Pop Up Kitchen 1

The Action Research Fellows and Associates of the Centre for Development Practice (www.cdp.res.in) had set up a pop-up kitchen in AUD, Kashmere Gate on 30th August, 2019 and in Karampura Campus on 15th Nov, 2019 to put to display local food cultures from Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. The food on display was cooked from food grains and vegetables grown in these three states with indigenous seeds and indigenous know-how; no fertilizers or pesticides were used. The effort was born out of a response to the process of the gradual loss of difference in the food culture. The attempt, in the pop-up kitchen, was also to usher in a relationship between the producer and the consumer such that:One, the consumer and producer come closer to each other by informing the former about the latter and the processes the latter deploys; Two, the diverse menu of rural local food travels to the urban globalised dining culture.This pop-up kitchen thus, aimed at bringing recipes from the (rural) producer’s world to AUD so as to represent, in however limited a form, the hidden diversity of food cultures in our country such that it not only reduces the producer-consumer gap but also pays attention towards how our food habits are increasingly becoming inclined towards the “polished” (‘white rice’ for example) than what is “nutritional.”  However, the whole effort was not limited to the pursuit of knowing about local food cultures, but about an experience of cooking such food and getting a taste of the diverse food cultures of rural central India.