CALORIE | In Your Words
How do you capture humanity's relationship with food?
Food writing as a literary genre is a diverse and storied medium. Through recipes, memoirs, travelogues, journalistic pieces, fiction, and rhyme food writing explores the way that food shapes society.
As part of our current exhibition season CALORIE, we are inviting young writers aged 18 to 30, to respond to a series of writing prompts drawn from the many ways in which food influences and is influenced by human society. You are encouraged to submit a short piece— essays or poetry—that engages with the prompts and explores the aspect of food that they represent.
Shortlisted writers will be mentored by culinary anthropologist and writer Kurush Dalal to showcase their final piece at a public reading in June.
Timeline
Submissions open: 24 April 2026
Submissions close: 24 May 2026
Writing workshop and mentorship session: 20 June 2026
Public reading and showcase: 27 June 2026
Participation Guidelines
The deadline for submissions is 11:30 PM IST on 24 May 2026
You must be between 18 and 30 years of age to participate.
You must be willing to travel to Bengaluru for the public showcase. Please note that we can only cover domestic travel for selected participants from within India.
You can submit a maximum of three responses per person.
Your submission must be in English.
Please include the title of your work in your submission.
Your submission can either be an Essay or in the form of Poetry.
For Essay Submissions, Word count: 800 to 4,000 words. Choose a length that suits your story—short personal reflections, longer explorations and pieces of fiction are all welcome.
For Poetry Submissions, Length: 10 to 60 lines. This can be one longer poem or up to three shorter poems (total not exceeding 60 lines). Style: All forms are welcome—free verse, spoken word, narrative poetry, haiku, or experimental forms.
Entries must be submitted in .doc or .pdf file formats. The file should be named as follows: YourName_Title_IYW2026
Text within the submission should be formatted in Calibri, size 12.
You retain all the rights to your work. By submitting your work, you will give Science Gallery Bengaluru the permission to use and publish your submission during CALORIE, and your submission will be archived on the Science Gallery Bengaluru website.
Your submission should not have won or placed in other competitions, or have been published in an official capacity in other magazines, exhibitions, etc.
Prompts
A distant geopolitical crisis disrupts fertiliser supplies just before the start of the next farming season. A farmer, ready for the rains, must now face uncertainty shaped by forces far beyond their control.
Researchers in computational gastronomy are using data analytics and artificial intelligence to map and model flavour. By translating taste into data—molecules, pairings, and patterns across cuisines—they are developing systems that can generate new recipes and flavour combinations beyond existing culinary traditions or human intuition.
We have been altering the traits of food long before the science of genetics was formally understood. Early watermelons, once bitter with pale yellow flesh, became sweet and red over centuries of selective breeding.
Cooking engages all the senses. The competing smells of the masala box. The whistle of a pressure cooker. The feel of rinsed rice sticking to your fingers.The changing colours of a curry with each added spice, and the first taste to make sure it is just right.
Forest ecosystems are shaped by cycles of feeding and regrowth. Large animals like elephants and buffalo damage trees while foraging for bark, opening space for undergrowth that supports smaller forms of life.
There are dishes we eat today that trace their origins to the search for food during times of famine. Banana stem, lotus root, wild roots, and flowers continue to be eaten in very different circumstances.
An excerpt from Joothan by Om Prakash Valmiki
“During a wedding, when the guests and the baratis, those who had accompanied the bridegroom as members of his party, were eating their meals, the Chuhras would sit outside with huge baskets. After the bridegroom's party had eaten, the dirty pattals, or leaf plates, were put in the Chuhras’ baskets, which they took home, to save the joothan that was sticking to them. The little remnants of pooris, puffed bread, bits of sweetmeats, and a little bit of vegetable were enough to make them happy. They ate the joothan with a lot of relish. They denounced as gluttons the bridegroom's guests who didn't leave enough scraps on their leaf plates. Poor things, they had never enjoyed a wedding feast. So they had licked it all up.”The following is an entry from K.T. Achaya’s ‘A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food'
"Idi-Appam: Fine noodles of a mash of boiled rice grits extruded in a press through brass dies constitute idiappam, which is mentioned in the Perumpaniru (fifth century AD) as a snack being sold by vendors on the seashore, along with the appam, adai and moodagam. A common breakfast item, it was accompanied, then as now, with sweetened coconut milk. The Syrians of Kerala and the Kodavas of Karnataka (where it is called nu-puttu) eat it with a meat stew or chicken curry. In Sri Lanka it is termed string hoppers, the latter word being an anglicisation of the term appam.”Excerpt from ‘Palm Oil: Grease of Empire’ by Max Haiven.
“Nearly every element of the process that now finds you reading these words could have been touched or facilitated by palm oil:¹ it could be an additive in the paper, a stabilizer in the ink, or part of the resin in the binding of the book; it is almost certainly either inside or essential to the manufacture of one of the hundreds of the components of the digital electronic device on which I am typing these words, and on which you might be reading them. It’s probable that one of the transport vehicles that conveyed these artefacts to you burned hydrocarbons that included palm oil-derived agrofuels. And it must be taken as given that the body and brain that writes and that reads has been reproduced, in part, through the metabolism of palm oil. We have both used palm oil products to clean or care for our skin. We have ingested palm oil as a carrier of medicines.
Though I suspect neither of us are intentionally investors in the palm oil industry, we are nonetheless economically entangled with it. The money that we receive for our labor is blood in the same ocean. Though it derives from a natural source, we created refined palm oil as it exists today, and it has, in turn, helped to create us”