Krish Ashok is a techie, writer and musician. He joins Jayashree Arunachalam of Newslaundry to talk about his book Masala Lab: The Science of Indian Cooking.

Bemoaning the lack of “good writing” on sub-cuisines and subaltern cuisines, Krish notes that much of such writing is savarna. “I would like to see more writing of tribal communities in the North East and in Chhattisgarh, what they eat, what the tradition of their cuisine is.”

Isn’t his own another addition to the savarna food writing corpus? “Yes, I actually call it out in the preface saying, look, I grew up in a city, I have an upper middle class urban bias and any and all of my algorithms and dishes might have bias. They will also presume you all have access to these ingredients,” he says.

Krish and Jayashree also discuss how Tarla Dalal changed food writing, the methods of cooking and why pressure cookers are actually flawed. Summing up the theme, Krish quotes his father on food: “If you didn’t cook it, you have no right to complain about it.”

Watch.

Text by Utkarsh Tripathi.