Anusha Murthy & Elizabeth Yorke

Founders, Edible Issues Collective

The Edible Issues Collective is a flexible, collaborative platform that brings together food systems professionals, creatives and researchers. These two young ladies, one a chef, the other a researcher, are behind it

Interviewed by SATHYA SARAN

Women on a Mission

You might call them chalk and cheese, if you did not know better. Anusha Murthy has a technological bent of mind, in sharp contrast to Elizabeth Yorke who is a chef and loves dabbling in food.

The two met in 2018 while at a food innovation programme at the Future Food Institute in Italy. The programme aimed at putting people from different regions and backgrounds together to generate discussions and new ideas on food.

Elizabeth had a great grandfather who was a priest in Sri Lanka, but her focus was India. And somehow, she wondered how what the programme was giving her was relevant to the Indian approach to food.

Perhaps her questions found an echo in Anusha Murthy’s mind. The two thought out ways to change the focus of discourses on food, shifting them away from Europe and the West to an Indian context.

“Food in India still has the power to bring family, friends, everybody together, and once we start asking questions about food, there is no end to it,” Elizabeth says.

Anusha, on the other hand, as a student of Instrumentation Engineering, used the learnings at the course to find ways on helping technology ‘plug into food’. “Within a month at the programme, we started working together,” Anusha says.

“We started a digital newsletter,” Elizabeth adds, “generating thoughts on how to start conversations on the Indian food systems, and the future of Indian food. Our colleagues did not know about Indian food, and we realised neither did we know a lot. We started researching and kept ourselves updated.”

In Edible Issues, as the newsletter was called, the two women curated news stories on food habits, culture, agricultural practices and, thanks to Anusha, food technology. Recipes were added, for good measure. “It was exciting and a great way to reach out to the programme community,” Elizabeth says.

It was a significant partnership and a beginning that would lead to the Edible Issues Collective.

The Collective “focuses on experiences, and archives around food and food systems,” Anusha explains. “We hope to generate thought and conversations on Indian food systems, and keep these systems in memory so we do not lose the rich food heritage that exists in our country.”

Today there are 10 Edible Issues Collectives that are taking this mission forward.

Elizabeth shares the story of one of their early research areas, when on their return from Italy, they held an event in Bombay on the future of food. “It was generic, we asked people what food they wanted to eat. We asked professionals about global food systems. It was very enlightening.”

Edible Issues finds a great platform at the Serendipity Arts Festival; “The visitors are curious, interested and enjoy the experiences we offer,” Elizabeth says. 2026 was their fourth year at SAF, and this year they had taken the experience offered to a new level.
The exhibitions they set up centred around smell, memory and food. “Smell is the most underrated of our five senses,” Elizabeth says, “but smell evokes sharp memories of events, people and food!”

The exhibitions exposed visitors to ‘different cultures’. Travelling in trains with migrant labour was one experience on offer; pastoral smell, focussing on how the olfactory archives of the farming communities in the Deccan and Goa have evolved, as in conversations about... ‘what is the fish today?’ ‘what are neighbours cooking now?’ and a room that held the textures and smells of healthy soil, to ‘show visitors what healthy soil is all about’.

“We have a long way to go shaping our food future,” Anusha says, “We try in various parts of India to build conversations on food.”

Mahua has been one of the conversational focuses in 2025. The collective held on Zoom was a Mahua Futures Roundtable inviting practitioners, researchers, chefs and community organisations to discuss mahua’s role in livelihoods, flavour, markets and ecology. A space to share insights, ask questions, and collectively imagine what the future of mahua can look like.

They soldier on, young women with a mission to save Indian food from slipping into unrecognisable, packaged TV dinners.

That they are on the right track is evident from the fact that the duo featured in the 50 Next: Class of 2022 list, the selection for which is based on research conducted by the 50 Next Group and the Basque Culinary Center to celebrate young innovators in the field of gastronomy. Anusha and Elizabeth were also part of the Empowering Educators category. Enterprising women surging ahead!