East Indian Culture Essay

Food plays a very important role in East Indian culture. Dietary habits within this culture are complex, enormously varied from region to region, and strongly influenced by religion (Purnell & Paulanka, 2008). Each religion has its own cooking style, which is influenced by the terrain, climate and crops.
East India is the home of hot, spicy food, much of which is vegetarian. “Customs and prejudices often remove certain food items from the diet, although the prohibitions vary from place to place” (Purnell & Paulanka, 2008). Dozens of different spices are used in cooking, including chilli, cloves, coriander, cumin, cardamom, and turmeric depending on area to area (Everyculture.com, 2015). These spices are used in vegetables, and other meat curries. People staple food depended on what they could grow. In the wetter areas of eastern, western, southern and central India, rice accompanies almost every meal and is the staple or basic food. In the northern part, people grew wheat and made it into different kinds of bread (Centre for Intercultural Learning, 2009).
Apart from these staple foods, people diets dependent of their religion. “Vegetarianism is firmly rooted in the culture and the term
As number of vegetarians clients in the Canada is increasing day by day so it is the duty of nurses and nutrition professionals that they provide their best possible effort to assist vegetarian clients by providing current, accurate information about vegetarian nutrition, foods, and resources. Nurses should be aware of available resources and whether these resources provide specific and relevant advice. It is important that patients feel confident in nurses' ability to help them, and an adequate, up-to-date resources list that they also have access to might help in this process (Chappiti, Jean-Marie, & Chan,