealth product, creeping into our diets in ways we don’t realise. And this is only likely to increase, as more uses are found for pea derivatives, with countries abroad now following India’s lead. ET was one of the first to note this trend when, in 2009, Nidhi Nath Srinivas pointed out that yellow peas had become the answer to India’s repeated failure to plan pulse production properly.

Pulses are vital in our diets, particularly for vegetarians who need the proteins in dals. Yet for multiple reasons pulse production has never received the support that goes into rice, wheat or even sugar. Pulses never benefitted from the Green Revolution, perhaps because they are of little importance to the Western countries that nurtured the agricultural research.

Since their yield is still low farmers gain little even when minimum support prices are offered – intensively grown sugar gets better returns. Pulses must be milled, which allows millers and traders to manipulate the market, ensuring that they, not farmers, benefit from price rises.

The market is also fragmented. Different parts of India eat different pulses (rajma and masur in the North, tur and urad in the South, mung in Gujarat, chana dal in Bengal, etc), and people are quite resistant to change. This makes it hard to create a consolidated procurement policy, and because most of these dals aren’t widely grown in other countries it is hard to source them quickly from international markets.

Countries like Myanmar and Australia do grow dals for India, but want India to commit to long-term contracts, which the government is unwilling to do due to pressure from farmers here, who complain about imports undercutting them.

The Canadian Connection
Yellow peas offer a solution to many of these complexities. They are grown in huge quantities in the vast prairie states of Canada, with Saskatchewan – where Andrew Scheer, the Conservative candidate in the current elections comes from – leading the way.

They tend to be much cheaper than pulses from other parts of the world, and are easy to procure, especially as Canadian agro-business has consolidated production: instead of having to deal with many farmers and traders, yellow peas can be ordered with just a few Canadian contacts. Canada originally grew yellow peas as cattle fodder and as a rotational crop, to restore soil fertility through their nitrogen fixing roots.

But colonial administrators in the British Empire realised they could serve as food for the Indian indentured labour being taken to work in plantations in the Caribbean and Africa. It was too complicated to get dal from India for them, but yellow peas could be substituted, with the added benefit of keeping the trade within the Empire.

In places like Trinidad and Tobago, nearly all dal dishes are made with yellow peas. There is considerable historical irony that this food for indentured labour is being served to independent Indians today. The labourers had no option, but to get around modern Indian concerns, yellow peas go to the poorest, who also have no option, and to the institutional sector, which doesn’t care.

As the campaigning organisation Navdanya has detailed in its book Pulse of Life, huge quantities of yellow peas have been procured, often with dubious contracts, and dumped in ration shops, while much of the rest goes to restaurant who take them simply because they are so cheap (some from the ration shops probably reaches there as well).

Versatile Substitute
Yellow peas are versatile, because they break down so easily when cooked. So they substitute for tur in sambhar in restaurants or masur in dhabas or chana dal in khichdi served in canteens. And, as Dr. NP Singh, director of the Indian Institute of Pulses Research in Kanpur notes, “many unscrupulous traders do adulterate besan with either yellow pea flour or khesari dal flour or maize flour as the latter are cheaper in comparison to chickpeas.”

Besan is the key ingredient for so many sweets, like Mysore pak or motichur laddus, as well as in the batter used in pakoras, cooked with dahi for kadhi, kneaded into flatbreads like thepla, or stuffed into puran poli or mixed with grain flour to make the highly nutritious powder called sattu.

Besan has innumerable uses in Indian cooking, and when it is made from yellow peas rather than chickpeas something fundamental changes. “The taste, texture, and quality of dishes prepared from different pulses will be different,” points out Dr.Singh.

When besan adulteration is done with genuinely dubious ingredients like khesari dal (which can be poisonous), the use of yellow peas, which are from the same family as chickpeas, seems to have become almost acceptable. But Dr. Singh notes it’s still not quite the same: “Composition wise, dried peas and chickpeas have comparable starch and sucrose levels. However, peas have comparatively less fat and more flatulence causing carbohydrates such as raffinose and stachyose in comparison to chickpeas peas.”

