Food designer on a quest to find out the source of veggies sold in city markets

Chennai

While flipping through the pages, he couldn’t recognise many of the vegetables that were mentioned in the book. “I also found handwritten recipes and letters from my grandmother. It was a time when recipes ran in families from one generation to another. They were treasured gifts from the mothers to their daughters or in-laws. Well, you can call it age-old versions of blogs and YouTube videos. A huge revelation to me was that a lot of traditional vegetables mentioned in the letters aren’t used anymore in our kitchen. No one knows why we don’t cook them anymore. There are no proper reasons, but only assumptions. I decided to give it a try and started a 100day challenge called ‘cook and see’ based on the recipe book ‘Samaithu Par’”, says Akash. His challenge was similar to the ‘Julie/Julia’ project from the film ‘Julie & Julia’. “Inspired by the movie and the project itself, I cooked 100 recipes using many of the vegetables that have started disappearing from our kitchens. Daily, I post history about each vegetable and shared a recipe with that particular vegetable from Meenakshi Ammal’s book. It was like investigating ‘missing’ vegetables. Seeing my posts on Instagram, a lot of people got in touch with me sharing their stories about the vegetables,” the youngster adds.

Though he completed the project, Akash is currently doing another ‘investigation’. “Does anyone know from where exactly the vegetables sold at Thirumazhisai are coming from? The vague guess can be Ooty or Nilgiris. As a consumer, we have the right to know from where we source the vegetables. Also, many TN-specific vegetables are not coming to Chennai. What’s the reason for that? Who is hiding those veggies? Here, vegetable markets control what we should shop for and eat. Shouldn’t it be the other way? I have been talking to local chefs and some people in the food industry and trying to discover more about this,” the food designer concludes.