dhoop uses food as a lens. Through this lens, we interrogate culture, sustainability, design, and the systems that sustain life. We started as a magazine focused on stories of food and its intersections. The theme of issue 3 is cooking. The cooking is seemingly ordinary. There are preconceived notions, biases, ideas, and expectations that come with putting together a theme, much like a bowl of pressure-cooked dal. My own experience of cooking is as deeply personal as it is strangely universal—some elements shared, others starkly different. But what made this issue particularly interesting was exploring how cooking interacts with the scope of dhoop’s bigger picture. We aren’t just talking about cooking in isolation, we are talking about how cooking interacts and engages with nature, culture, sustainability, and design.