What does it mean to eat with your eyes? For designer and food enthusiast Priya Mani, this question isn’t rhetorical — it’s the starting point for her extraordinary project, 'The Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Food', a sensorial alphabet where food, form, and culture come together. This ongoing A-to-Z series is a comprehensive and stunning archive of cultural identity that folds design theory into culinary traditions.

With monochrome backdrops, curated props, and chiaroscuro lighting, the designer turns everything from ingredients to cooked dishes into sculptures and little installations. But you’ll notice that the project goes beyond aesthetics. Priya is also documenting food’s afterlife; what it carries, what it signifies, and how it morphs across geography, diaspora, and imagination. The encyclopaedia uses personal and indigenous stories of food to paint a larger picture of culinary traditions.

Take her entry on Apong, the rice beer brewed by the Mishing community in Assam. The image features the herb-starter cakes used in fermentation laid out like ritual artefacts. Along with the drink; she traces its spiritual connotations, its communal ties, and the rich alchemy involved in its making. Falooda — the ornate Mughlai dessert—becomes more than eye candy here. In Priya’s hands, the rose syrup, sabja seeds, and vermicelli strands become symbols of cross-cultural layering, sensuality, and indulgence.

In the encyclopedia, Priya also explores food via a more diasporic lens. Angelica roots collected in the Arctic, Axone fermented in a Nordic kitchen, Blue Agave from a Copenhagen garden — these entries reveal the layered negotiations of being Indian outside India. The boundaries between native and foreign collapse, making space for a kind of culinary futurism rooted in ancestral wisdom.

At its core, the Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Food is a love letter to memory, to heritage, to the aesthetics of nourishment. This magnificant instance of gastronomic inquiry interrogates both the politics and ethnography of food.

Follow Priya here.

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