In the rural global South, it is increasingly the case that the relationship between landholding status and household nutrition is intermediated by complex associations between intervening variables. These include changes to agricultural practices, the dynamics of how decisions about food are prioritised within household budgets, the gendering of household power relations, the breadth of non‐farm livelihood portfolios, and the effect of landholding status on access to social welfare schemes. This article demonstrates this complexity using a mixed‐methods assessment of livelihoods and nutritional status in two north Indian villages. The study finds that in these villages the role of land for household nutrition is expressed through significantly greater milk consumption by landholding households, but insignificant differences in the consumption of most other major food items. Landholding households' greater consumption of milk is hinged to an ability to grow fodder in between cropping cycles, and manage these activities via prevailing agricultural gender norms in which women and girls are charged with responsibilities for livestock husbandry. In the context where milk provides a crucial source of protein for the mainly vegetarian diets in these villages, landholder households' greater access to milk represents a vital aspect of the local patterning of food and nutrition security. This finding underscores how greater complexity and diversity in the rural social landscapes of the global South are creating increasingly intricate, locally distinctive configurations of food and nutrition (in)security. Such local nuance cannot be readily observed within research traditions that rely on large‐scale national datasets. Mixed‐methods geographical research in the tradition of livelihoods analysis gives important voice to these considerations.