Yes, Chef!

Chef Thomas: Millets have been forgotten in many ways - being climate resilient, they’re relevant to climate change, and are native to India and part of our food culture. 2023 is the International Year of Millets and we wanted to use that momentum to create a space that brings together accessible and credible information on millets, including recipes. We also want to create a resource bank of restaurants in different cities that have millets on the menu, and the dishes they serve. We also plan to list millet producers so people know where to buy millets from, and provide summaries of academic articles and research on millets. This will all be available on an independent website we create. [The website is now live at https://milletrevivalproject.in/]

Chef Thomas: My seven-year-old nephew can’t eat rice or wheat, and eats millets. We recently held an online workshop with Millet Coach Shalini Rajan, which my mom joined because she wanted to learn how to cook millets for him. During the course of this project, I’ve also discovered some of my closest friends regularly eat millets - whether due to a health condition or for better nutrition.

Chef Thomas: I grew up in Kerala on a rice-heavy diet, and only started cooking with millets as Chef at The Bombay Canteen. Now thanks to the MRP, I’m much more informed. I already knew that anything to do with the food system is complex, but when you delve this deeply into a subject, you view it from different angles. You come face-to-face with the complexities of growing millets in different local contexts.

Chef Thomas: A few months ago we did an event in Shillong, in collaboration with North East Slow Food & Agrobiodiversity Society, an organization that works with indigenous communities. Our aim was to solve food system issues, create better livelihood opportunities and preserve local food culture. They presented us with a conundrum: millets (krai in Khasi) are being consumed less and less in Meghalaya; including among local millet growers. Many of them didn’t grow up eating millets, or remember their parents eating them, but have memories of their grandparents eating them.

Chef Thomas: Difficulty in processing millets for sale, a lack of easy access to organized markets, decreasing land area allocated to krai production… but one of the main reasons is taste. Often, millets were just boiled. We did a one-day workshop with millet growers from around the state, local chefs, and other stakeholders to discuss their challenges and issues. We created 24 dishes, of which 12 were millet based, using local ingredients that aren’t cumbersome to make and pair well with other Khasi dishes. It was a great success.

Chef Thomas: We recently hosted an insightful online session called “Charting the Future of Millets”, which featured representatives from MSSRF, CEEW, and the Odisha Millets Mission, many of whom have been working on millets for decades. So much of the conversation around the International Year of Millets is about consumers. We hear “Eat more millets, they're good for you”. Some conversations are about climate change. But we rarely hear the farmers’ perspective. Are farmers being fairly compensated? What are the price fluctuations? What challenges do they face when processing millets? How do farmers find new markets? There are many geographies, with different state governments, and different challenges across the board. Part of our role is to create synergy by bringing people together, and finding common ground to push this movement forward in a way that considers all stakeholders.