What makes a dish from Northeast India? Is it the indigenous knowledge, skills, and affection that goes into cooking a meal? Or is it the techniques, season, and soil that contributes to its matchless taste? 

This book project is a contribution to emerging conversations on our shared political future. Drawing on ethnographic creativity and storytelling, the editors locate this book in Northeast India, a region that has witnessed militarisation and violence since India’s independence. Food and culinary diversity are not the first response when one refers to the region. In the backdrop of the armed conflict, economic inequalities, and the enclave economy founded on extraction of resources and labour the region has witnessed, this book connects emerging political initiatives that adopts food as a framework to address conditions of violence and dispossession.

We believe that the everyday experience of food is a story of nurturing life, relations, and diversity.

As a co-editor of this book project, feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon will lead this book project and draw from her work on anthropology of food and consumption, an important contributor to emerging debates and conversations on food, justice, and sustainability in Northeast India and beyond. We believe that Joel Rodrigues as the second co-editor of this book project brings his expertise as a researcher who bridges the notion of rights with the food justice movement in the region. He adopts food and consumption practices to analyse gender relations and questions of identity and equality. This book project is supported by Heinrich Böll Stiftung, and will be published by Zubaan.