Rituparna Patgiri
Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati (2024)
Food has various social uses and functions that it performs, apart frombeing a part of the process of consumption. Food is governed by several religious regulations andprohibitions or taboos. There are several inter linkages between food, ecologyandmaterial reality. The gendered nature of food, too, has been highlighted. Gender, class
and food interact with each other to highlight different relationships with the societyof different groups of people. Similarly, there is an intricate connection between foodand modernity. Food is a very visible part of contemporary public life, especiallyinthe Indian context.
Be it the emergence of a host of new eating places offering diversekinds of cuisines in India’s growing cities, portrayals in media (advertisements, cookbooks, cooking shows, photographs, social media) or the rise of applications
(grocery shopping, online ordering, calorie tracking, etc.) – food is everywhere. But at
the same time, there are also issues of food security, hunger and nutrition. Therelationship between food and health – which has always been important in the Indiancontext – has also re-emerged in public sphere debates. It has also been arguedthat
globalization has played a critical role in food systems. The relationship between foodand the process of globalization is a multi-faceted one which has gained much interest
in recent years.
