In childhood, the kitchen was never just a place where food was prepared, it was our first classroom. While my mother cooked, she also taught us from Adorsho Lipi, a foundational Bengali learning book. As the food slowly became ready on the stove, our lessons, language, manners, and sense of morality were also being prepared beside it.
The kitchen became a space where nourishment and ideology grew together. Through the warmth of steam, the smell of spices, and a mother’s voice, an entire generation learned what it meant to become “good,” “civil,” and “ideal.”
But adulthood reveals a painful disconnect. The ideals we inherited in childhood no longer align with the realities surrounding us. Food is no longer only food, it becomes a language of control, a tool of influence, a mechanism through which beliefs and behaviors are shaped.
This artwork merges food, body, language, and power into a chaotic visual collage. Tomatoes, chili, eggplant, Coca-Cola bottles, teeth, eyes, lips, and mechanical keys coexist in a playful yet unsettling composition. At first glance, the imagery feels colorful, humorous, almost childlike , but underneath lies a deep discomfort.
The central symbol is the “key.”
No single person turns it. Instead, countless invisible forces, the state, media, corporations, consumer culture, religion, family structures, and social pressure, collectively wind the mechanism. And our mouths keep moving.
We speak, consume, react, argue, desire, and repeat, often without realizing how much of it has already been programmed into us.
The same mouth that once learned language through Adorsho Lipi gradually becomes mechanical over time.
Rather than viewing food politics only through hunger, economy, or agriculture, this work explores food as a carrier of memory, ideology, and behavioral conditioning. It questions how nourishment shapes identity, and how everyday consumption silently participates in constructing obedient social bodies.