LETTERS FROM THE ROOM

Seeds Between the Lines

In this story, Mukta brings Eaten Cotton, a handmade book that reimagines cotton, farming, and food as her contribution to the meetup.

LFC GOA | October 2025

Every part of the book—from the thread along the spine to the paper for the cover—was made using local, low-waste materials at Gram Art Studio in Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh. The cover uses leftover fibre; the indigenous cotton tucked into the spine can be braided into different patterns. Photo by Mukta.
Mukta Patil is the Projects Editor at The Locavore. She writes on the intersection of land, food, and community, and has a soft spot for things that take time.

Cooking has never been my strong suit—I’m very underconfident, and was too afraid to show up to a Local Food Club meetup with a dish. But this book, Eaten Cotton, is one of my favourite things I’ve ever been part of making. It felt right to carry it with me to LFC Goa, because it is deeply about food, farming, and the ways they are associated with our lives.

Eaten Cotton is a love story, a cookbook, and a piece of art that I made in 2022 with my friends at Gram Art Project, an artist-led farm and collective in Paradsinga, a small village in Madhya Pradesh. I’ve known Tanmay, who runs the collective with his partner Shweta, since my late teens. Over the years, we’ve stayed friends because we share a way of looking at the world—holding on to questions of what makes something valuable, why processes matter, and how to imagine non-extractive systems.

Making the book was as important as the story inside it. Only ten copies exist, because each one was so labour-intensive. Every page is handmade from waste material on the farm, dyed in natural colours, and screen-printed in the village. Photo by Mukta.

The book tells a fictionalised account of four friends searching for indigenous cotton seeds. Their journey is threaded into the book with recipes, reflections on farming practices, and illustrations of how communities might imagine a different way of living and working with the land. At its core, it’s a love letter to re-wilding our surroundings, and to intercropped cotton—not the chemical-intensive BT monocrop that has devastated so many farmers in Madhya Pradesh, but older varieties that remember soil, seasons, and touch.

Some pages even carry seeds pressed into them, spaced just as they would be in intercropped systems, reminding the reader that cotton is never meant to grow alone.
From seed to yarn, the book traces the slow transformation of cotton. Photos by Mukta.

Every page holds specks of husk, illustrations of cotton becoming yarn, the process itself stitched into the paper. It’s a tactile object—that’s why we didn’t make a digital version.

At the meetup, I wanted people to touch the book. To feel what process can mean. There wasn’t enough time for everyone to sit down and read every word, but even passing the book around sparked conversations—about what it takes to make what we eat, about how much effort sits behind every ingredient we use without much thought. If I was able to communicate even a fraction of that, it was worth bringing.

"At the meetup, I wanted people to touch the book. To feel what process can mean."

The book ends with what we called a “sovereign meal”: a harvest that includes not just cotton, but fruits, vegetables, pulses, weeds, flowers, birds, animals, milk, oil, leaves, and seeds. A meal that grows in harmony, without exploitation—stitched together out of the whole ecosystem.

For me, that idea of sovereignty is about choosing to pay attention to the details, to value what might otherwise be overlooked. And in some ways, sharing this book at the LFC meetup felt like part of that same ethos: remembering that nourishment doesn’t begin at the plate, but in the processes, communities, and ecologies that allow food to exist at all.

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