Don’t crunch the numbers

Our food is more than counting calories.

On our walk through the Science Gallery Bengaluru’s exhibition – Calorie – this thought kept simmering in our mind. It felt less like a glib retort for the guilty ordering of a midnight snack and more like the whole truth about food. We’re incessantly fed information on the pros and cons of food. Eating locally and seasonally is touted as a modern discovery, proteins are the top dog on the nutrition totem pole and carbs are at the bottom, sugar is the devil but a plant-based diet is the highway to heaven and so on. Food is one of the most contested domains of our contemporary conversation and Calorie doesn’t just present this cacophony but also cuts the fat to give us science.

See food diet

Across the themes of Grow, Buy, Cook, Eat, Digest, and Waste, this two-floor exhibition allows us to relook, reconsider, and rethink our relationship with food. There’s the Farmer is a Wrestler by artist duo Thukral and Tagra, which speaks to the practice of Punjabi farming: farmers transforming their farmlands into akhadas, or wrestling fields, during the off-seasons. Here, on a wrestling mat, we were invited to give physicality to their lexicon of distress. “There are seven wrestling positions, which get increasingly hard, that correlate to the numbers on the mat. While you locate the numbers, you learn about farmer issues, which have been chosen from the 16-point demand put forward by farmers’ unions during the 2020 Indian farmers’ protest against three acts passed by Parliament,” says Megha, an experimenter at the Gallery, our guide on this walkthrough.

Next, we were struck by the red and golden hues of the Indonesian artist Elia Nurvista’s Long Hanging Fruits. Four Javanese batik textile panels map the movement of the African oil palm from its origin in West Africa to Indonesia and Malaysia by Dutch colonisers. “The colour gradation from very red in the beginning to more golden towards to end speaks to the refinement process of this oil,” Megha peppers in. She also points us to the mural “painted with the unrefined palm oil” by the artist.

Bengaluru artist Surekha’s Ragi.net work felt so personal in addressing how the city’s farmlands are being transformed into glass-and-steel industrial zones and IT parks. She used e-waste collected from these abandoned peri-urban farmlands and sowed ragi – a local staple – “as an act of reclaiming these spaces.” Mysore artist Dayananda Nagaraju’s Atantraru & The Golden Seed is another work that pulls at our emotions. Sickles crafted at the time of birth of the sons in his community are hanging in limbo, including his own personal sickle, to echo the feeling of being stuck in a limbo attached to being a farmer in our country; and the single grain of rice rendered in gold speaks to the true value of this profession.

Diet: did I eat that?

There’s Ingesting Insects, a fascinating display of edible insects consumed by indigenous communities especially in North-East India, by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE): a real harbinger of a future where we might need them for our protein intake. There’s Goa-based graphic artist Orijit Sen’s Mapping Mapusa Market, the result of a decade’s documentation, displayed to feel like walking through this Goan market and instead of overhearing conversations, one reads it. In the same space, there’s even a photo exhibit of three markets across the country including our city’s own Russell Market, reminding us that these spaces aren’t just commercial but cultural too. A sharp reminder of the fast crumbling of this vibrant space is underscored by UK filmmaker Beth Fox’s 12 Lemons: Adventures from the Gig Economy, which follows delivery men in London.

Calorie doesn’t just speak to food systems and histories but looks towards the working of our bodies too. There’s stuff change by artist-researcher duo Dr Lea Luka Sikau and Denisa Pubalova that engineers the minute vibrations and the ‘metabolic acoustics’ of our gut functions. “This is an exciting way to destigmatise the sounds we’re usually ashamed of,” Megha reminds us. And it is strangely soothing to contemplate this work. Displays like Museum of Edible Earth make us rethink our categories of consumption.

These are just an appetiser of the 35 wonderful, eye-opening works that make up the Calorie exhibition. You’ve got three months (until July) to learn that art is still a powerful tool to channel research, information and innovation to us all. And perhaps, we can even glacially move towards valuing food for more than its nutritional content; or rather see nutritional value as being a result of larger socio-economic discourses. Quite a clever little trick, drawing us in with the exhibition’s title and then showing us that the food can’t be accounted for with a single unit.

The details: Calorie runs till the end of July at Science Gallery Bengaluru, 10-11, Bellary Road, Sanjaynagar. Wednesdays & Thursdays, 10am - 6pm & Friday to Sunday, 10am - 8pm. Entry free on all working days. There’s also a two-day Calorie film festival that centres glimpses on how food inhabits everyday life on April 11 & 12, details here.