If there’s one thing that India is famous for, it’s gotta be our food.
TZ: I travelled across India for about two months through about 18 different parts of the country, and that trip changed my life, because I saw ingredients and techniques and recipes and stories and folklore and flavours I’d never imagined, let alone seen or heard of.
And while we might not always acknowledge it, we all know where the credit is due.
SO: The enormity of spices and types of plants that Indian cuisine employs is, I think, some of the highest in the world, and that’s because it’s such a biodiversity hotspot. It’s why I moved to India.
So if ecosystems and nature are the secret to Indian cuisine, what happens when we throw climate change in the mix?
I know this might seem like a recipe for disaster, but here’s some food for thought.
Welcome to In Our Nature, a podcast by the ECOBARI Collaborative that uncovers what we need to do to protect ecosystems, so that they can protect us. I’m your host, Isha, and in this series, we explore our deep connections with the natural world, and how restoring nature can help us adapt to climate change. ECOBARI is a shared initiative of nine founding partners, and is convened by the Watershed Organisation Trust.
Our second episode in this series is all about food, and what it teaches us about our relationship with the natural world. But let’s start one step back: what does food mean to us?
TZ: I was in the Garo hills in Meghalaya, and I was in this village, where there’s a sub-tribe of the Garos, and I went with some people from the Garo tribe, but even they didn’t understand the language because of the dialect, and so we could barely communicate with them. But they were so welcoming. As soon as we came in, they opened this large pot, and it’s got rice wine inside. And with nothing said, [21:19] they gave us all a long sip, which is more like a gulp, of this strong rice wine. And they started playing their music with drums and the horn that is made out of a Buffalo’s horn, and it was just this collective experience, where nothing needed to be said.
That’s Thomas Zacharias, who goes by Zach, and he’s the founder of The Locavore, which chronicles food culture across India through recipes, events, storytelling, and partnerships. But he’s also been a chef for almost 15 years, from a Michelin Star restaurant in the US to the Bombay Canteen in Mumbai. So you can imagine that he’s got a lot to say about food.
TZ: If you’re just willing to open yourself to some of these foods and these cultures and these experiences, miraculous exchanges can happen in terms of how we find commonality in each other, wherever we are. One of my favourite things about food is it just shows us how similar we all are, rather than different.
So food is an avenue for exploration, like in Zach’s travels to the Garo Hills, for bonding and sharing and new experiences. But it’s also about comfort and nostalgia – like his grandmother’s kitchen in Kerala, where he first learned how to cook.
But while we often think about our relationship with food from our own perspective, have you ever wondered – what does our food think about us?
SO: A lot of our foods are actually communicating with us. I mean, pineapples and fruits are a good example. They are the reproductive systems of the plant, right? They have seeds in them, and they want their seeds to be spread, so they need to be eaten. So that’s why they’re so sweet and they smell so nice. So those fruits are talking to us, you know, they’re saying, come and eat me. I’m so nice and tasty. You should eat me, and then you can take my seeds and you can spread them.
That voice, if you can believe it, doesn’t actually belong to a talking pineapple, but instead to a chemical ecologist named Dr. Shannon Olson. She studies how different creatures in the natural world communicate through chemical signals, of which smells are one. She’s also the Global Director of the echo network, a collaborative that aims to bridge the gap between science and society, and a Special Scientific Envoy to India with the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences.
Shannon says that things aren’t always straightforward when it comes to listening to our food. Sometimes, we just can’t take a hint.
SO: When mammals like us eat chilis, we actually destroy the seed coat. So we break down the seeds so they can’t actually germinate, which is bad for chilies. So chilies kind of hate us. And they show us that they hate us by producing capsaicin, which is a very interesting chemical that binds to the temperature receptors in our mouth, so it is literally hot. It’s not physically hot, but in our brains, it becomes heat, because the chili is desperately trying to tell us to knock it off and not eat them. But interestingly, one of the best spreaders of chili seeds are birds, and I’m sure you’ve seen birds and parrots especially like wolfing down chilies. And that’s because they don’t have the same temperature receptors in their mouth, so they can’t taste capsaicin. So chilies are probably, like strawberries to them, they’re just sweet, right? But the capsaicin serves another purpose, and that is that it’s also antimicrobial. And where you have the most microbes is often in the most humid regions of the world. In the Northeast, is a good example of that. So you also see the environment that the food grows in becomes incredibly important for the qualities that we value as humans.
So if you really like spicy food, just remember, that gorgeous flavour is actually the chilli screaming at you to stop.
