Eastern Highlands of India: A Short Primer on Meghalaya's Food Culture

If you've eaten food from "the North East" of India in a Delhi or Bengaluru restaurant, what you've probably eaten is a version of it adapted for diners who don't know it well. The smoked pork, the bamboo shoot, the ghost-chilli chutney, the rice beer — these are the headline acts. The actual food of Meghalaya is richer, quieter, and much more about the ingredients than about any specific dish.

This is a short primer for the curious, written by people who source food from the region but aren't from it. Take this as a starting point, not a definitive guide. The communities who cook this food have written better and more authoritative accounts; we'll link to a few at the end.

Three communities, three kitchens

Meghalaya is home to three principal indigenous communities — the Khasi, the Jaintia, and the Garo — and their kitchens, while overlapping in some ingredients, are not the same thing.

Khasi cooking centres on the hills around Shillong. Rice is the staple. Pork is the most-used meat, often smoked or slow-cooked with bamboo shoots, sesame seeds, or fermented soybeans. The dishes lean towards depth of flavour from long cooking rather than from heavy spicing. Jadoh — rice cooked in pork blood and spices — is the iconic Khasi dish. Dohneiiong is pork in black sesame paste.

Jaintia cooking comes from the eastern Jaintia hills, on the edge of the Bangladesh border. Closer to Khasi cooking in technique but with more turmeric — the high-curcumin Lakadong variety is the region's most famous export — and slightly more fermentation. The Jaintia kitchen is where most of the turmeric, ginger, and chilli we source for the Adviah range comes from.

Garo cooking is from the western half of the state, with a different agricultural and forest tradition. More dried fish, more bamboo, slightly different chillies. Nakham — a fermented dried fish — is a central ingredient. The food is leaner, smoke-forward, more reliant on wild foraged ingredients than the more cultivated Khasi-Jaintia traditions.

The ingredient palette

What the three traditions share is an ingredient palette that's quite different from the Indian plains. Some of the things you'll find in a Meghalaya kitchen that you won't in a Punjabi or Tamil one:

Black sesame seeds. Ground into a paste for pork curries (dohneiiong). Toasted whole for tempering. Not the same plant as the white sesame used in laddoos.

Fermented soybean (tungrymbai). A small dark paste of soybeans wrapped in leaves and fermented for days. Used in curries the way you'd use miso in Japan — small quantity, big depth. Strong-smelling, divisive among visitors.

Bamboo shoots, fresh and fermented. A vegetable staple. Sliced into curries with pork or fish.

Smoked pork. Either home-smoked over a kitchen fire or bought from local markets. The smoke flavour is integrated into the meat over weeks.

Lakadong turmeric. The high-curcumin variety. Used in much smaller quantities than the supermarket cultivar because of its concentration. More on the cultivar here.

Naga king chilli (raja mircha). Cultivated more in neighbouring Manipur and Nagaland but used heavily in Meghalaya cooking, especially in pickles and chutneys. Cooking notes here.

Ja (rice beer). A community drink, brewed in small batches in many households. Not all variants are commercially sold; some are kept for festivals.

Local greens and wild forage. Pumpkin leaves, bamboo flowers, certain ferns. The forest is part of the kitchen.

Why the geography matters

Meghalaya means "abode of the clouds." The state receives more rainfall than almost anywhere else in India — Cherrapunji and Mawsynram are still the wettest places on earth by long-term annual average. The cool, high-elevation soil and the long wet season produce a particular kind of agriculture: small family plots, long-cycle crops, varieties of turmeric and ginger and chilli that don't grow well in the hotter plains.

This geography is the reason the spices from Meghalaya have measurably different chemistry from the spices from Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra. The Lakadong turmeric's high curcumin isn't marketing — it's the result of slow cool growing in the Jaintia hills' specific soil and climate. Replacing the same plant variety to the plains produces lower curcumin yields. The terroir is real.

If you want to go deeper

Mokokchung-based food writer Jennifer Liang's writing on Naga food (which often overlaps with Meghalaya's traditions). Hoihnu Hauzel's anthology The Essential North-East Cookbook. Patricia Mukhim's columns in The Shillong Times. And, for the politics of how indigenous food has been mis-represented in mainstream Indian discourse, the work of Rahel Khaleq Yathzo at the Northeast Network.

The closer you get to primary sources, the more interesting the picture gets.

What we source from the region

The Adviah range includes Lakadong turmeric, Naga king chilli powder, Nadia ginger, Meghalaya cinnamon, and a few other items — all sourced from named family farms in the Jaintia and Khasi hills, ground in small mills, shipped within months of harvest. None of it is exotica. It's the same food a Jaintia family is cooking with this week.