Recipes for Reclaiming Food
Food sovereignty refers to the right of people for access to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. Any attempts towards food sovereignty or against hunger cannot be isolated from its politics, the involvement of caste and gender. The modernisation and homogenisation of food systems - from agricultural production to consumption via markets - has caused the elimination of multitudes of local and traditional varieties of food and recipes. It also looks down upon the culture and practices of many of the communities. 'Recipes for Food Reclamation' is an attempt to to understand and document the essential ingredients needed to assert democratic control over our food system and also show methods/ processes of effective collectives who are not just challenging the industrial, corporate-controlled, market-led food system but are also creating gender and caste revolutions through their inclusive, sustainable, community owned initiatives.
Ajam Emba
Ajam Emba is an indigenous slow food eatery and training centre based at Ranchi, Jharkhand. It is the brainchild of Aruna Tirkey, a rural development worker turned entrepreneur. Aruna realised that despite wide food diversity (close to 9,000 varieties of green leafy vegetables are known to the local tribal population), and an equally wide diversity of cuisine, the state’s indigenous foods remain fairly unknown. Not just in the mainstream food culture, but also within her state, dominant cuisines from other states were easily accessible and far more popular. Over the last few years, changing food habits and preferences have also contributed to the disappearance of many culinary traditions of Jharkhand.
Aruna started Ajam Emba in 2018 to revive and popularize indigenous cuisines, promote local women entrepreneurs and benefit native organic farmers of Jharkhand. It also aims to build a viable and sustainable business, both environmentally and economically.
Name of the Recipe:
Ajam Emba, meaning great tasting and healthy food, is a Kurukh phrase, (a Dravidian language spoken by Oraon and Kisan tribes of Jharkhand)
Under what category does this recipe come?
The recipe is about fostering pride in adivasi culture
Place of origin of the recipe. Brief history of its origin.
While walking around in a newly opened department store in Ranchi, Aruna saw a packet of ragi (finger millet) flour, locally known as madua, a popular staple of her own Oraon community, being sold at a price so high, many members of her own community couldn’t afford it. Aruna, who grew up eating millet, had slowly watched its displacement from her community’s diet. Traditional indigenous diets were being increasingly replaced by commercially produced rice, which is widely supplied through the government’s Public Distribution System, often free for families that are below the poverty line under the Food Security Program. This sadly affects the production of locally grown heritage grains such as millets - the backbone of indigenous food and the consumption patterns of local communities. This realization led her to start Ajam Emba, to focus on reviving heirloom grains and preserving tribal culinary knowledge.
Purpose of the Recipe:
Revives and popularizes the indigenous food of Jharkhand as a means of healthy living amongst a cross-section of society
Preserves and celebrates native food culture
Brings in innovation to indigenous food and cuisine for wider societal adoption
Creates a pool of local food entrepreneurs to sustain the mission
Ensures fair returns to Indigenous farmers and forest-produce collectors
Build a viable and sustainable business, both environmentally and economically
Essential ingredients:
Forgotten ingredients
Time to slow cook
Pride in indigenous wisdom and cuisine
Female entrepreneurship
Experimentation
A partnership with millet farmers, local fishermen, and forest-produce collectors
Method:
Put the looming threat of urbanisation and commercialisation over indigenous food systems in a mortar and smash it into a coarsely ground paste
Temper the bitterness of the paste by squeezing on it a zest of the cultural and culinary traditions of the Oraon community, the flora and fauna of Jharkhand, the 900 herbs infused with health and nutrition and the tastes and smells of the nearby forests
Gather local women from the community. Marinate their traditional wisdom and culinary knowledge in the sauce of entrepreneurship and economic development. Slow cook the marinated preparation in earthen pots over wood fires to blend in the flavours of rural hinterland with some modern methods
Pour in some local partnerships with millet farmers, local fishermen, and forest-produce collectors
Now prepare the serving space by garnishing it with a mural celebrating the village life, some bamboo elements, uncultivated seasonal leaves and flowers and earthenware cups and cutlery to recreate the lesser-known, sustainable and simple rural life of the community
Ajam Emba, the indigenous slow food eatery and training center, is now ready. Spread the patia (mat made from leaves of wild palm bush) to seat the diners on the ground
Plate the local cuisine of gorgora roti (desi pizza), mutton handi, jirhul and kudrum (wild flowers), ghonghi (local snails), phutkal (a leafy green), getu (a boneless freshwater fish) and gondli halwa (wild rice dessert) on sal (Shorea robusta) leaves
Serve with pride
Benefits/impact of the dish:
Today, Ajam Emba is one of the state’s most prominent woman-led initiatives. The slow food restaurant-cum-training centre in Ranchi is entirely managed by tribal women and girls. The place has also become a conversation starter on sustainable local farming practices and has managed to create awareness and appreciation for indigenous food which is not just high on nutrition but also has a low carbon footprint.
