A people’s archive of food memories: Oral histories from India in pandemic times

In spring 2020, we faced a challenge of completing oral interviews on changing food cultures in India’s capital, Delhi, in a context of political upheaval and the Covid-19 pandemic. Our response was to conceive a ‘People’s Archive of Food Memories’ – by which ‘student ethnographers’ from a local college were recruited and trained online to gather oral histories at home from family members in lockdown. The focus here is methodological, emphasising opportunities and challenges of this improvised approach in terms of the interview sample, trust and intimacy, research outputs and the families involved. Defining the archive are migrant food histories that come alive through an attention to cooking and eating, not just as subsistence, but as sensuality, pleasure, caring and belonging.