Dear Locavore, During an argument with a friend, I asked, “But how will I find out what happens next?” "Sometimes, you just don’t,” he said. “You won’t know.” This is as confounding to me today as it was that moonlit night, walking Delhi’s deserted streets. I don’t like cliffhangers—if we dig deep, search through enough clues, stay up late and turn over that last page, surely we deserve…something? |
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The view that bears witness to my interminable questions, and the slow circling of my traffic-jammed mind as I sense-make, or don’t, depending on the day I’m having. Alternatively, where I’m writing to you from. Photo by Mukta Patil. |
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I have been writing these letters to you, reader, a year now. I say ‘letters’ because though I send you news about work—and millets—I have been indulgent. I’ve written about desire and tenderness, hunger and hands, fears and dreams, language and hope, and imagination. But food is all of this, isn’t it? Food letters, love letters, (fool letters!), if you will. They always begin and end at the same place: a list of questions that journey towards an answer-shaped cloud. I find this circularity pleasing; it stills something in me. Sometime in September, Yamini, our editor-in-chief, asked me to organise a discussion on interviewing. It is such a large part of the storytelling we do at The Locavore. I’m no expert, but I think something of my love for questions carried the day. I often find myself saying there’s no such thing as a bad question, but some can be more useful, more timely than others. Some blossom and multiply, others wilt, some we gently pack away for later like pressed flowers. A good interview then, is like a window; the questions let in the light. Who is this person I’m talking to, really? What do they know that’s amazing, or beautiful, or funny? What connects me to them? Their work to the world? |
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In a recent interview, scientist Dr. Ruth DeFries spoke to the Millet Revival Project about agricultural diversity, the Green Revolution, and how farmers aren’t reaping benefits from growing millets. Photo by Vipul Gupta. |
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In 2014, Dr. Ruth DeFries founded the Network for Conserving Central India, a platform for actors within this landscape to work together. In our interview with her, about her ongoing work in the region around millets, this was the question I loved most: |
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What kind of system wouldn’t model the Green Revolution, but, in some ways, balance sustainable land use while centering people’s needs? I know this is a difficult question, because it is a question of imagination, but you could go wherever you want to with it. |
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I hope you do enjoy cliffhangers, because you’ll have to read it to find out what she says. It’s good, I promise. |
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During his fieldwork in the early 2000s, anthropologist Dr. Bhrigupati Singh wondered about the dietary shift from millets to wheat, and what it had to do with water, in the region of Shahabad, Rajasthan. How did it affect eating habits and cultivating practices? When it came to making decisions, what really mattered to people? Photo courtesy of Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. |
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In our latest excerpt—an essay by Dr. Bhrigupati Singh from the compendium Living and Dying in the Contemporary World (2015) —he explores how tastes and desires, social hierarchies, and public policy intersect to create complicated lived realities around millets. These questions are slippery, the answers even more so. |
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Now the poor eat wheat every day, would they (or “we”) agree to restore millets to our diets? This depends on the value ascribed to millets, values that might be changeable. Accepting these tectonic movements, we might instead focus on how life (understood here as a sense of vitality and plenitude) waxes and wanes. What may have been life giving at a certain point—say, a growth spurt in wheat—may become life denying at a later point, in creating a water scarcity. Millets, which sustained life for centuries, were demoted. Perhaps at a later stage, soon enough, they may have to ascend again. The critical question is how to sense and participate in these waxing and waning movements at a given juncture. |
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Waxing and waning. Our questions, expectations, understandings, all morph with time. As more information filters in through the window, it makes it just a little bit wider, brighter. We can almost make out the view. What it takes, I think, is a fidelity with the shape-shifting questions. |
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At our recent Beyond The Plate session, an online discussion on the intricacies of our food systems, we asked how deeply the Green Revolution had impacted millet cultivation. Photo courtesy of The Locavore. |
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Sometimes we ask in retrospect. It could take years, decades; those pressed flowers found in a book you had all but forgotten. The big questions, the complicated ones. Like how our colonial past and political history primed India for the Green Revolution and a subsequent shift away from millets, and how it impacted indigenous cultivation practices. We then go back and examine the archives, fan out the evidence, course-correct. Followed by the question I both love and detest: what do we do, now? In many ways I find the answer to this in recipes. In supporting local food systems, in buying millets, in doing cooking, there can be a joyful interstice to feed, and to be fed. Try the Proso Millet Mushroom Risotto, the Jowar Moti Pulao, or the Little Millet and Sattu Parathas for dinner as the weather gets cooler, and maybe the Bajra and Sweet Potato Cutlets with chai. Don’t think. Just chop, mix, season, cook. Eat. Use your hands. |
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(L) Jowar Moti Pulao by Tejaswi Rathod. (R) Proso Millet Mushroom Risotto by Shreya Baid-Bothra. |
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When I don’t understand things, which is often, and get overwhelmed with questions (though I like them very much), I re-read Jeanette Winterson, whose obsession with questions, storytelling and, well, life, I find terrifying and comforting in equal measure. And this brings me back full-circle (told you!) to my friend, and our argument. In one of Winterson’s books, the protagonist, Silver, is asked for a story. |
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“What story? The story of what happened next. That depends. On what? On how I tell it.” |
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A little bit of him then, and a little bit of me: we don’t quite know, but we reach. How should we tell this story now, reader? What happens next? |
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Editorial Lead, Millet Revival Project |
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Sowing A Climate-First Future |
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Bandra
Bombay, Maharashtra 400050, India |
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