Just deserts

Anisha Rachel Oommen & Aysha Tanya | How did recipes travel and change? Where did early food innovations come from? The answer is often women, working unseen in their kitchens. The online publication Goya Journal is telling stories of such women, tracing evolutions, micro-cuisines, efforts at conservation today. And for its unique work, it has been picked as one of The Guardian's 30 things to love in the world of food right now

- Rituparna Roy

Two missing things prompted Aysha Tanya and Anisha Rachel Oommen to launch their food media production company Goya Media in 2016: the big picture wasn't being represented in much of the writing on food in India, and there was practically no home cooking being featured.

Through India's thousands of years of history, "much of the stories that shaped Indian cuisine lived in the home kitchens run by women," says Oommen, 37. It was time to tell some of those stories.

Oommen and Tanya, 34, had worked together at a food magazine, and bonded over a common love of Nigella Lawson. What they admired most about the British TV celebrity and cook was the way she gave new meaning to home cooking in the 1990s, and made the kitchen a space to reclaim in a new avatar. Watching her they thought that perhaps they too could challenge the gendered conversation around food in India.

"For so long, the kitchen has been a prison that trapped women in hours of servitude in the role of a nurturing caregiver, and it still does. Yet food is looked at as trivial, as a woman's domain," says Oommen.

Most of the stories in this sphere tend to emerge from the restaurant space, which is typically dominated by men. "It was time for all the players in the chain to take centrestage, from seedkeepers to farmers, cooks, and even food writers," Oommen says.

The duo's online publication The Goya Journal was launched in 2016. In the seven years since, it has featured stories about women celebrating micro-cuisines and fighting to preserve niche ones; tales of cafés friendly to and frequented by lovers Mumbai; explorations of new crops, grain revivals and new ways of growing food.