Gopal Kapur is 72. He looks 50, maybe. He's trim, with clear tan skin, and, as he informed me with a grin the first time I met him, still has all his original teeth. "No cavities," he beamed, tapping the gleaming white expanse in his mouth.

Kapur, a retired civil engineer and management consultant, attributes his good health to his diet. He was born in the Punjabi region of India in 1939. His mother was an excellent cook and a strict vegetarian. He immigrated to this country in the early 1960s and worked his way through engineering school at Fresno State as a waiter and cook. He's always had an interest in food.

And now, Kapur is on a mission. He wants to bring, nutritious, tasty, affordable food that is easy to cook to poor people in his adopted country. He believes Americans punish their food. "They harvest it and then send it to a factory," Kapur says, "where they strip out all the taste, the color and nutrients, replace those natural ingredients with chemicals and artificial flavorings, and then they put it in a pretty box."

He blames processed food with high levels of sugar, fat, salt and carbohydrates for the nation's obesity crisis and epidemic levels of diabetes and hypertension.

Using his own extensive knowledge of food and working with professional nutritionists, Kapur has created four different meals that are tasty, highly nutritious, affordable and easy to cook.

This last component – easy to cook – is important because Kapur believes too many Americans, particularly the poor, don't know how to cook anymore. They've never been taught how to cook. To prepare the meals he's created you just add water, heat and stir. No microwaves needed. For food to reach its optimum in taste and nutritional value, Kapur believes the ingredients need time to really know each other, something only cooking can achieve. The meals should be prepared either on a stove top in a saucepan or in a crock-pot, he says.

Working with the Roseville Rotary Club, he's tapped a network of volunteers who package his meals, which he distributes free of charge to the poor. On a recent Saturday morning, employees at Westlake, Grahl and Glover, a Granite Bay financial services firm, along with their wives, husbands, children and friends, donned hair nets and aprons and arranged themselves around four tables loaded with measuring cups and ingredients for each of the meals Kapur created – GrandHotCereal, SoupofLife, LeanMeanBeanProtein and NuttyQuinoaPilaf. In assembly-line fashion, they mixed the ingredients and then packaged them in plastic zip lock bags. Each package, which he calls BagOfLife, contains enough food to feed a family of four.

But will Americans, who are used to meat-laden, highly sugared, heavily processed foods, eat it? To find out, Kapur regularly conducts taste tests. He's very blunt with his test subjects. If they don't like the food, he says, they are free to spit it out. One of Kapur's most enthusiastic volunteers and fellow Rotarian, Megan Boespflug, had her doubts. "I looked at the food and I said, 'No way!' " But after she participated in a taste test at the Roseville Rec Center, Boespflug was convinced. "Those little kids came back for seconds."

Enthusiasm is not universal. At another taste test at a Roseville transitional housing complex, 11-year-old Shane Jones-Trammel grimaced after first tasting one of the meals but then ended up rating it a respectable 6 out of 10. His mother liked the food; his 14-year-old sister barely tasted it.

I conducted my own taste test among friends and family with mixed results. My nutrition-minded, brown-rice-eating friends loved the meals. My 94-year-old-mother, a very picky eater, ate every bit of the meal with beans. Personally, I didn't much like the soup, but I was impressed with the cereal. Slightly sweetened with coconut sap sugar, it looked and tasted a lot like oatmeal. My favorite was the quinoa pilaf.

"Quinoa grain," the nutrition notice attached to the meal packet explained, "originated in the Andean region of South America and has been used for a food source for over 6,000 years." It contains 30 percent more protein than rice, wheat, oats and rye as well as essential amino acids. The almond meal gave the dish a nutty flavor and crunchy texture.

Each meal costs about 75 cents per serving. A person can eat on less than $3 a day, far less than the $5 a day or so allotted for adults on food stamps. All the dishes are vegetarian, but Kapur is not. He says you can add chicken or other meats. But he warns against sugar. If the cereal isn't sweet enough, he says, add fruit instead – bananas, peaches, raisins.

Kapur's dream is to be able to produce his BagOfLife meals on a massive scale and deliver them to soup kitchens, food closets, homeless shelters, to anywhere people are hungry. It's not enough just to fill empty bellies, Kapur believes – it's urgent that all of us, our children especially, start eating good-tasting and nutritious food that will make us strong and healthy, not fat and sick.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

To learn more about Gopal Kapur's BagOfLife, go to www.familygreensurvival.com or reach him at gkapur@familygreensurvival.com.

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