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Men and women of all races, classes, and religions enjoy a free hot meal at the Sri Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar in Punjab State, India. The gurdwara is the holiest site of the Sikhs, as well as the world’s largest langar, or community kitchen, which provides- a free hot vegetarian meal to 100,000 people, 24/7, every day of the year. The meals consist of roti, or Indian flatbread, rice, a curried vegetable dish, and dal, or lentil soup, which is cooked in giant wood-fired cauldrons in 4-ton batches paid for by donations and cooked and ladled out mostly by volunteers. Such langars are a part of every Sikh temple and serve an estimated seven million free meals around the world as an act of charity to all visitors each day. India’s Punjab was the epicenter of the Green Revolution in Asia in the 1970s, where Sikh farmers readily adopted high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and cotton; chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and extensive irrigation, tripling grain production and transforming the region into the breadbasket of India. But those good times, as captured in many Bollywood films, have turned into hard times in Punjab, as falling harvest prices, high costs for fertilizer and other inputs, and contaminated groundwater from fifty years of intensive monocultures have led to both a debt and a health crisis in the state. In the decades to come, India will need to learn how to harvest the productivity of the Green Revolution without its many burdens. Or the cooks in the Golden Temple will have many more mouths to feed.

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Men and women of all races, classes, and religions enjoy a free hot meal at the Sri Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple, in Amritsar in Punjab State, India. The gurdwara is the holiest site of the Sikhs, as well as the world’s largest langar, or community kitchen, which provides- a free hot vegetarian meal to 100,000 people, 24/7, every day of the year. The meals consist of roti, or Indian flatbread, rice, a curried vegetable dish, and dal, or lentil soup, which is cooked in giant wood-fired cauldrons in 4-ton batches paid for by donations and cooked and ladled out mostly by volunteers. Such langars are a part of every Sikh temple and serve an estimated seven million free meals around the world as an act of charity to all visitors each day. India’s Punjab was the epicenter of the Green Revolution in Asia in the 1970s, where Sikh farmers readily adopted high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and cotton; chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and extensive irrigation, tripling grain production and transforming the region into the breadbasket of India. But those good times, as captured in many Bollywood films, have turned into hard times in Punjab, as falling harvest prices, high costs for fertilizer and other inputs, and contaminated groundwater from fifty years of intensive monocultures have led to both a debt and a health crisis in the state. In the decades to come, India will need to learn how to harvest the productivity of the Green Revolution without its many burdens. Or the cooks in the Golden Temple will have many more mouths to feed.

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