Any special instructions:
Always eat Ajam Emba (great tasting and healthy food)!
Deccan Development Society
Deccan Development Society (DDS) is a grassroots organisation working with women’s sanghams (voluntary village level associations of the poor) in about 80 villages in Sangareddy district of Telangana. The 5,000 women members of DDS are the poorest of the poor in their village communities. Most of them are Dalits, the lowest group in the Indian social hierarchy. What started off as a way of ensuring the simple sustenance needs of the marginalised communities, has become a tool of empowerment for them to address the larger issues of food security, natural resource enhancement, education and health. Over the years the leadership of the DDS has increasingly been taken over by the local women who have evolved over the years into a strong political force.
Name of the Recipe:
Mana Pantalu - Mana Vantalu (Our Crops - Our Cuisines)
Under what category does this recipe come?
The recipe is about food and nutrition sovereignty and food security
Place of origin of the recipe. Brief history of its origin.
Led by PV Satheesh, development specialists and committed intellectuals, the non-governmental organisation called Deccan Development Society (DDS) was founded in 1983, in Zaheerabad, a rural town in the barren arid region of the Deccan Plateau, Telangana.
PV Satheesh, a young media professional working in Hyderabad, visited the villages of Zaheerabad for his field work, over 35 years ago. The region, regularly hit by drought, was barren and was left both ecologically and economically devastated. He met with the poorest of the people, landless peasants who worked for the landlords for a pittance of grains. The initial, short-term goal of the DDS project was simply to enable the villagers to eat a second meal each day. But that goal expanded into a larger, long-term enterprise of self-empowerment. Over three and a half decades, thousands of women have escaped from working as low-paid, bonded labourers, to become self-reliant farmers capable of growing enough to feed their households. They have created an extraordinary commons-based system of ‘food sovereignty’ and ‘food security’ by controlling their own seeds, reviving their highly nutritional traditional food, managing their own lands, and nourishing the soil with organic manures.
Purpose of the Recipe:
The recipe shows the way to create sustainable and inclusive food systems by also providing alternatives to corporate-controlled, market-led food systems
It provides autonomy over food production, seeds, natural resources and markets
Respect for traditional knowledge systems, crops, and food of the marginalised communities
Social, ecological and gender justice
Essential ingredients:
Rocks of Resilience - Dalit women like Laxmamma, Anjamma, Manemma, Anasuyamma, Chandramma, Sammamma and others from 50 villages of the Zaheerabad region with their equally resilient millet crops are sowing crop diversity, to harvest food security
The Strength of Sanghams - consolidating village groups, turning them into vibrant organs of local governance and federating them into a strong pressure-lobby for the poor and the marginalised communities
Satyam Pantalu (Crops of truth) - Agro-biological diversity of local, indigenous crops that make fewer demands in terms of water, soil or fertiliser
Pannendu Pantalu (Fruits of Diversity) - a well developed mixed cultivation system that combines risk reduction with the optimum use of scarce resources
Seeds - of indigenous wisdom
Perseverance - continuing dialogues, debates and other educational activities with the community
Patience - to make the unproductive land cultivable, to focus on diet diversity, to set up an alternative Public Distribution System - People's PDS (Community Grain Fund) and seed bank (Community gene bank)
Method:
Start by kneading a tight dough of women’s sanghams. Set it aside till it rises to escape the vicious cycle of low yields, labour, soil erosion, debt and the marginalisation of caste, land, gender and food
Gently roll it and spread it evenly to form a large inclusive base for knowledge sharing and reviving traditional agriculture
Carry this base along with start-up finance from the DDS to the degraded agricultural lands left untended due to incapacity to invest. Add to this some vermicompost, livestock manure, biomass, neem leaves and 1.2 million eco-employment days (also called women’s collective labor) to make 10,000 acres of land ready for sowing again
Sprinkle some seeds - not Sarkari Vittanalu (Government seeds that grow mono crops of cotton, soyabean and industrial maize) but old, local, indigenous, nearly forgotten seeds, kept safely in straw baskets in sealed clay pots, with village mothers and grandmothers. Use Pannendu Pantalu - the mixed cultivation 12 crop system to savour the diverse flavours of Satyam Pantalu (Crops of truth) - millets, lentils, pulses, grains, uncultivated foods, fruits and medicinal plants on the land
