This Is How Indian Artists Are Turning Everyday Food Into Powerful Political Statements

Food appears as art not on a dining table, but towering overhead at the Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan where artist Subodh Gupta’s monumental assemblage of stainless-steel kitchen utensils rises like a shrine. Ceramic plates, pans, saucers, ladles and pateelas stacked skyward, catch the light with devotional intensity.

These are objects found in countless Indian kitchens, pulled daily from crowded shelves. Here, they are transformed into something both reverential and disconcerting. It isn’t merely sculpture. It is memory, migration, excess, hunger and aspiration welded together. “Food is never just food in India,” Gupta says. “It carries class, labor, faith, and desire. The kitchen is a political space.”

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Subodh Gupta

Standing before his work, it becomes clear why his practice has resonated so powerfully across continents. By elevating humble utensils to monumental scale, Gupta touches upon contradictions: a nation propelled by dreams of abundance, yet perpetually shadowed by scarcity. The gleam of stainless steel speaks of aspiration and upward mobility; the repetition and excess hint at consumption pushed to its limits.

Food as a critical vocabulary

Over the past decade, Indian contemporary art has witnessed a decisive shift. Food is no longer a decorative still life or shorthand for hospitality. It has become a critical vocabulary—a way to talk about belonging, inequality, erasure and longing in a food-obsessed nation where what we eat often defines who we are.

For Mumbai-based Sailee Samel, a self-taught miniature food artist, food is first and foremost emotion. “Food is the language of memory,” she says. “A miniature version of a childhood snack or a regional staple isn’t just clay—it’s a pocket-sized memory. It connects people back to their roots and the comfort of home, no matter where they are.”

Samel’s delicately crafted vada pavs, thalis and cups of chai—shared with over 200,000 followers on Instagram through her handle theyellowbrushh—distil something vast into something intimate. “At theyellowbrushh, I believe that food is more than just a meal—it’s a vessel for our most cherished memories,” says the 35-year-old. “By shrinking the dishes we love, I try to capture big emotions—home, comfort, culture—in the palm of our hand.”

Her journey into food art was shaped as much by rupture as by nostalgia. Trained in hotel management and tourism, Samel spent years immersed in the hospitality industry before losing her job during the pandemic. That forced pause became a turning point. “I stopped waiting for ‘someday’,” she says. “Food was what pulled me back to myself.” What sustains her work is not technical virtuosity alone, but deep sensory attentiveness—the color of a fresh meal, the texture of a biscuit, the quiet intimacy of tea. Her miniatures are not replicas; they are emotional triggers.

Food art as a social message

This turn to food is not accidental. As India urbanizes at breakneck speed, food has become one of the most visible markers of inequality—revealed in what we eat, how we eat, and who gets left out.

At the grassroots end of this movement is Nagpur-based Shweta Bhattad, whose pan-India Gram Art Project works directly with farmers, food waste and rural communities. In one installation, the smell of decomposing grain is impossible to ignore. Bhattad uses discarded produce, husks and agricultural residue to create works meant to decay—mirroring the precarity of agrarian life itself.

“Art cannot be separated from the soil it stands on,” she says. “If farmers are invisible, their labor becomes invisible too.” Her practice deliberately resists the gallery’s obsession with permanence and collectability. Allowing her works to rot is not merely symbolic; it is structural, pointing to a system where surplus and starvation coexist. In a country where food wastage and farmer distress are two sides of the same coin, decay becomes an act of truth-telling.

Food as memory

Memory, meanwhile, operates as both refuge and resistance in the work of Chennai-based artist Shilpa Mitha. Her sculptural recreations of idlis, chutneys, neer dosas and steel tumblers are deeply personal yet instantly recognizable. “Food is the first archive we carry in our bodies,” Mitha says. Her practice suggests that culinary memory can function as cultural preservation at a time when domestic rituals are increasingly endangered by speed, migration and nuclear living.

Sueno

Mitha, a former sound engineer and founder of the brand Sueño Souvenir, traces her fascination with food art to childhood traditions like Kolu, where miniatures play a central role. “The first food I ever made was a burger in clay,” she recalls. “The moment I finished it, I knew this was what gave me joy.” Her most complex works—Kerala sadya or Tamil Nadu-era sapadu—can take over a week to complete, each dish painstakingly shaped from air-dry clay and hand-painted.

The reactions, she says, are often telling. “Someone once used a photo of my neer dosa and chicken ghee roast on a Zomato listing,” she laughs. “Another person complained about the dal I used, not realizing it was a miniature. That confusion—thinking it’s real food—is the biggest compliment!”

The yellow brush

Yet beneath the delight lies a social message. “Unity in diversity,” Mitha says. “The same ingredients become different dishes across states. They’re unique, yet connected. There’s a lesson there.” The absence of smell and warmth in her sculptures mirrors the sanitization of food in urban life, where cuisines are aestheticized even as the communities that produce them are marginalized. “I want viewers to feel longing,” she says, “because that’s what we feel when food cultures disappear.”

When consumption becomes commentary

What is particularly striking is how this artistic engagement with food is now spilling beyond galleries into branding and consumption itself. Hyderabad’s Manam Chocolate, for instance, commissions artists to depict cacao landscapes and farming communities on its wrappers, turning packaging into narrative. Consumption becomes conscious—if not entirely ethical—reflecting a growing desire for provenance, values and story embedded in what we eat.

Taken together, these practices signal a larger cultural reckoning. In a global art world where food-based art often veers toward spectacle or novelty, Indian artists are grounding it firmly in lived realities—agrarian distress, urban alienation, ecological collapse and cultural erasure.

Seen in this light, Subodh Gupta’s towering steel utensils in Uzbekistan feel less like spectacle and more like prophecy. Food has emerged as a powerful artistic language because it is intimate yet universal, sensory yet political. It is ingested daily, but rarely interrogated for its origins or consequences.

By turning consumption into commentary, these artists compel viewers to pause and reflect. In a food-obsessed country, they remind us that what sustains can also indict—and that memory, like taste, lingers long after the meal is over.

(Neeta Lal, formerly Senior Editor with some of India's leading mainline publications, is a SOPA-nominated independent journalist exploring the intersections of art, culture, travel & lifestyle in South Asia and beyond)

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