Millets and me
Fig 1: Millets!
Even a single stalk of millet can revive a dying man (1)
This is an old saying from Nagaland, India, and it aptly captures the significance of millets in earlier times. Millets were amongst the earliest crops domesticated by humans, and are thought to have eased the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society. They are basically a group of small-seeded grasses grown around the world, especially in the arid regions of Asia and Africa. Millets are highly nutritious and can be grown in regions of low soil fertility with little inputs such as irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. They used to be a staple food of communities across Asia and Africa until about half a century ago. In India, the onset of the Green Revolution in the 1960s resulted in a dramatic increase in the production of rice and wheat, thereby pushing millets to the background. An entire generation or two, including mine, grew up without having tasted millets on a regular basis. Perhaps that could be the reason why, despite spending my growing up years in India, I practically knew nothing about them. Although I had heard about bajra (Pearl millet) and ragi (Finger millet), and even consumed them as an infant, they were not a part of our regular diet. When my firstborn started on solids, I began searching for healthy homemade alternatives to store-bought baby food. That’s when I came across “sathu maavu”, a traditional baby food. It is a wholesome baby meal consisting of 20-25 ingredients, including an assortment of millets, pulses and nuts. Several of the ingredients are sprouted and toasted before use, in order to improve digestibility and bioavailability of nutrients. Sathu maavu was the one thing that made me a passionate advocate of millets; it literally fueled my inexhaustible son! I was quite surprised and, frankly, a bit sheepish that I hadn’t heard about these grains before. Thus began the journey of exploring millets, which led me to a wonderful world comprising a wide variety of grains with different flavors and nutritional profiles. To my pleasant surprise, 8 years later, the journey continues - as you will discover in my coming posts!
