My mother has always been suspicious of food from outside. For her, home-cooked food is healthier and safer. So, her caring instruction is simple: cook your own food, pack your lunchbox, and take it to work. But I often bypass her instructions. On busy days, when convenience wins over maternal wisdom, I abandon the lunchbox and head to the campus canteen. Sometimes, when the days are tiring me, to her greater disappointment, I order food the whole day through a delivery app.What seems like a simple choice between home-cooked food and outside food can tell us much more. Lunchboxes that leave Indian homes carry not just rice, curry, chapati or leftovers, but traces of family feeling, region, class, religion, memory, habit and ideas about health and care. Something as ordinary as a meal can become a marker of identity and difference. This is more so when the lunchbox enters a workplace and encounters other foods, smells and culinary traditions.This is where Food Studies begins. At the outset, it is important to acknowledge that Food Studies is not simply about recipes, restaurant reviews, food vloggers or endless reruns of MasterChef, however entertaining as they may be. Food Studies asks a much larger question: what can food reveal about the way we live?There is, however, a difficulty I have encountered while teaching Food Studies in classroom. Students sometimes look at me with a certain anxiety when a discussion moves beyond the prescribed reading. They are accustomed to asking a different kind of question: “Are those topics mentioned in the syllabus”, “Will this be in the examination?” or “Have we covered this unit?” These questions are not evidence of students’ intellectual indifference. My students are indeed smart. What the confused feedback reveals is how students have been trained to understand education as the systematic completion of units, the accumulation of examinable information and the achievement of measurable outcomes. Food Studies unsettles that expectation because its most important lessons cannot easily be contained within a unit.I often would want to tell my students that the point of Food Studies is not to remember a list of dishes or theories. It is to develop the habit of associations that bring in the unthought connections and uncharted territories inside the four walls of the classroom.Food and historyNow, let us take the example of Onam Sadya, the celebrated Kerala festive meal served on a banana leaf with more than a dozen dishes. Far from being a random collection of recipes, it showcases the philosophy of abundance and balance. This is where the sweet, sour, bitter, salty, pungent and astringent tastes live together without any one of them dominating the leaf. It may well be one of the best metaphors for India: diversity does not dilute the meal; diversity is the meal.Once you travel across India, the relationship between food, geography and history becomes all the more evident. North India’s wheat belt has produced chapatis, rotis, parathas and naans. They emerge from a different agricultural history from that of the rice-growing South. For southern states, rice, coconut, tamarind, millet, seafood and spices have produced distinct culinary identities. Ask a Malayali about coconut oil and the answer may have little to do with nutrition alone. It can evoke family, childhood and inherited practices. To dismiss such traditions simply as “unhealthy” without considering their ecological and cultural histories is to mistake nutritional science for the whole story.Food and powerThe story becomes more complicated when politics enters the kitchen. Debates over beef, for instance, are rarely only about what is eaten. They intersect with religion, caste, nationalism, affordability and individual choice. For some communities, beef is taboo, while for others it is tradition or an affordable source of protein. Public sentiment, however, often leaves little space for these overlapping boundaries. The controversy surrounding the Tirupati laddu similarly demonstrated how even sacred prasadam can become a matter of legal and scientific scrutiny when questions of faith, purity and authenticity collide.Far from being a sealed tradition, Indian cuisines have been shaped by migration, trade, conquest, ecology and exchange. Colonialism transformed agricultural practices around plantations and cash crops. Subsequently, globalisation brought fast food, cloud kitchens, food delivery apps and new forms of consumption. What we call “traditional” food is often the result of centuries of borrowing, adaptation and reinvention.In 2001, the then-British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook famously described Chicken Tikka Masala as a “true British national dish”, pointing to its masala-based gravy, adapted to suit British diners’ preference for meat served with sauce, as evidence of Britain’s capacity to absorb and reshape outside influences. The claim was immediately revealing: a dish associated with Indian cuisine could be presented as quintessentially British precisely because it had been transformed in Britain. The continuing debate over whether Chicken Tikka Masala is a “British national dish” reveals how cuisines migrate and transform. Recipes do not carry passports. They travel wherever people migrate, adapting to new places and new circumstances.Taste and classMade by cooking finger millet flour with water and shaping it into dense balls, ragi mudde has long been associated with the agrarian food cultures of rural Karnataka. Traditionally eaten with saaru, bassaru or other accompaniments, it is a food shaped by the region’s agricultural ecology and the nutritional demands of physical labour. Yet its social meaning has changed. Once widely eaten by agrarian and working-class households because it was accessible, inexpensive and sustaining, ragi was, in Bourdieu’s terms, a “taste of necessity”. It was a food valued for what it could provide rather than for the cultural distinction it might confer.Today, ragi is increasingly celebrated in urban Bengaluru as a nutritious, gluten-free and sustainable “millet superfood”, a status reinforced by government initiatives and the expanding wellness culture. The ingredient has remained largely the same; what has changed is the social position from which it is consumed and valued. Ragi mudde, therefore, illustrates Bourdieu’s distinction between the taste of necessity and the taste of luxury: a food once consumed because it sustained agrarian labour can be recast by an urban, educated middle class as a deliberate, health-conscious and even fashionable choice.The more interesting questions, therefore, are not about whose cuisine is superior, but how food acquires social value in the first place. Why was bajra, once associated with rural and working-class diets in Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, pushed to the margins of the aspirational urban plate, only to return later as a fashionable “superfood”? Didn’t the kanji of the Malayali working-class household undergo a similar destiny?Food, however, is not only a public matter. It is deeply personal. M. F. K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me reminds us that meals are also acts of becoming: our tastes become small biographies written through memory, longing and relationships. We do not simply eat food; we eat our childhoods, festivals, griefs and hopes. That “gastronomical self” is especially vivid in India. Ask a Malayali about coconut oil warming in a pan, or a Hyderabadi about biryani, and the conversation stops being about ingredients. It becomes a story about family, migration, and belonging.Food, nature and cultureClaude Lévi-Strauss’s famous “culinary triangle”-raw, cooked and rotten-suggests that food is never merely a matter of preparation. These categories encode the ways societies distinguish nature from culture and transform ingredients into meaningful social practices. Consider the food cultures of Rajasthan and Punjab. In Rajasthan, where water scarcity and a harsh climate have historically shaped everyday cooking, dishes such as bajra roti, ker sangri, gatte ki sabzi and papad reveal how culinary practices emerge from ecological conditions. What might appear to an outsider as an unusual combination of dried berries, beans, millet and preserved foods is a sophisticated response to a particular environment. Preservation, drying and cooking transform scarcity into cuisine. Food creates its own cultural technology through which nature is negotiated and made inhabitable.Punjab offers a different culinary relationship with geography and abundance. Makki di roti and sarson da saag, for instance, are made with cornmeal and mustard greens. But they embody an agricultural landscape marked by seasonal cycles and a farming history. The tandoor, meanwhile, transforms flour and fire into breads such as tandoori roti and naan, turning an elemental cooking process into a social and cultural practice. Across North India, the transformation of wheat, milk, pulses, vegetables and spices into rotis, parathas, dals, lassi and sweets demonstrates Lévi-Strauss’s larger point: cooking is the moment when the natural world is reorganized according to cultural meanings.The dastarkhān, a Persian term referring to the cloth spread for dining, is more than a surface on which food is served. Across Central and South Asia, it has traditionally been a shared social space where food, hospitality and relationships come together. The act of spreading the dastarkhān transforms eating from an individual act into a communal experience, bringing people together around a shared meal. The North Indian dastarkhān with biryanis, kebabs, breads, slow-cooked dishes and sweets conveys a different history of hospitality, refinement and status. The South Indian thali with rice, rasam, sambar, vegetables and payasam arranged on a banana leaf creates a particular grammar of abundance and restraint.In India, Food has long been entangled with caste hierarchy. Commensality (who is allowed to eat with whom) is one of the everyday grammars through which caste operates. Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan offers a particularly painful account of this relationship, describing how Dalit families were given leftovers and scraps from upper-caste households. The issue was not simply poverty; it was humiliation and dehumanisation expressed through food.The kitchen has historically been naturalized as women’s space where cooking, cleaning and caregiving roles validate the ideals of womanhood. The Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) captures this through the tedious repetition of washing, chopping, cooking and cleaning.Food Studies gives us conceptual tools to unravel the seemingly ordinary experiences. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, for instance, traces how sugar, that most intimate of tastes, was produced through the brutal machinery of Caribbean slavery, then sold back to English factory workers as a symbol of domestic comfort. A spoonful of sugar could, therefore, carry the history of colonial production and industrial capitalism.Sugar offers students a way to trace connections that might otherwise remain invisible. What appears on the surface as an ordinary ingredient can thus lead students to ask who produced it, who consumed it, who profited from it, and how economic and political systems can shape something as intimate as taste.To study food, therefore, is to look beyond the plate and ask what it tells us about the world that produced it and how something as intimate as eating connects us to much larger worlds. How can makki di roti and sarson da saag be celebrated as heritage cuisine in a restaurant while similar everyday rural foods are dismissed as coarse or backward? And why do debates over purity, vegetarianism and dietary identity often overshadow more urgent questions of malnutrition, food insecurity and farmers’ suicides?A plate of biryani rarely arrives at the table alone. The biryani that one eats in Hyderabad is not quite the biryani one encounters in Kolkata, Lucknow, Malabar or Sindh. Along with the rice, meat, spices and aroma comes a history of journeys. This is the journey of merchants, soldiers, migrants, kitchens and empires. This is why Food Studies deserves a broader place in our intellectual and educational conversations. It is one of the intimate experiences through which society reads itself.Rethinking educationAs I have argued elsewhere, the contemporary university system increasingly speaks the language of outcomes, competencies, credits, rubrics, modules and measurable performance indices. Though this model serves the principle of accountability, it can also produce a peculiar anxiety around the learning process: students begin to understand knowledge as something that must be completed rather than something that must be pursued.A plate can become a classroom, and learning to read that plate can become a way of learning to read the world. Perhaps that is what education should enable us to do: not merely cover what is already known, but instill the hunger to learn more by developing the curiosity and confidence to discover what else is connected to it.The classroom, then, need not be a railway line along which knowledge moves from Unit I to Unit II and finally arrives at the end-of-semester examination as its destination. It can be a Deleuzian rhizomatic adventure, branching in unexpected directions.(Sudeesh K. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, Yeshwanthpur Campus. These observations emerge from his experience teaching Food Studies to B.A. Honours students.)