Hi, I’m Niharika Goenka. I’m the founder of Boombay and I’m also a food addict with a history of overtraining, bingeing, under-eating and d
Hi, I’m Niharika Goenka. I’m the founder of Boombay and I’m also a food addict with a history of overtraining, bingeing, under-eating and downright gluttony. I started Arugula & Co. - a health food startup with a single point agenda - to help you #eatmoreveggies in 2018. Now under a whole new identity, I’m adding a new agenda to the list.
From my first diet at the age of thirteen, I had tried every protein shake, gone on every “healthy diet”, and even completed a Masters in Nutrition from Columbia University, only to stumble on three simple truths: nutritious food is one that is closest to its original form, unrecognisable ingredients that use numbers and symbols for names are not real food, and lastly, flavour satiates, food never does. Arugula&Co and Boombay are the results of my fifteen-year journey to better health, sustainable food and search for great flavour.
After completing my Masters in Nutrition & Exercise Physiology at the age of 24, I was asked one of two things: “Give me tips on how to lose weight,” or “When are you starting your practice as a nutritionist?”. It was assumed that I would follow the traditional path and become a nutritionist but I didn’t want to limit my career to “weight loss” as, like a lot of urban teenage girls, I too had a history of disordered eating, binge eating, and yo-yo dieting that had long convinced me that ‘dieting’ in any form was not the answer. As I was learning about things such as mindful and intuitive approaches to food, I happened to take a class that changed my life forever. Day 1 of Nutritional Ecology went like this: Joan Dye Gussow, the matriarch of the ‘eat local think global’ movement walks in, eighty-seven at the time, and tells me why the vultures outside my window at Malabar Hill were dying— if you’re curious, it’s because cows were falling sick. Back in the ’90s, we started feeding cattle NSAID’s, the equivalent of a human dose of common over-the-counter drugs such as aspirin or ibuprofen. What we didn’t know was that NSAIDs contain a chemical called diclofenac which, when ingested by the vultures that scavenge on cow carcasses, causes instant kidney failure. As the birds fell from the skies, the food systems and the cultural practices of Zoroastrians collapsed in the mere span of a decade.