Shannon also talks about chillies in the Northeast, like Bhut Jolokia or the Naga chilli, which are some of the spiciest in the world – and that’s primarily because of how much rainfall there is in the region. It shows us how deeply our food and its flavours are connected to the ecosystems they grow in.
SO: Each region of the world has specific foods and specific resources because of its ecosystems. We are a product of our ecosystems. Our culture is a product of our ecosystem. [SO 39:54] The reason that we eat the food we do in different parts of India has a lot to do with the weather and the climate, right? I mean, the food that you eat in North India in the winter time, if you ate that, and, you know, in Kerala in the monsoon, you would die, right? Because it’s so heavy.
That means that India, where every state has a different cuisine, owes a lot to the diversity of ecosystems that are found here.
SO: India has such an amazing variety, because it has the highest mountains in the world. It has deserts. It has some of the highest number of biodiversity hotspots on the planet. It has rainforest. It has grasslands, it has marshlands. It has so many different types of ecosystems which produce different types of resources.
So what happens when we start to lose some of that diversity, when the integrity of our ecosystems starts to erode?
SO: Things just won’t taste and smell and feel the same.
[interlude]
Changes are already underway in our food systems, although most of us that are far away from them don’t feel the full impacts of it just yet. Zach said he started to first notice these changes while he was still a chef.
TZ: 10 years ago, I started creating a seasonal vegetable calendar, just as a chef, because I would use only local ingredients, and I would introduce dishes as and when these new vegetables arrived. I’ve seen that calendar shift in terms of seasonality, which shouldn’t typically happen and hasn’t happened for decades and centuries. But now you know either one vegetable, say green garlic or toor dal, which should be in its fresh form in the winter, is not appearing till later.
These shifts are often caused by a changing climate, as in his own example of the delayed onset of winter. And he started learning more about this as he travelled around India, especially because of how much time he spent with people who know their ecosystems deeply.
TZ: That connection with place and terroir and ecosystem around is the strongest with indigenous tribal communities, and that’s been the case whether it’s with the Bodh tribe in Himachal, or with the Garos in Nagaland, or with the Koknis in Maharashtra, or the Kunbi tribe in Goa it’s been the same. They have a very strong connection and association with their ecosystem. And the further away you go away to say, rural, especially farming communities, it’s one level of detachment. And the closer you get to urban India, we are even more detached.
That detachment means that sometimes we don’t realise that things are changing, although a lot of things are. From the community, he often hears this.
TZ: The murmurs of you know this, this sense of imminent loss, that we are losing, or we are about to lose, that has been very strong in all my travels across the country for the last decade. [TZ 44:43] For example, in Assam, I’ve heard of certain river fish not found or barely found anymore.
But it’s not just the lived experiences of people – he’s also heard a bunch of things from the mainstream news.
TZ: The story that I’ve heard over the last several years, it’s more accessible as a piece of news, because everyone cares about mangoes, you know, mangoes are very temperamental in that a slight delay in rains or an unseasonal rain can drastically affect mangoes.
Another example is kokum, which received widespread coverage after a 2017 study predicted it could go extinct within the century.
TZ: I think why kokum hit the news is because there aren’t too many substitutes for kokum. I mean, you can substitute with tamarind, but that’s jarring, because the flavour is so different.
So we have a lot at stake, things that are unique and important to us in terms of the Indian palette. And we need to preserve them.
SO: India is very fortunate, because much of the world is actually limited by a single type of banana, which is a clone and it’s highly susceptible to disease. So India has to keep hold of its lovely bananas, and especially the tiny ones are my favourite for breakfast, right?
Yeah, she’s right – elaichi kelas are objectively the best banana out there. But the other banana that Shannon mentioned is called the Cavendish, which is pretty much the only banana supplied to US and European markets. This one species makes up almost half of global banana production, and it’s being threatened globally by a fungus called Panama Disease, which is spreading like wildfire. Since it’s a clone, it can’t even evolve new traits or versions that might be resilient to this fungus – which means we’re at risk of half the world’s bananas being wiped out.
That’s a risky position to be in, and it’s a clear lesson to be learned.
