Binti Gurung has spent the last five years focusing on two things—researching and archiving Nepal’s food history and starting and leading discourses on the crucial role food heritage play in understanding one’s cultural identity.

“Food is the most common shared experience. It connects everyone in many ways, and it is not a straightforward relationship if we are to look at it in a deeper way—food gives us our identity. It is political even if you say it is not,” says Gurung, whose eyes lit up once she gets talking about food heritage.

She now leads her own food startup company Natural Roots. “The company sources traditional herbs, local produce, and food products from smallscale farmers and agricultural cooperatives across the country and people can buy them on our online platform NepaliFoodJournals,” says Gurung. The platform also hosts Gurung’s ever-expanding archive of Nepal’s ethnic food cultures, stories, and recipes.

In this conversation with the Post’s Srizu Bajracharya, Gurung talks about her journey as a food researcher, why it is important to preserve food cultures in a hyperconnected world, and how our food habits are increasingly getting homogenised. Excerpts.

How and why did you get interested in food cultures?

I think it started right from my childhood. Although I kept away from kitchen duties because I felt like it was a duty that society considered a woman’s responsibility, I could see how food was at the centre of our upbringing and all our relationships.

My mother would often ask me to pluck fruits and vegetables from our garden. She would share homegrown vegetables with the neighbours and make friends by exchanging food. It was also customary to share food koselis (gifts) with neighbours and relatives on various occasions. Many of the food gifts that we would receive in our family were ingredients that were foraged from forests.

My family is originally from Lamjung, and I was brought up in Pokhara. We later moved to Kathmandu. I then went abroad to study history. Regardless of where I was, food was a way of connecting with people. My parents were very particular about tasting food people ate in the vicinity to adjust to our new environment. They would say something like, ‘You know this is something that everyone eats here, you should try this.’ I also started to understand how the way we eat food and what we call a particular dish also sets us apart. While living far from home, food helped me mix with people from different cultures.

Food is not just part of our lifestyle, but it is also a way of fitting in. And these were things I had not seriously thought of until I met some people in my life who showed me why understanding food is essential. And that’s how this journey of understanding food cultures began.

What is it that made you start Natural Roots?

The idea for Natural Roots germinated when I met a nettle farmer who urged me to use my expertise as a researcher and historian to promote sisnu (stinging nettle), which is also widely known as a superfood for its health benefits. So, initially, Natural Roots started with the single heritage food, and during those days, literature around sisnu was heavily based on Western concepts and usage. I then began doing my research and even presented a paper at the Oxford Food Symposium in the UK.

Soon, one thing led to another, and I started getting attached to the ideas of our food traditions, knowledge, and intergenerational transmission of that wisdom. But particularly, the question ‘why most of us are unaware of our food heritage’ was what drew me to this journey.

Until that point, I had not thought that I would work on food heritage and trace my own community's food history. It was not a conscious decision but more of an evolving endeavour. And here I am now, archiving food histories—the passed down knowledge of food from the diverse indigenous communities of Nepal. It’s been a gratifying journey. And now I just want to make Natural Roots (Nepali Food Journals) a repository for people to learn about our food history.

You have mentioned time and again that a lot of indigenous food ingredients have disappeared. What do you think are the main reasons for it?

Many have already disappeared, and more are on the verge of disappearing. This has happened with many traditional Gurung foods. Some food that the Gurungs made to feed pregnant and new mothers have completely disappeared.

Some of the factors that have contributed to the disappearance of ingredients in the broader indigenous community are climate change, development activities, and government policies. When policies are being drafted, cultural factors and people are not given consideration. The policymakers and government decisions fail to understand the interconnectedness of things. For example, the forced displacement of the Tharu people to develop the Chitwan National Park has affected the community's cultural practices, which in turn has caused food cultures to disappear. And we see that happening with many other indigenous settlements where farming is still one of the main livelihoods of people.

How serious do you think Nepalis are when it comes to understanding our food cultures and preserving them?

There's a lot we still don’t know about our food cultures. We don’t have a food history archive as a point of reference to talk about our food heritage. And that is why government institutions working to promote the country’s heritage and culture are not able to see how food plays an equal part in giving us an identity in the global world. These entities are unaware that it is equally important to preserve our food knowledge—about ingredients, recipes, taste—along with our architectural heritage. When a community loses its food heritage, many cultural aspects that make the community also gets lost in the process.

I will give you an example. Some indigenous groups in Nepal forage foods from the wild. On the surface, it may appear that these communities are just depending on the forests for food, but there is often much more to it. Many foraging communities also worship the forest, and there’s a spiritual part to voyaging for food. And in the process, they also protect the forest. So, imagine losing that one food that binds all of this communal belongingness and tradition.

But having said that, things are changing slowly. Communities are beginning to comprehend the importance of understanding, preserving, and promoting their food cultures.

Why do you think people are more conscious about their food heritage?

Many like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s got introduced to other cultures before our own. What I am trying to get at is that when we don’t know about ourselves, our food histories, we exist in a void—where we start borrowing from others and defining ourselves in that way to the extent of losing ourselves.

We should not be adopting other cultures at the cost of losing our own; we need to know how to be global citizens by maintaining our cultural and communal identities. And that realisation has also come to some with time as more and more people are discussing cross-cutting issues about our identities.

Time and again, I have seen how I fail to recognise my own culture where needed. For example, when I was studying foraged food abroad, I was wooed by the concept as if it was a foreign practice. As a result, I could not contribute my own community’s knowledge to what was being shared in a global interactive class. Foraged food has existed for centuries within indigenous communities in Nepal. It was only later that I got to share that history with my research paper, ‘Foraged Food of Nepal on Nettle’ at the Oxford Symposium.

People's food habits are getting increasingly homogenised. What do you think are good and bad about this trend?

At a time when things are undergoing rapid transformation, unless we are critical of our choices, it's easy to lose sight of how we are losing our distinctiveness to the mainstream cultures. Dal-bhat today is the staple food for many Nepalis, but many of us don’t know what our staple food was before dal-bhat. For our family, it was ‘dhindo’. It is not wrong to adopt new food habits, but sometimes the food habits we develop come at the cost of forgetting our food lineage. I also think, if everyone’s plate starts looking the same, what is there to learn, share, and understand?