India, June 27 -- 1In the book, you break away from what you call the "yum-yum mode" and produce a powerful treatise for our times. This book reflects my struggles, thought process, emotional process and tears process! It's been a very long, almost 15-year, journey putting this together and it also reflects my journey around the world - living in the US, northern Europe and now in India for almost 10 years. That living has informed my thinking. Because when we're talking about complex issues, about 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". Culinary writer Anya von Bremzen once used this phrase in an interview, and I thought it was such an easy way to understand 99% of food media. 2You write that the millets movement has benefitted elite Indians at the expense of small-scale farmers. Are there parallels around the world? The example of quinoa and the gentrification of indigenous South American foods is very strong. People are afraid millets will become like quinoa, a case where the farmers are not able to purchase the staple grain they produce, and can't consume their traditional foods because they have been so gentrified. The story of the Indian food movement is still unfolding. That's why I wanted to shout a bit and say it doesn't have to be like quinoa or corn. We can still safeguard biodiversity and food sovereignty, rather than just creating nice products at fancy restaurants or for the urban elite. 3Why do you think there are so few women in the upper echelons of the food world? Fine-dining and commercial kitchens are modelled on the brigade system from the 1800s, based on marshalling people together. This idea of the kitchen as a kind of a masculine space structured by hierarchy or inequality means there's someone at the top and the people below just shut up and listen. If you don't, you get screamed at, hit or thrown out. This toxic masculinity (keeps women out). So then it becomes a question of how to reorient the kitchen. It's 2026. We probably can get all the plates out on time, to a high standard, without using the brigade system. There are feminist ways to run a kitchen. That's why I mention Asma Khan and her work at Darjeeling Express in London. 4You advocate for your readers to become "culinary killjoys". Why? We are now disassociated from where our food comes from. If you like Southern American food then you're ingesting the history of enslavement. And those yummy Swedish cardamom buns that we love? Real violence of colonialism had to happen for that cardamom to get there. But I also hope people are enjoying their food, and can respect what they eat enough to become curious about it....