SO: We’re constantly being bombarded with new diseases, new pests are coming from different parts of the world. Having varieties of these crops and these different types of species is important to allow us to maintain diversity in the face of disease and other threats. Another thing is these native varieties of rice, we have these regional varieties of millets and pulses and things that are going back hundreds of 1000s of years, that may not have as high of a yield, but they all have special characteristics. Maybe this one grows when you have a late monsoon, or this one grows when the land is very dry, and having that variety allows us to also have resilient food systems. [SO 49:29] Having a variety of options is always what protects you in times of peril, and having biodiversity does that as well. So it’s important for so many reasons, not just the beautiful history of India and its culture, but also for its future security as well.
Rice is another powerful example. We’ve lost around 90% of rice varieties in the country in the span of five of six decades. That’s a shocking figure, and it can cause real trouble in times of distress – like after Hurricane Aila in Bengal in 2009, which brought seawater deep into farmers’ fields and water sources. And while their ancestors used to cultivate salt-tolerant varieties of rice, those had been completely replaced by modern, high-yielding varieties. So a desperate search started to find the traditional varieties again, which by that point, were pretty much gone.
All of this means climate change isn’t the only factor responsible for the loss that we’re experiencing in our food cultures. Policies introduced by the Green Revolution gave us food security, but they also took away a lot of diverse and indigenous varieties from Indian farms. Globalisation and the entry of processed foods into the Indian market shaped aspirations and pushed people away from traditional and regional foods, in rural and urban areas.
TZ: Whether it’s convenience, whether it’s accessibility, whether it’s what farmers are getting incentivised to grow, whether it’s in terms of how diets in urban India are shifting towards, you know, trendy foods, or the number of vegetables that are being consumed are decreasing, because the knowledge of how to cook with them is going away. All of this happening simultaneously.
[interlude]
If our love for food and the diversity of cuisines in our country teaches us one thing, it’s that our ecosystems are very different from each other. That means efforts to restore them also look very different in different contexts.
SO: It’s very context specific, it would be very different to do in Sikkim versus in Kerala.
Just like you wouldn’t go putting kokum in Punjabi food, restoration and plantation projects should respect the rules of the local environment. It’s important to be true to native species, because they’re all linked with each other – for example, certain species of insects only breed on certain species of plants. So if you aren’t planting the right trees and plants, the ecosystem will have a hard time rebuilding itself.
And we absolutely need to be restoring our ecosystems, because they provide for us. Ecosystem services come in four forms: provisioning services give us something in our hands, like fuel, food, medicine, or water. Cultural services give us something for our hearts, from sports to spirituality. Regulating services are, literally, services that the ecosystem provides – like sequestering carbon, regulating temperature, or pollination. And supporting services are the processes that enable everything else, such as the water cycle and photosynthesis.
SO: Ecosystems are resilient. It’s not like you just remove a tree, and then the ecosystem collapses. It’s not quite that simple, but there’s a tipping point, right? There’s a point at which, you know the combined effects of human involvement and extraction, and maybe climate change and other things kind of compound upon each other, and it can cause an entire collapse.
The collapse of an ecosystem usually doesn’t mean that every living thing within it gets wiped out. Instead, it’ll probably become a lot less effective at providing the services that it used to, the services that we – and our food systems especially – really depend on.
SO: Carbon sequestration doesn’t happen properly, or the water doesn’t get cleaned. The lakes are not able to clean themselves anymore. The process of, you know, waste management that we have naturally in an ecosystem doesn’t happen, and the waste builds up because the microbes are not available anymore, or there’s not enough tree cover, so there’s not enough oxygen and production or plant at the plants are not available to produce enough oxygen and also help with that cycling.
And we’re already seeing this happen. Researchers across the globe are finding that both land and ocean ecosystems are slowing down in their ability to capture carbon. In fact, early-stage research shows that land-based sinks like soil, trees, and plants absorbed almost no carbon in 2023.
Ecosystem services are the essentials of life, and once they’re degraded, they are difficult to restore. That spells trouble for us, because our health is inextricably linked with the health of our planet – and even if you look at the way we eat, it shows.
[interlude]
TZ: Especially from the time I spent with the Kokni tribe in Palghar district in Maharashtra, I realised, you know, we just went on one foraging walk through their village and spotted about 30 different ingredients where one particular leaf was good for, you know, gum strength was another was good for digestion, and third was good for the bones, and we’ve come so far away from that in terms of modern medicine, where we don’t think of food as medicine anymore, but tribal communities and native communities did.
The way we eat has changed drastically, with a lot more processed food and less diversity, and that’s linked to the changes we’ve made to our food systems. The Indian Council of Medical Research, or ICMR, reports that more than half of India’s total disease burden is caused by unhealthy diets. According to a national nutrition survey in 2019, more than 30% of kids between 5- 9 years old have high triglycerides, which can lead to high blood pressure and heart disease. Those same choices that are causing us to lose biodiversity are also affecting our health.
