☀️Dispatch: 🔮Future of Taste🍴, Protest, 🪸Climate Recipe(s), Broccoli🥦
Give logic back
(#1) Future of Taste
The Centre for Science and Environment, in collaboration with Down To Earth, recently launched the fourth book in their Food First series, 'Future of Taste'. Like its predecessors, this book explores food, produce, and recipes that have a deep connection with biodiversity in India. But, this time around, this discourse is driven by looking into the future and prepping for it. In a webinar on 15th Feb, Vibha Varshney, the editor and collaborator for all the First Food series talked about the way this issue addresses food for a climate risked world.
A few other interesting points in the discussion were:
More than millets ——> climate resilient crops.
Focusing on ingredients that grow outside agricultural lands. In wetlands, ponds, forests and degraded lands. This means looking at foraging, collecting and consuming diverse foods that aren’t easily accessible in neighbourhood mandis or supermarkets.
Also, biodiversity on the plate = protecting it in the wild. If we consume, then we will protect and save.
This conversation is intrinsic to the process of working together and making connections between food, nutrition and nature.
Elite are resource illiterate…The fact is that elite determine food culture. And it is important therefore for making sure that all your restaurants that serve people when you put that food that forgotten food..that link with biodiversity, when you put it in your blog, when you talk about it..it helps people to understand, that culture of food will change.
Sunita Narain
India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries; have over 11% of the world’s plant species. These plants are a part of our festivals, ceremonies and medicine. We already have a rich repertoire of survival foods that deal with vagaries of weather.
(#2) Protest
A collection of resources on Farmers Protest 2024. Meghnad’s deep dive, Manisha Pandey’s summary on the discourse, Dr. Madhura Swaminathan’s appeal, and, Dr. Ashok Gulati’s critique on a legal minimum support price (MSP).
(#3) Climate Recipes
Last year, in December 2024 during Serendipity Arts Festivals, I saw the book Climate Recipes displayed on the shelf of Edible Issues’ Roots to Resilience installation. On enquiring, Elizabeth Yorke told me to check out the exhibition at Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts.
Climate Recipes archives and relays lived and tested knowledge as recipes that shift our existing perceptions of adaptability to climate change. Encompassing the wisdom of indigenous ancestors, environmentalists, activists, foragers, chefs, architects, and artists, it presents practices and cultures that teach us to live with the changing biodiversity.Climate Recipes is relayed by Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi & Srinivas Mangipudi and supported by Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Pollinator.io, and Socratus.
While flipping through the book and walking the hallways of the centre, I noticed that the walls were adorned with neatly drawn pencil illustrations mirroring the book's content. There were a few things that stood out more than others:
The book reinforced the idea that answers can often be found in the simplest of things — a concept that is almost radical in today's world.
offering a sneak peek into the minds of individuals (through mind-maps) who are also riddled with the questions of climate change and food and on their own journeys to find some answers is rather humbling. Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar’s decision to not name the fish on the (Edible Archives) menu, in order to offer whatever is in season is empowering.
Emphasis on native knowledge of bio-availability, food is medicine and kinship with nature are some common themes in all the write-ups.
Another crucial point highlighted is the common-sense and logical approach of finding solutions to climate change. These solutions are driven by the context we live in, rooted in the Indian context. For example, Tallulah D’Silva talks about Termite mounds for sustainable architecture as efficient structures facilitating a free circulation of light and air.
(#4) Broccoli
The chapter, Broccoli in Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird essentially tells you to revive your intuition. This intuition might have been suppressed by the noise of the world, the way the world corrects and discards opinions, and self-doubt. Intuition, common sense, and logic have varied meanings, but these words are cut from the same cloth. These are themes that run through today's newsletter when we look at food systems, the way we ate and grew food, and the way we should.
According to Anne Lamott, the way to regain your intuition is by making space for it, quieting the chatter of the rational mind. In life and in writing, she says, “The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich, juicy, and fascinating.”
There has been a lot of emphasis on logic, common-sense and intuition in eating. Eating what’s in season, reviving grandmother's recipes/wisdom, using natural materials to make stuff and so on. But none of these things are new, and they have come back as a byproduct of simplifying how we think about climate change, food systems, and consumption. For instance, somethings can only be learned from years of lived experiences, living with the land and growing on it.
Bathua grows all over North India throughout the year…I used to think why don’t we use it..and ask local why don’t we use it…The reason I discovered much later in a village of Rajasthan where a 20-something girl told it is bitter..then I started looking up why it is bitter in summers..it has so much oxalic acid concentration in the summer that it is inedible..we should not be consuming it in summers, even if it grows profusely.
Sangeeta Khanna
Perhaps, allowing your broccoli to tell you what it's like to be eaten is a way to simplify, not complicate, these decisions.
What do you think?
And that’s everything for this week.
dhoop is an independently published magazine, so producing and selling the print versions of the magazine is the only way to share our work. However, through this series of ‘Some dhoop for you!’ newsletters, we want to come to your inbox and share some insightful, fun, and meandering thoughts on the discourse around the different elements that make dhoop. If you learned anything new, the best way to support us and this newsletter is to share it far and wide.
Oh, if you haven’t bought the Issue #2 of the magazine — get it now!
And please become a paid subscriber if you want to read the next feature story.