Prescriptions & Palates: Exploring the unique relationship between pharmacies and food

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

A pharmacy, especially one used over time, isn’t like other stores. We go there with our frailties and private needs and come to see them as being auxiliary to our families. We depend on them to get scarce medicines, to stretch prescription rules in emergencies, and even to give advice for issues that seem too minor for a doctor’s visit. We also use them for food needs. Pharmacies have always stocked foods like health drinks, baby foods and glucose powder. And before the current boom in imported ingredients, olive oil was often available only in pharmacies and to be used for cleaning ears! They also sold kitchen chemicals, like the potassium permanganate whose vivid purple-pink solution sterilised leafy vegetables. Pharmacies also stay open when other shops are shut, so are useful for late-night cravings for chocolates and snacks. The fancy new stores carry dairy products and dried fruits, but there’s sustenance even in more medically-oriented products, like biscuits that’re sold as protein supplements but whose odd taste some people actually like. There are also creative ways to use quasi-medical products (this is, obviously, not recommended for prescription medicines). On internet parenting forums, weary parents admit to drinking gin with gripe water, that soothing tonic for babies. In Niloufer Ichaporia King’s 'My Bombay Kitchen', she describes how her mother made alcohol-soaked desserts during Prohibition “using Drakshasava, a herbal fortified wine sold at the chemist’s as an Ayurvedic remedy”.

Thank the late monsoon for your reduced visits to the pharmacy

Before the rise of modern medicine, the food we consumed was considered for its medical properties as much as culinary. “Sugar and spices