We could learn a lot from the way tribal communities see food as medicine – especially in terms of preventing disease. Zach had a bunch of suggestions on how to think more consciously about the way we consume food, which are as good for our health as they are for the planet.
TZ: Balance out and eat more diversely. So not just about eating locally, but eat diversely. Eat seasonally. Support initiatives that are trying to make a difference, whether it’s in terms of regenerative and organic farming practices, or in terms of, you know, people who are doing it in your own local neighbourhood and communities, and I think, educate and inform yourself about aspects of traditional food knowledge that still remain, and kind of preserve them in some way. [1:01:18] We also have circles of influence around us, whether it’s your friends, family, your own home, your neighbourhood. So you might say, be aligned to eating more diversity, more locally. But can you bring one more person into it, or a collective of people into it?
And food, Shannon and Zach both believe, is a great way to bring people into the conversation.
TZ: Through nostalgia, we can make climate change personal, and that’s what it’s going to take for people to wake up and take notice. It moves the conversation from abstract statistics and doom and gloom to really tangible experiences and memories when people are reminded of the foods they grew up with. Maybe it’s a seasonal fruit or a traditional dish made by their grandmother, or a local ingredient that’s becoming harder to find. It creates a sense of loss, and that emotional connection, I think, is what can make climate change feel real, immediate and relevant to all of us.
SO: Preserving biodiversity is the hardest thing for societies to do. We just can’t get traction of it. There’s these meetings all the time. There’s all sorts of plans, right? But they’re not being put into action, because ultimately, something always becomes more important, and that’s because it makes more money, right? So we have to increase the value of our biodiversity for our societies. One of the ways of doing that is showing the importance of it in these qualitative, intangible ways like our food, right? And when we can make that clear connection, that will help us to preserve our biodiversity.
And I think that’s where we can employ things like understanding food better understand our connection with food as a mechanism for increasing the value of our biodiversity.
Thanks for listening to In Our Nature! Our podcast is supported by Honeywell Hometown Solutions India Foundation. If you like this episode, please share it far and wide to help us get the word out there. We’re super grateful for your support and your attention.
ECOBARI stands for Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Resilient Incomes. Our collaborative aims to spotlight and enable solutions that build climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods by restoring, protecting, and enhancing nature. It’s a shared initiative of nine founding partners with diverse areas of expertise, including rural development, action research, sustainable finance, nature conservation, and policy engagement. To learn more about ECOBARI, visit our website at www.ecobari.org
Speakers
Dr. Shannon Olsson, Global Director, the echo network and Special Scientific Envoy to India with the Danish Academy of Technical Sciences
Thomas Zacharias, Chef and Founder, The Locavore
Isha Chawla, Anchor, ECOBARI
Sources
- Deb, Debal (2019). Restoring Rice Biodiversity. Scientific American. 321. 54-61. 10.1038/scientificamerican1019-54.
- Deb, Debal (2021). Valuing Folk Crop Varieties for Agroecology and Food Security. Independent Science News for Food & Agriculture.
- FAO Team: Banana facts & figures. Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations.
- ICMR – National Institute of Nutrition (2024). Dietary Guidelines for Indians. ICMR & NIN.
- Ke, Piyu & Ciais, Philippe & Sitch, Stephen & Li, Wei & Bastos, Ana & Liu, Zhu & Xu, Yidi & Gui, Xiaofan & Bian, Jiang & Goll, Daniel & Xi, Yi & Li, Wanjing & O’Sullivan, Michael & Souza, Jeffeson & Friedlingstein, Pierre & Chevallier, Frederic. (2024). Low latency carbon budget analysis reveals a large decline of the land carbon sink in 2023. 10.48550/arXiv.2407.12447.
- Pramanik, Malay & Paudel, Uttam & Mondal, Biswajit & Chakraborti, Suman & Deb, Pratik. (2017). Predicting climate change impacts on the distribution of the threatened Garcinia indica in the Western Ghats, India. Climate Risk Management.
- Saladino, Dan. (2023). There are more than 1,000 varieties of banana, and we eat one of them. Here’s why that’s absurd. The Guardian.
Credits
Produced by Isha Chawla
Original score by Anurag Baruah
Sound effects from Freesound.org
Music from Epidemic Sound and Track 04 by Chinmaya Dunster (8:14)
Listen to the series here
