Reclaiming Humanity Through Organic Food, Slow Life

At The Farm restaurant, the serenity is palpable as you walk through its tended garden, complete with a temple complex and a 40-year-old frangipani tree. It settles next to you at your table, under the shade of tall bamboo and leafy trees, or under the large, thatched roof with a view of wood-fired pizza ovens. The farm cats lounge in various corners, and you feel yourself unwind in their image as you settle in for a leisurely meal in a cocoon against the tirade of city life thundering just outside. Time moves slow.

Shalini Philip and Arul Futnani have been running The Farm on the rapidly developing outskirts of Chennai for 17 years and counting. Here, the food you eat still holds the spirit of the earth it was grown in. It is a small part of the thriving dairy farm that they have managed to keep alive amid skyscrapers, technology parks and myriad construction sites, symptomatic of the bleed of a metro city.

They tell me that they started the restaurant in a bid to sustain the family farm as Chennai’s urban sprawl crept closer to their doorstep. Selling produce wouldn’t help them break even on labour and land costs. “We were 100 per cent foolish. We followed our hearts and not our heads. We are not trained chefs, but we both love food,” Philip recalls with a smile.

Calling their menu “lawless”, she tells me how it developed to use what the farm produces throughout the year. The wood-fired ovens were chosen over electric ovens to use the farm’s surplus eucalyptus wood (originally planted to improve arid soil). The residual heat of the ovens is used overnight to slow-cook the

pork and dry out breadcrumbs (made from leftover home-baked bread) to coat their crispy cutlets. The ash from the ovens is then sprinkled in the fields as pesticide.

Being a dairy farm, they taught themselves to make artisanal cheeses, which crown their famous cheese plates, accompanied by homemade crackers and preserves, and adorned with garden blooms. For Christmas, they use the winter roselle flowers from the farm to make a jam they swirl into fresh ice cream.

A micro-roastery sits cutely in a corner of the restaurant where special ‘The Farm’ blends are roasted. Responding to my quizzical expression, I am told that this was their lockdown project while they had time on their hands, and they now source beans from carefully chosen estates all over India to make blends “with their own names and stories” and even supply to friends’ cafes in the city.

The restaurant espouses sustainability, offering organic and local produce, farm-to-table dining and employing closed-loop agricultural practices. But this terminology is conspicuously absent from their brand and design language. “We don’t tomtom these buzzwords, because to us, these practices are simply the most logical way to do what we do,” Philip explains.

Nothing that happens at the farm, the restaurant and its little shop is accidental. Their farm grows what the restaurant needs, as much as the restaurant uses what the farm offers it. Futnani and Philip’s way of life and doing business is a labour of their love for their farm, their love for food and their steadfastness in placing profit secondary to this. Their food carries the flavour of this authenticity.

Restoring Farmers’ Faith

A little closer to Chennai sits a rustic house, across from an imposing KFC. As you enter the gate, you are greeted by some or the other herbs drying in the sun, and just up the path, baskets of farm-fresh vegetables are set out to be probed, weighed, and piled into the bags you should have brought with you.

Inside the house, you will first find an assortment of homemade laddoos and treats, and past that, a variety of treasures from spices and unpolished millets and pulses and local honey, to podis and chutneys and herbal skin and hair care. A little room holds tins of cold-pressed oils and a larger room with an intoxicating fragrance holds more than 20 varieties of local rice.

This is reStore—a non-profit organic store started in 2008 by a group of passionate residents of Chennai looking to build sustainable practices into their lives. Everything in this store is sourced directly from organic farmers who set their own prices, and the store operates on a zero-waste principle.

Radhika Rammohan, one of the founders of reStore, tells me that they were moved by the increasing farmer suicides and the fraying connection between food and its consumers. Combining their experience working with non-profit and farmers’ organisations, they tried to emulate the food cooperatives and farmers’ markets they had seen in the West to create a transparent and fair way to bring food from the farms to city consumers.

When asked how popular the store was at a time when ‘organic’ was not even a trend, Rammohan says: “Our launch in 2008 was attended by over 300 people, and this was just because of print media and internet groups.” In its 18th year, reStore sees a steadily growing customer base, despite the challenges of quick commerce, which it simply can’t compete with and the appeal of unbruised, uniform produce packaged in shiny plastic.

“Unlike a modern store where the customer is king, we are unable to absorb costs to give them perfect produce because our farmers set these prices. As with anything organic, there may be minor spoilage or damage. At a supermarket, they can just include that difference in the price and give you what looks perfect.” At reStore, the customer has to bring a degree of empathy and understanding for the imperfections of organic produce and real food. The gentle request to remove your shoes before you enter the shop is symbolic of what reStore asks of its customers—incurring a slight inconvenience for something bigger than you.

Philip, Futnani and Rammohan acknowledge the demands of a world that runs on the profit and loss axis, but they do not let it shake them from the purpose that launched them on their respective journeys.

Philip wonders whether The Farm is missing out on attracting clientele because they do not exploit the buzzwords that draw eyeballs, but, instead, choose to let their work speak for itself. Rammohan, too, wonders whether more people would be inclined to buy from the store if it could serve greater delivery demands and use plastic to store and transport produce more efficiently.

But that is inconsistent with who they are. As the popularity of sustainability rises, the commodification of the principles they have not let go of will also increase the noise in the spaces that they operate in. Philip affirms that the trends may come and go, but they just continue doing what they do.

The trend of labelling it a ‘luxury’ to enjoy local food and buy direct from farmers implies that this is a privilege. The demands of the market will produce red herrings that commodify these principles and exacerbate this perception. But The Farm and reStore are examples of ventures that throw their doors open to share what they treasure and believe in—hero-ing what they stand for and not merely what makes money.

As Radhika points out: “It is ironic that what ought to be is called luxury.” They are not alone. With the rise of community-supported agriculture, it is becoming easier to support local farmers—organisations like Navadarshanam outside Bangalore and Solitude Farm in Auroville offer baskets of fresh produce for consumers at home. The rise of permaculture workshops and courses allows urban dwellers to take ownership of their food by growing produce in limited spaces. Organisations like Locavore have created communities where participants share knowledge of local ingredients and heritage recipes. But to meaningfully engage with this ecosystem, we must recognise those who are in it for the long haul rather than a quick buck.

While the internet creates confusion and cacophony, it is also a source of community and knowledge. The Instagram page of The Farm blew up during the pandemic, and harvested many new followers around the world.

Priyanka Patel, an ecology conservationist working on a re-wilding project outside Bangalore, muses that “people who love plants somehow always find each other”. Through her Instagram, she has met people around the world who are generous with knowledge and curious about her work—although she wonders how many people will show up for these causes beyond their screens.

By being generous with our time and effort, we have the opportunity to go the extra mile from consumers to actors with agency—to get our hands off our touchscreens and into the earth. The year 2026 is predicted to be the ‘year of the analog’, and it hopefully identifies in us the desire to return to our intuition about what is good, for us, and for the world around us. As the market latches onto slowness as a trend, it too will become a strategy rather than a standard. But it is returning to our first principles of community, care and intention that will motivate us to make the effort to engage with our world offline, and support local businesses and efforts. To quote Vandana Shiva: “Our separation from the natural world is a form of dehumanisation.” Reclaiming our connection to and our consumption of food is also reclaiming our humanity.

Chitrangda Singh is a corporate lawyer-turning-academic with an inimitable love for food and a good story