YouTuber Travels Across Northeast Breaking Stereotypes Around its Traditional Food

Eat Your Kappa, a YouTube channel run by Shillong-born Nambie Jessica Marak, is unique for several reasons.

The channel is an effort towards shedding light on the diverse and unique foods from across the north-east and destroying stereotypes surrounding the food — from “the food is too bizarre” to “they eat anything and everything”.

Being a food enthusiast, Marak travels across north-east India documenting varied recipes and ingredients from the area like Garo style pork curry, Baring Na’kam (brinjal with dried fish), Awushi Kulho (Chicken with potatoes), and so on. She launched her channel to create a repository of her learnings and findings in January 2016, and currently has around 38,000 subscribers.

Kappa is a Garo method of cooking, where meat and vegetables are cooked with the extractions from bamboo or barks of banana trees. This gives the food a distinct flavour.

“This method of cooking is done by other North Eastern tribal communities as well, and it was something that I grew up eating. To me, the word Kappa was synonymous with North Eastern cuisine,” she says while talking to The Better India.

It all began when Marak moved to Chennai for her studies and missed home food. At first, she would cook the food she missed. This eventually turned into her recording and posting cooking videos and recipes on her channel.

Besides food recipes, she also puts up videos on unique farming practices, festivals, and village life in the northeast.

Watch how Marak brings various types of northeastern cuisine and culture to the homes of mainland Indians.