Empty Plates
Empty Plates is a podcast about food + memory created & hosted by Chef and Researcher Anjli Vyas.
In each episode, Anjli is joined by a diverse array of change makers, leaders and thinkers. Together, they will reflect on 3 plates of food that have shaped and impacted their life.
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Empty Plates
22. Dr Neha Vermani on the colonisation of our diets, biryani and understanding our own food ways
In today's episode Anjli speaks to doctor Dr Neha Vermani, a historian of early modern South Asia, particularly the Mughal Empire about the how our diets have been unwittingly been colonised by food ways. Neha’s research focuses on intersections between material culture (especially food practices and human-plant-animal interactions) and histories of science, senses, emotions, and self-fashioning.
Together they explore the topic of food migration through the lens of ancient supply chains, food theories and food as a key component of human migrational identity.
Along with co-editing a volume on recipes as sources of history writing, Neha is currently preparing her first book “Tasting the Empire: Food Practices in Mughal South Asia” that is based on her doctoral and postdoctoral research. From 2022- 2024, Neha Vermani was a British Academy Newton International Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History, University of Sheffield, UK and postdoctoral fellow on the Andrew W. Mellon foundation funded “Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Culture” project at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C.