Dear Locavore,

 

Clean narratives are suspect. Stories nest inside silences, blank spaces on a canvas sometimes speak louder than what is visible, and history is only a perspective, what we choose to remember. 

 

Omissions and marginalisations—oftentimes violent ones—have historically intersected with how we see and eat some foods over others. At The Locavore, we have been questioning how consumption patterns get demarcated along identities, ways of life, access to resources, and what place millets occupy in the margins of this story.

 

The forthcoming edition of the Millet Revival Project’s Beyond the Plate—a panel discussion featuring Dimum Pertin, Dr. Bhrigupati Singh, and Big Fat Bao, moderated by Dr. Chubbamenla Jamir—will address these questions and the impact that they have had on millets. 

Millet cultivation has dwindled on India’s agricultural map, with rice and wheat systematically overshadowing millets in the last few decades. This has led to a host of marginalisations: from new forms of agriculture that sideline indigenous knowledge and ways of cultivation, to diets that are far less diverse, and even in access to the grains themselves—who used to consume them, and who can afford them now. 

 

Join us for the online panel discussion, ‘Understanding Millets and Marginalisation’ on 13 August 2024, between 5.30 and 7.00 pm. 

Sign up for our free session here, or click the button below!

Beyond the Plate sessions are hosted by The Locavore in collaboration with the Rainmatter Foundation, to uncover the nuances of our foodways and the complicated history of millets across India, interrogating commonly held ideas around them.

Dimum Pertin is a passionate advocate for sustainable agriculture and cultural revival from Arunachal Pradesh. She is the founder of Gepo Aali, an initiative she established two years ago to revive lost crops and intertwine food with language. One of the lost crops Dimum works with is Anyat millet, or Job’s Tears. It has all but disappeared from fields and plates, though women farmers of the Adi tribe are now making an effort to revive it. 

 

Dr. Bhrigupati Singh, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Ashoka University, is author of Poverty and the Quest for Life. He writes about fine and coarse foods. Lower down the caste hierarchy, diets became “coarser”, he says. This extends beyond millets versus rice or wheat, to vegetables that were differentiated as ‘naram’ versus ‘jungli’ or cooking meat with expensive condiments and spices as opposed to boiling it with just salt and red chilli powder. 

 

Big Fat Bao is an illustrator and designer whose work focuses on the impact of caste on design, food, gender, and ecology, and the propagation of casteist cultural narratives through them. In 2021, their incredible illustrated series on Caste and Food opened conversations around the history and violence of foodways. They write, about the series, “As much as food is a site for knowledge, it is also a site of oppression, humiliation, and claim for modernity. In many ways, it deems people lowly due to their food practices.” 

 

The session will be moderated by Dr. Chubbamenla Jamir, Founder and Director of Nattive Foodsscape Foundation. Dr. Jamir is the Co-lead for the Thematic Working Group on Mountain Food System, Himalayan Universities Consortium, with expertise in climate change adaptation, agriculture, and food security. 

 

I hope you join us as we learn more about the many marginalisations communities experience while growing and consuming millets. And if you think of someone who might be interested, please share this newsletter and bring them along!