Usable Pasts, Sustainable Futures: The Food Lab
Through this interdisciplinary public-facing research engagement, we aim to revisit and bring into renewed circulation historically effective practices that can help mitigate climate change. We hope to achieve this through generating new conversations around forms of urban living in the 21st century as they relate to the issues of public health and climate change, with the involvement of specialists, students, and the general public. The long-term objective would be to drive positive transformation from below through public engagements, reports, and a published volume on the topic. We have identified three key nodes or ‘industries’ around which our host city of Ahmedabad has been organized historically: food, clothing, and housing, with a view to connecting each one to urban life, collective health issues, and the crises sparked by climate change.
The Food Lab
The Food Lab will bring together stakeholders from different domains of expertise including nutrition science, restaurant practice, sustainable farming, media, public health, and climate change into discussions around ‘Food’, which is one of the three nodes that serve as anchoring points for the larger Usable Pasts project.
Date: September 9, 2022
Time: 6 pm to 8 pm (High Tea from 5 pm onwards)
Venue: Room 100, University Centre, Ahmedabad University
Resource Persons
Lab Anchor: Purvi Vyas, teacher and organic farmer, Ahmedabad
Minal Pathak, Senior Scientist, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Associate Professor, AMSOM, Ahmedabad University
Veena Iyer, Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar
Nabanita Bajaj, Edible Routes, Delhi
Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar and Shalini Krishan, Edible Archives, Goa
Sejal Dand, Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch (MAKAAM), Ahmedabad
Pankti Pandey, Zero Waste Adda, Ahmedabad
Nishtha Chauhan, Cafe Aarambh, CEE, Ahmedabad
Tejaswini Niranjana, Director, Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University
Student Participants
Kanika Bajaj, BA (Honours), Social and Political Sciences
Aditi Mohta, BA (Honours), Social and Political Sciences
Sridharshiny KV, IMS, Life Sciences
Isha Chandrashekar Iyer, BA (Honours), Psychology
