Over time, all our food will taste the same

When the British came to India, they brought the idea of milk with tea. While the core of that remains the same, tea has taken new forms across India. Evolution is in our social fabric and has been accelerated by television.

Change is good, but not at the cost of losing our grip on the origins of a dish. We each interact differently, and this manifests in our food. Fresh is better than what comes out of a packet, but we're always pressed for time, the size of the nuclear family is shrinking, and we resort to short cuts. Over time, this erodes the technical know-how and all food begins to taste the same.

It doesn't help that seasonal veggies are available all year round. Cooking isn't for everyone; it is labour intensive and has to be passion driven. Every region has something good to offer, and traditional dishes lose out in the way of supply and demand.

Not because we don't want to eat them, but because we don't understand them as well. Now we're trying to grow more on smaller pieces of land, it's all about quantity, not quality. Farmers grow their own crops separately from the ones that are sent to the market. The quality of crop is markedly different.

Some rural places are stuck between the old and the new. But organic vegetables don't require expensive chemicals, so why they are more expensive? It's easy to change things which cannot express themselves. The youth really need to step up and be interested in where food comes from—in farming, or the farm-to-table movement can never be a reality.

The author is one of India's most celebrated chefs