If you feel that the sambhar in restaurants or commercially bought sweets somehow taste different, or don’t digest as well, the reason could be yellow peas.

New Products
The Canadians have also developed new pea products. In the 1970s, a Saskatchewan research laboratory figured out how to isolate pea protein. Dr. Singh explains that peas have two proteins, Legumin and Vicilin, which are salt soluble: “Briefly, the defatted pea flour is dispersed in water, adjusted to alkaline pH using sodium salts and left for shaking for at least two to three hours to maximize protein solubility.

This is followed by lowering of pH to the isoelectric point which is the pH at which the protein has least solubility.” The protein that precipitates out can then be treated for taste, shelf life and flavour. Pea protein was initially used for products like protein shakes for vegan body builders, who objected to the dairy derived whey used for most protein drinks. Pea starch, which was used as a thickener in many processed food products, was more useful, especially as consumers started raising concerns about allergies from other pulses or cereals used to make thickeners or other ingredients.

Another concern with soya was with genetically modified (GM) seeds, which are almost standard in North America. Yellow peas, by contrast, seem to have few allergies associated with them, and because they were overlooked by agri-research, have also escaped GM tinkering. This turned out to be a huge advantage when the US based start-up Beyond Meat began looking for a protein base with

which to develop its range of animal-free meat products. Soya, which is used by Impossible Foods, another leading animal-free product start-up, was ruled out for GM concerns. But pea protein was readily and cheaply available from Canada, just over the border, and had few problems associated with it.

Beyond Meat’s pea protein based alternative meats have been a hit, with chains like TGI Fridays and Dunkin’ stocking their products. Other companies too are coming up with pea protein based products like Ripple Foods (dairy alternatives), JUST (egg substitutes) and Good Catch (fish alternatives), but Beyond Meat was the first to go public, and it did so with quite a bang. The stock soared more than 700% post its launch in May giving it a market cap of 412 billion.

Spike In Prices
While some of this hype has, inevitably, faded since then, it’s clearly signalled the huge potential for pea protein. Since producers are still few and mostly based in Canada this has caused a spike in prices. In July this year pea protein was trading at $4200 a tonne, compared to $3500 for soy protein.

This has already stimulated plans for more pea protein factories, but with yellow peas still plentiful – oddly enough, the spat between China and Canada over Huawei has helped, thanks to the import curbs China has enforced – this is one product that isn’t going to run out. It is even attracting gourmet interest. Rene Redzepi, the Danish chef who has championed the value of northern products, has developed yellow pea products like piso, a product like soy miso which is made by fermenting yellow pea paste.

The USA and Russia are now already ramping up yellow pea production and with continued concerns over soy – for example, the environmental damage from Amazon fires, which are claimed to have been set to clear land for soy plantations – this is a commodity which is likely to keep growing. India is no longer one of the largest consumers, but this may not be a bad thing.

It may encourage more local cultivation of yellow peas – it is a good cold season crop – and the general interest in pea protein might encourage Indian production of it. Even more, this new global interest in pea products could inspire India to stop taking pulses for granted. For centuries this was the one country that depended on pulses for nutrition, and used pulses in more ways than anywhere else.

Yet just as the rest of the world is waking up to their value, our per capita pulse consumption has started declining. Even as the world is turning away to pulses, for all the ethical and health reasons that India has always known, we ourselves are turning away from them towards dairy and meat.

Dr. Singh points out that there is much we can do. Pulse proteins can be made from Indian pulses, like lobia and kulith, not just imported yellow peas, and these could be crucial for the protein starved diets of the poor. What is needed is infrastructure and technological development to make these products available at affordable levels. We have to stop looking at yellow peas as more than a stopgap for our failures in pulse production, and realise all the benefits that the rest of the world is waking up to now.

Source:- https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/food-entertainment/personal-care-pet-supplies-liquor/why-you-should-give-the-yellow-pea-a-chance/71551528