Often when we think of heritage, we think about monuments and architecture, art and artefacts. What about food? 

Culinary heritage is harder to define, which makes it even harder to preserve. In our talk #CulinaryCulture researcher Lily Kelting will offer a few frameworks to understand culinary heritage, like terroir, designated origin of production, and Slow Food. 

She will also discuss how useful-- or not!-- such frameworks are for an Indian context. How are Indian culinary heritages being kept alive and revived? And by whom? This talk sketches the nascent and multi-faceted Indian Food Movement, in which chefs, Instagrammers, homemakers and shop owners work to look at the past to re-think the future of Indian food.

About the speaker

Dr. Lily Kelting is an assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Flame University in Pune. She is currently writing an academic book about the revival of heritage foods around the world, interweaving examples from the U.S. South, Nordic region, and Western India. Sections of this research can be found in Food, Culture and Society, Southern Quarterly, and Paragrana. She holds a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies from the University of California