A leading Mumbai hotel once catered a corporate banquet with a dish from every Indian state. It was strictly vegetarian and for the Northeastern states the chef was clearly at a loss. He ended up offering six bamboo shoot dishes, and boiled rice for Tripura. No banquet has ever used so much bamboo shoot.
The edible shoots are undeniably important in the region of lush hills and river valleys casually marginalised as the ‘Northeast’. It is a place with complex histories and very diverse communities, crossroads for trade, war and displacements and a reservoir for remarkable biodiversity. A wide variety of plants and animals are foraged and hunted there, and fermented, smoked and processed in multiple ways. There is much more than bamboo shoots.
