We often hear of aha moments from entrepreneurs, makers or artists when reflecting back on their journey. These moments always happen to be serendipitous encounters that inspire people to delve deeper into a problem or what they want to do in life that comes naturally to them. For instance, the Ikea founder couldn’t fit a table in his car so he took its legs off, the GoPro founder went surfing and could not take pictures of himself, the Spanx founder discovered slimming underwear while selling fax machines, while the inventor of instant noodles saw people lining up for soup on a cold day. For our guest on the Khhat this month, her aha moment was an opportunity to intern with bread historian William Rubel in California, that taught her not just how to make the best breads ever but opened up the world of history, identity and systems embedded in our food.

In her words, she lives and breathes food and food systems and loves a conversation with anyone and everyone.Her curiosity is certainly as breathtakingly infinite as mine, one of the many reasons that any of my conversations with Elizabeth, even quick calls have lasted not less than an hour!

Our conversation for the khhat meandered across a ton of spaces she has explored and experienced, led by her drive to continually learn. I was struck by the many parallels between Elizabeth’s journey and my own, reflecting on my experiments of the last decade and how each one sowed the seed for the next. It was through her annual learning trips to Mexico, Petaluma, Santa Cruz, Copenhagen, and one of the most incredible masters programs, designed as an expedition to 13 cities around the world (Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Valencia, Berlin, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai and Bangkok), that Elizabeth found herself being drawn out of the kitchen, and into the world of research, exploring food citizenship, circular economy and the Indian food systems.

“..there is so much to learn from everybody in every space. Even if someone is from the same space as you, they have a different perspective and the way they have come to that understanding is different. People are intriguing, the way knowledge is passed is really intriguing to me.”

The pursuit of knowledge is not sanitised of ambiguities, and each moment of deep learning is accompanied by at least one if not more, moments of uncertainty. As we dig deeper into rabbit holes of knowledge, we realise how much more we don’t know. Elizabeth shared a similar concern, as she began to spend more and more time exploring how food supply chains work, what influences the evolution of food traditions and cultures, the science behind why and what we cook, eat and grow.

Image: (Left) Elizabeth's cooking internship with an amazing team at Lorea in Mexico city. (Right) Whipping meringues in the middle of the street in Panaji with the Centre of Genomic Gastronomy for a 'Smog Tasting'.

For her, the nature of ambiguity has drastically changed ever since she’s moved away from working as a professional chef. The stress of performing to perfection from the moment you stepped into a kitchen, be it your first day or your first hour, or the uncertainty of whether the salt is balanced or if the onions have browned enough is now in the past. What she often thinks about now, is whether the choices she makes are ‘right’ or what else is hidden from plain sight. 

She tells me about her earliest encounters with food as an eight year old, helping her mum bake, particularly a recipe called ‘The Never Fail Chocolate Cake’. She recalls that while all the things she learnt to bake were simple, what she found most interesting was how the ingredients magically changed.“How everything went into the oven in one form and came out as another. There was something so magical about it. That was awesome.” 

The excitement of experimenting with new and different ingredients, recipes and processes today, takes her back to those early moments of excitement and ambiguity. You don’t know what will come out the other end of your experiment, but you’re willing to acknowledge the effort and allow yourself to improve and make it better the next time. I find this play out in a lot of Elizabeth’s work, from experimenting with Idlis for her college thesis to developing tasting menus that deconstruct recipes through elements of the periodic table. The magic of science and the science of food truly come alive in her explorations.

“Now that I’m not in a kitchen anymore, I’m having a blast when I cook. It feels like a big relief in a way. It just feels more natural, there is a lot of peace and calm in this space and feels like those early baking times, when you’re putting things in and something magical comes out.”

Image: (Left) Tea & Conversations On Food Waste With Kids In Hangzhou. (Right) A tasting experience bridging science in everyday eating - Edible Elements, designed by Elizabeth at the Science Gallery Bangalore

We often make choices, for which the outcomes are unknown. While the unknowns remain constant, she feels there is more clarity and confidence while cooking and she does not have to think twice, it feels like breathing. However, with her growing knowledge of food systems in India and interest in looking for signals that might tell us what the future of food in India might look like, there is also a growing concern towards what it means to create and share food that nurtures both people and the planet. 

Elizabeth and I spoke about trust and not just transparency, to become a necessary ingredient to drive our food futures. She believes transparency is important, but when it comes to food the system needs to include people who are making, those who have nurtured it. 

“Transparency on its own can be very authoritative, a system can be transparent but it's not necessarily nurturing of people in the process. It feels like policing. Today, we talk about blockchain in food or qr codes that tell you where something is from. This only talks of the product and not the people -the hands who made it that way. Just because it's transparent does not necessarily mean it's a good or positive system for everyone that is a part of it.”

While acknowledging that communication is important and the stories we tell are powerful, she hopes for the future to make space for building good, wholesome, tasty products. Just simply putting out something that's delicious and for us to be able to trust those that make it. 

Questions that occupy her and really got me thinking were, whether we need to scale back on building the narratives and double down on making the product ‘right’ for everyone - those that consume it, those that produce it and the hands that make it. Are we consuming the narratives more than we’re consuming the food? Neither of us have an answer yet, I think that’s for another khhat.

If you have thoughts, or would like to share a perspective, we would love to hear from you. As usual, you can simply hit reply to this email to share your thoughts, conundrums, or just to say no more khhats please. 

With love and curiosity,

The KHHAT is a medium to share our ideas, explorations and discoveries, while connecting you to mysterious experiences, obscure places, and gifted people, in the form of a letter that reaches your inbox once a month. You can just hit reply to tell me what you liked or not in The Khhat, ask a question you wouldn't ask google or bing, tell us you want to be in our next one, or just to say no more khhats please!

*Khhat or ख़त means a letter, in urdu. 

 Listen to the Climate Cuisine podcast by the Whetstone Radio Collective

*Remember to mask up, sanitize often and celebrate, but carefully. Eat well, stay healthy.