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Although many chefs in india have embraced sustainability and the farm-to-table concept of dining to a certain extent, we still have a long way to go to bring about lasting change

- Anjuly Mathai

The farmer Chef Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar and writer Shalini Krishnan travelled around India for nearly three years to collect indigenous varieties of rice that were getting lost. The result was Edible Archives, a culinary project at the 2018 edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In it, Ghosh Dastidar cooked delicious dishes using 25 to 30 varieties of indigenous rice for the visitors. We met the duo last December to shoot a video of the project. Ghosh Dastidar cooked for us a dish of Hetumari and Tulaipanji rice from West Bengal, accompanied with lentil fritters, cottage cheese, anchovies and fried mackerel. All the different elements in the dish worked beautifully. We polished it offso thoroughly that someone might joke that the mud plate in which we ate did not need to be cleaned afterwards.

While researching the project, it hit Ghosh Dastidar that the aroma of some of the rice varieties she had worked with had subtly changed over time. She spoke to farmers to find out whether it was just her imagination, and discovered the problem. The different varieties of rice were being grown near each other in the fields, and the unique characteristics of each were getting lost. Krishnan explains that when you grow two varieties of rice in adjoining fields, you must make sure that they do not have similar maturation and flowering times, because then, there might be cross-pollination, and the rice varieties will get mixed. “When you dilute the rice, the first thing you lose is the aroma,” says Ghosh Dastidar.