Every few years since 2013, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi has put out a glossy volume of short essays and recipes, building what has become the First Food series of biodiversity-focussed guides to cooking and eating. The latest (2023) and the fourth addition to the series promises a perspective on Future of Taste, though all volumes have been broadly focussed on expanding tastes and opening palates to unusual local and native ingredients, becoming familiar with their nutraceutical properties—and, most importantly, their culinary uses.
The CSE is perhaps our best-known independent environmental research, advocacy and consumer watch group; under the direction of Sunita Narain, and via its Down to Earth magazine, it has long drawn spotlights onto India’s transforming food systems and their complex environmental and human impacts. The heavily commercialised model of industrial agriculture that turns food farming into yet another mode of value-extraction, creates debilitating dependencies and enormous environmental burdens.
Future of Taste
Centre for Science and Environment
Pages: 258
Price: Rs. 950
India, however, remains home still to a great many smaller, livelihood-focussed farms and production centres that continue to maintain kinder and more intimate relationships with soil, plants, livestock, seasons, and communities, effectively safeguarding the nutritional richness and cultural rootedness of traditional foods and foodways. The CSE, and the First Food series in general, sees much hope in such realities. If the “connection between food, livelihood, nutrition, and nature” is to be reset, India has yet viable pathways to that goal.
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There is also the need to consider more keenly what it means to farm and eat in the face of climate change. While earlier First Food volumes increased exposure to biodiversity and leaf-to-root use of plants particularly in traditional food economies, this latest Future of Taste edition bundles all of the above as routes to “climate responsibility” and ultimately, resilience. This means not only that farms should be less input-driven and more focussed on restorative and regenerative methods, but equally that consumers should eat in ways that encourage such practices.
Food security in a “climate risked” world depends not only on strong governmental policy, but equally on consumer choices—what we decide to put on our plates, day-to-day. The book’s essays draw our attention to the biodiversity loss in several local contexts and turns the focus onto us: our values and decisions as eaters can help undo at least some of the damage.
Cover of Future of Taste | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
So, Future of Taste proceeds much as the other Food First volumes have, laying out breakfast and meals, condiments and beverages for us to try, alongside orienting essays about specific ingredients which comprise “the future of taste” (the book’s title follows a pattern of the prior volumes and has no predictive, futurist elements). There is a predictable focus on millets, but also generally on plants which are hardy survivors, inherently braced for climate change.
At each turn, we learn new things about even familiar ingredients. Did you know that you can make pakodas out of bitter gourd leaves? Or gulmohar flowers! Stir-fry the stolon of taro root (arbiin Hindi, cheppankazhangu in Tamil)? Or that the tamarind seeds we typically discard are protein- and mineral-rich? Do not forget to make a chutney out of wood apple (kaitha in Hindi, vilampazham in Tamil), the book reminds us, or a sharbat out of black currants (jamun in Hindi, navalpazham in Tamil) when they each are in season. It offers cues to our collective memory of older foodways, and many prompts to broaden our understandings of what counts as food in the plant world.
The volume also makes a concerted effort to insert wild, hyper-local, and other relatively unknown ingredients into our culinary repertoires. Radhuni (wild celery) is beloved in Bengal, akarkara (pellitory) in the North-east, but not much beyond. Tree tomatoes or tamarillos (mara-thakkali), originally from the Andean regions of South America, have “gone native” in Nagaland, but make only infrequent appearances elsewhere.
Other local plants like wild turmeric flowers and the Himalayan cherry in Manipur, or the hill lemons of Uttarakhand can bring to us the tastes of mountain terroir. While we open ourselves to all these different flavours and the prospects of reaping nutraceutical benefits, First Food authors keep ecosystemic realities in our sights: each plant’s drought tolerance, ease of growth, or vulnerability; or how whole plants provide both food and livelihoods to entire communities.
In all these ways, this latest First Food compendium packs an impressive information punch. But the impression is just that, of a book packed with information; it is left to readers to figure out what matters in their local contexts, and how to grasp, remember, and utilise so much detail. Plant-forward cookbooks that offer what the American food writer Deborah Madison once termed “vegetable literacy” (in a cookbook of the same name) are rare, but these days there are dozens of YouTube channels showcasing village ingredients and country cooking.
Dozens more on social media regularly feature the “lost” wonders of local, seasonal, tribal, or wild foods. In other words, the information gathered in this volume and much more of its kind is already plentiful, even overwhelmingly so. The only question remaining is how that information can be re-compiled in the most effective, engaging, and, yes, even entertaining ways so that we as consumers absorb it and—most importantly—put it to daily use.
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Considered thus, Future of Taste misses a valuable opportunity to rethink meaningful information delivery in printed form. The volume’s many long-form essays could well have been punctuated by summaries, diagrams or other insets that would have reduced the density of fact reportage, facilitated unfamiliar plant recognition, and more effectively emphasised takeaways. The medicinal properties of ingredients are at times presented only generally and without actual guidelines for use.
For instance, knowing that kaitha pulp inhibits the production of breast cancer cells or that maan dhaniya (wild coriander) treats nerve problems is of no practical value unless we can put this knowledge to direct therapeutic use. To boot, the book offers no means to identify foods to tackle specific ailments, look up ingredients from specific regions, or visually recognise named species. It does not help that the phytochemical profiles of various plants, associated research data and citations are all given in-line. For example, “According to research published in the June 2012 issue of Tropical Journal of Pharmacological Research…,” or sentences like it noting researcher positions and affiliations, are far too many in the text, adding distracting detail that makes for tedious reading.
Future of Taste holds out the possibility of celebrating the wondrous relationship between plant worlds, what we find in markets, what grows wild or in our backyard gardens, and what we cook up in the kitchen for our health, adaptability and resilience. But this prospect remains largely unrealised. Lacklustre images, the incongruously grand spotlight on “First Food Cuisiniers” (whose relationship to this project or even to cuisine at times is entirely obscure) in a volume of locally sourced recipes, and the unparcelled information stream each convey the feel of another conventional cookbook—which First Food is anything but. One hopes that the next addition to this series will break the pre-set “taste” groove, and guide us more boldly into the futures that plants hold for our collective sustenance and well-being.
Deepa S. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist with the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She blogs about native ingredients, ethnobotany, and food cultures on paticheri.com.
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