India, Nov. 21 -- Food heritage plays an important role in championing food security. But food and drink rarely make their way into the archives. As a result, we are deprived of looking at the past through the lens of food. The failure to preserve archival documents related to food is one of the reasons food history is not being utilised to critically analyse socio-political changes, economic and agrarian developments, globalisation, gender, race, caste, and class.

A few years ago, while the old building of the magnificent Connemara Public Library in Chennai was being renovated, I found a crumbly old booklet, hidden among the stacks of books waiting to be put on the shelves again. Titled "Meat Curing in the Presidencies" and written by "...