Dear Locavore,

 

Desire is a many-limbed beast. I often imagine mine as an octopus floating beside me—arms reaching, all three hearts hungry and pumping. She wants, and she charts for me a sea of longings I am compelled to swim through.

 

Food is the first of these hearts. Our tongues tingle, the body requires nourishment, age hinders, the gut reacts. The wallet dictates, caste privileges, and geography settles. So many of our hungers are beyond our grasp, shaped by forces we will never quite understand. 

 

This month, we want to fold back the curtain on what makes millets desirable (or not). If you haven’t attended one already, The Locavore’s Beyond The Plate sessions explore what food can be, beyond eating. Because it’s always so much more, isn’t it? 

 

The initiative brings together experts and practitioners across the food industry, culinary culture, and agribusinesses to foster impactful conversations around the essence of food. In the next session on March 21 we look at how restaurateurs and businesses are learning to make millets tasty and appealing, and explore why, somewhere along the way, this staple came to be seen as undesirable.

 

Restaurants play such a central role in introducing us to new cuisines and flavours that may be unfamiliar in our own kitchens. Raghav Simha, one of the co-founders of Project Hum will be joining us as we dip into the shape of our desires, and learn how we can shift them. Other panellists include Umang Bhattacharyya, co-founder and brand director of Slurrp Farm, which is trying to bring sustainable, nutrient-dense, and diverse ingredients back into children's diets, and Borra Srinivas Rao, managing director at Manyam Grains, a company working with indigenous millet-grower communities in northern Andhra Pradesh to create sustainable millet value chains.

If you have been thinking about millets in the context of taste, sign up here!

 

The second heart is curious. It asks and asks and asks. My unending desire to know things—what we ache for, what our impulses are, what world we yearn to live in—both serve, and undo me. “Knowing you,” a friend once said, “I should have known you would have follow up questions.” I always do, reader, as I suspect you do as well. We want to peel back the layers, and find the heart of the onion. That’s what makes the sauce.

 

In a recent interview, we asked archaeobotanist Dr. Dorian Fuller just exactly how he peels back the layers of the years to tell us more about the history of millet cultivation. Would you believe me if I told you that archaeobotanists can sift through ancient, preserved remains of wood, nutshells, and seeds to tell us that kodo probably evolved as a weed of rice, and that bajra and jowar actually travelled to India from Africa? You can read more about his journey, and that of millets, in the full interview here.

And for our latest feature, food writer Shirin Mehrotra travelled through Chhindwara district in India’s central peninsula, to learn about why kutki (little millet) needs little water to grow, the most common way it is eaten, and why it has disappeared from the diets of Adivasi communities here. She also sourced a recipe from Fakir Chand Uikey, a farmer she met, for kutki rice and hare chane ka saag.

 

 

The third heart is to not eat alone. Of all of my desires, this one is the hardest to admit, and most tenacious. 

 

At the end of February, for a series of events we organised in Delhi under the Millet Revival Project, I ate and drank with many of you, and it was glorious. During our cooking and storytelling workshop, I noticed so many of us feeling more connected to each other, and to the dishes being cooked. 

During the millet mixer (which included a documentary screening of Jowar Gatha by farmer-director Laxminarayan Devda, The Locavore Shuffle, and ChefTZac’s pub quiz) food, and our ideas around it, paved the way to camaraderie, experimentation, questions, and joy. Building an appetite needs all of these, no?

 

Stories, poems, songs, folklore, histories—they feed us as much as food does. They bring our entire selves into the conversation, like we did at this Locavore Shuffle at Fig & Maple in Delhi. And then the table is heaped with not just what is cooked (here, another millet salad, developed by Chef Radhika Khandelwal), but who we are. Desire, made apparent.  Photos by ChefTZac.

 

In one of my favourite illustrated books, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, the Boy says to the Mole, “Isn’t it odd, we can only see our outsides but nearly everything happens on the inside.” 

 

And it does. But sometimes, when we are able to name our desires, their shapes emerge. My octopus slips and slides, defies enclosure. Still, sometimes I see her face, and it expresses clearly what is written on mine. There are times I have to unpeel her suckers, allowing myself to be in a place that is in between what I want, and what I must do. 

 

The more intimately I know her, the more easily I can swim with the tide, or against it.