In this region, food delivery typically comes along national highways. But these long, thin lifelines are vulnerable during monsoon season, which is becoming increasingly erratic. In the wake of extreme climatic events, heavy rainfall, flooding, and landslides, like the one in 2016, are frequent—yet damaged roads are not just a monsoon affair. The failing roads are often not fully recovered and create considerable food supply challenges throughout the year.
In response, local communities have been uplifting their traditional sustainable food practices, returning to their nearby forests, kitchen gardens, and fields. These trends are largely positive, as they counter consumption of imported processed foods that cause health issues. But more importantly, they strengthen relationships and reinvigorate Indigenous understandings of abundance
We are two scholars from this region who study Indigenous knowledge systems and cosmologies, and relationships between our communities and the environment. Foodways are a central part of these ways of knowing, and we were both raised in village communities that depended on local food sources as sites of sustenance and relationality.
RECLAIMING SOCIAL AND FLORA ROOTS
Relationality is part of how local foods are gathered, made, and consumed. Regional products can be found in haats, local weekly markets, and the small stores and supermarkets that have begun to appear in the last decade. Relying on plants to thrive requires collaboration and reciprocity between humans and their forests and fields. In the journey of these foods from where they grow to human tables, sites of gathering bring together humans, nonhuman animals, and more-than-human deities, spirits, and forces.
One site of gathering is the forest. Members of the Rong community, the first people of Sikkim, have long histories of forest-foraging for root vegetables, ferns, nettles, bamboo shoots, tubers, and garlic flowers. These traditions have been shared with communities who migrated to Sikkim, including the Lhopo community co-author Kalzang comes from. In Kalzang’s village, which is predominantly Rong with some Lhopo residents, ferns and nettles grow by the side of forested paths that cut across the road into the village.
