Hosted at Serendipity Arts Festival 2024
Facilitated by Edible Archives

Rice is more than just a staple — it’s a living archive of landscapes, traditions, and ancestral wisdom. Every Grain a Story was a rich, multi-sensory workshop hosted by Edible Archives, celebrating the vast world of India’s heirloom and indigenous rice varieties through storytelling, memory, and taste.

Participants were introduced to remarkable rice varieties with fascinating histories: one known for its medicinal properties, another whose tall stalks once sheltered wild elephants, and a Goan variety that thrives during floods. These grains, rarely found in markets or on modern plates, form an essential part of India’s endangered edible heritage.

Key highlights included:

• Storytelling sessions about lesser-known heirloom rice varieties from across India, uncovering their culinary, ecological, and cultural significance.

• Conversations on how heirloom grains are disappearing not only from farms but also from memory, and what this loss means for our edible futures.

• Interactive activities inviting participants to map their personal edible archives, reflecting on the foods, recipes, and flavours that have shaped their lives.

• Explorations of rice through history, science, environmental studies, art, and poetry, expanding participants’ understanding of what it means to truly know and appreciate a grain.

This workshop became a quiet but powerful act of preservation — reconnecting people to ancient grains, their stories, and the sensory worlds they carry.