Lily Kelting: “There are feminist ways to run a kitchen”

Academic writing often emphasizes product over process; There is an idea that the book should somehow arrive completely finished. But this is not my experience. This book reflects my struggles, my thought process, emotional process and even the process of tears! It’s been a very long journey of almost 15 years to put together and it also reflects my own travels around the world – living in the US, Northern Europe and now India for almost 10 years.

That life has informed my thinking. Because when we’re talking about these complex issues, history and heritage or food culture, it shouldn’t be nice and easy. This is the job of food studies as a discipline – to create another way of talking about food that is not “yum-yum mode.” Cookery writer Anya von Bremzen used this phrase in an interview, and I thought it was an easy three-word way to understand 99% of food media.

You write that the millet movement has “benefited elite Indians at the expense of the most marginal, small-scale farmers.” Is there any similarity around the world?

I think there are many other such examples. The example of quinoa and the gentrification of indigenous South American foods is very strong. People fear that millet will become like quinoa, with farmers not being able to buy the main grain they produce. And they won’t be able to consume their traditional foods because it has been so gentrified and so urbanized. Another great book that I am very inspired by eating nafta. Writer Alicia Galvez talks about Mexican corn in the same way, saying that now if you want a stone-ground corn tortilla you have to go to a Noma pop-up in Tulum, because, at home, people are eating heavily processed foods. She ties it directly to trade – to NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) – and it’s a very solid argument.

Part of the reason I wanted to write this book and intervene now is that I feel like it’s not done yet. The story of the Indian food movement is still unfolding. That’s why I wanted to shout out a little bit that it doesn’t have to be like quinoa or corn, we can still protect biodiversity and food sovereignty instead of making nice products for fancy restaurants or urban elites.

In Exploring Food in the Southern United States, you speak of family heritage that has a “painful history,” where the body and food are a “monument” to human legacies (such as slavery). How do you highlight this nuance in a world where popular chains like McDonald’s flatten every narrative?

I think these are uncomfortable histories, so it’s very important to pay attention to them. I think there’s a double paradox in this, because people expect food to be good and comforting; To think that we could use a tasting menu to tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade seems like a comparison.

But that’s what chef Eric Adjepong did to tell this story of the middle passage across the Atlantic. I’ve also seen it at Argama, an ingredient-forward restaurant in Pune, where they use dagad flower In one dish to illustrate how climate disaster could limit our food choices in the future. If a fine dining restaurant can make this kind of subtle criticism then I’m very optimistic.

Regarding McDonald’s – well, it’s very difficult, like David and Goliath. We are very small in front of the corporations. But I don’t want to be so cynical. Because while big corporations are flattening our stories about food, there is a lot of good work being done now around food systems and food justice.

There’s a very sharp critique on the class system – and by extension race and caste – in the West, where you write about other people’s labor being the “best thing”, where diners at a fancy restaurant are “eating up time”. He is very powerful. How does this play out in Indian kitchens, where labor has been practically romanticized?

The way to be fancy in the Global North is to consume other people’s time.

Whereas in the Indian context, he doesn’t even have that capital, because someone else’s time is so undervalued. And when I say about someone else, of course, I mean the woman cooking, her labor is seen to have no economic value.

So, I wonder how can we build a food sovereignty movement in this context? How can we celebrate these traditional foods without celebrating the people who make them?

I also think as a foreigner, as an inside outsider, I have a different perspective. I have learned to make chapati and it is difficult. I have learned how to make dosa and fill modak.

These are skills, not easy things. We are all eating up other people’s time all the time and we don’t even notice it. That’s why I think about the movie great indian kitchen This was so important because it was this work’s representation that reflected the reality of the Indian kitchen.

Does the entire concept of heritage hinge on mealtimes? How do you see the tension between heritage building and women’s labour?

This is a very good question. Basically, there is a tension between the desire to protect heritage and the fact that a lot of heritage is an engine of inequality.

So, I like the idea that legacy is a way of eating up time.

This is true in virtually all case studies.

There is a lot of discussion about friction in the context of AI and convenience culture. No woman is saying I want more friction, but then how do we protect culinary heritage? I think it’s also about telling the true story as I said at the end (of the book) about my grandmother who stopped cooking. There are also women who would prefer not to make stone chutney. In fact the reason they switch to mixers is because it is easier for them. And depending on the context, these women may also be doing all this agricultural labor, invisible and without wages. And they are individuals with their own hopes, dreams, aspirations. This is where the book lands.

When you take a spice like cardamom and its culinary history in the Far North, you write that “centuries of history – histories of exploration, colonialism, slavery – collide.” Is that history acknowledged? If not then why?

The strength of the Danish brand overcomes some of the difficult conversations about colonial history or even the inequalities that go on there. The New Nordic Cuisine has become an official political program through the Nordic Council of Ministers, so it is truly effective cultural diplomacy. For the most part, there aren’t conversations about “Denmark was a colonial nation, you know.”

Can you talk about the reasons for the conspicuous absence of women in the “upper echelons of the food world”?

In March 2026, there was an exposé about abuses at Noma, Copenhagen (Michelin ranked as the best restaurant in the world) and the reaction was huge! I guess it took too long: It also turned out that founder-chef René Redzepi had stabbed an employee in the foot with a fork. What was interesting to me was that the criticism was never really explicitly centered around gender, it was mostly that this was a really toxic workplace.

Fine dining and commercial kitchens are based on the brigade system of the 1800s, which is based on gathering people together. This idea of ​​the kitchen as a kind of masculine space structured by hierarchy or inequality means that there is someone at the top and the people at the bottom just shut up and listen. If you don’t do this, you will be yelled at, hit, or thrown out. This toxic masculinity (keeps women out)

Then the question becomes how to give the kitchen a new look.

It’s 2026, we can probably get all the plates to a higher standard on time without doing this. There are feminist ways of running a kitchen too. That’s why I mentioned Asma Khan and her work in Darjeeling Express in London.

In India, you note that “the so-called Indian food movement often valorizes traditional Indian foods without valuing the people who produce it – farmers and women (and women farmers). How then do you substitute heritage to include “women’s embodied culinary knowledge as science, as serious and valuable”?

In the book, I talk about this movement that started in the 1970s, wages for domestic work, which was an activist project; But it is also a theoretical project. These were not feminist economists of the 1970s. They were not asking the World Bank to get the green light for their policy proposal. What they were doing is like a more radical provocation toward reevaluation.

My writing is also associated with, or an extension of, these types of radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. What if every time I ate a plate of rice, I thought, wow, a woman farmer went to great effort to get this rice to me. And also, if it’s some kind of local indigenous rice, there’s also the work of saving the seeds, that knowledge. If we start to see this labor, perhaps it is the beginning of giving different importance to food and cooking.

Why do you advocate becoming a “culinary treat” to your readers?

I added a toolkit with positive examples and steps for people because so many reviewers asked me what they should do. I took this term from a book by Sara Ahmed that I read in graduate school. Then I really didn’t like it very much! I love fun!

But now we have become very detached from where our food comes from. We know how to appreciate food, but not the art of making it.

If you love Southern food, you’re getting a taste of the history of slavery. And those delicious Swedish cardamom buns we love? There had to be real violence to get that cardamom there. Colonialism involves economic violence as well as epistemological violence, damage to knowledge systems and cultural systems.

But I also hope that people are having fun, I hope that they’re enjoying their food, which also means respecting what they’re eating enough that they can be curious about it.

Aparna Karthikeyan is a freelance journalist and writer based in Chennai.