Next, Prepare People’s PDS (a system of subsidised ration shops) - a stock of community grain fund from the excess millets and pulses and serve it in times of food scarcity to support the poorest, elderly and the disabled in the village. This not only reduces the dependency on the Government’s PDS system which consists of rice (an alien grain), but is also local, culturally appropriate and more nutritious. This food provision system makes the village self-sufficient, as over time, enough grain is grown for everyone to get through the lean season without having to face hunger or migrate to work as day labourers. Use the surplus stock to sell locally to fund community development programmes
Simultaneously, prepare pots of seeds, add some neem leaves and start a community gene bank where seeds can only be shared, borrowed or traded
Continue stirring the pot of food sovereignty by establishing community-owned mobile markets and widening the circle of consumers for forgotten foods
Benefits/impact of the dish:
Marginalised women now have full autonomy on their land, their resources, their seeds, crops and their cuisines. The upper caste rich men are coming to them seeking seeds: a position which has an extraordinary historical significance
Marginalised lands have found new value because of the upgrading of their productivity through use of manure and better tending
Marginalised crops have started moving centre stage defining new relationships with people. Low-status foods which have greater nutritional value but due to market and media manipulation had receded to the background are gaining new strength and are in the process of becoming Status foods
Community-controlled farming avoids most external market dependencies while providing genuine security and hope
Any special instructions:
Save your seeds. Save your crops.
Farm2Food Foundation
Farm2Food is a non-profit social enterprise based in the Jorhat district of Assam, which works closely with government schools and local communities to promote sustainable farm-based livelihoods. The brainchild of Deep Jyoti Sonu, a young social entrepreneur with two decades of experience in the education and youth development sector, the foundation was started by him and his friends with an intention to reshape the negative attitude of young people towards agriculture. Their flagship program, ‘FarmPreneur’ aims to impart training, tools, and knowledge in farm and food entrepreneurship by setting up nutrition gardens in schools and supporting their process of learning self-sustaining and organic methods of growing their own food, eating healthy, learning about nutrition, and becoming entrepreneurs.
Name of the Recipe:
Creating an army of FarmPreneurs
Under what category does this recipe come?
This recipe supports sustainable farm-based livelihoods by making the youth see farming as an attractive business and also enables them to become farm and food entrepreneurs
Place of origin of the recipe. Brief history of its origin.
Jorhat, Assam
Assam has a fragile economy and ecology as the region suffers from poverty, underdevelopment, civil conflict and frequent floods. The agricultural sector, which employs over 70% of the region’s population, is characterized by low productivity, often attributed to its laid-back culture and lack of an entrepreneurial approach in spite of having the most fertile lands. Farming is unattractive to the younger generation, who increasingly migrate to other places in the pursuit of alternative livelihoods. Food is often imported from neighbouring states and monocropping of tea has led to extensive loss in biodiversity. Under such circumstances, Farm2food is working with some of the most disadvantaged communities in Assam’s rural districts enabling unemployed youth to become farm and food entrepreneurs with a larger vision to build a North-East that is unshackled, prosperous, self-reliant and peaceful.
Purpose of the Recipe:
Farm2Food’s work in Assam has transformative potential on multiple fronts:
Ecological – by engaging in organic farming and reviving indigenous crop varieties
Social – by uplifting educational and nutritive status of marginalised groups
Economic – by creating an army of ‘farm and agripreneurs’
Cultural – by keeping traditional knowledge alive
Essential ingredients:
Organic farming
Nutrition
Education
Method:
To prepare a healthy mix of farming, nutrition, and education, start by preparing a carefully crafted school curriculum for children to learn the concepts of science, maths and economics, simply by teaching them to grow their own food
Get a batch of young, curious minds kick-started on their journey of becoming FarmPreneurs through a beej-daan yatra (Seed Donation drive) where children go door to door to visit their village elders who share seeds of local indigenous crops and tips for growing them
Next, start the nutrition gardens in the school premises that will also act as laboratories for learning and experimenting. Mix the textbook theories with practical knowledge. Toss the fundamentals of geometry - shapes, area, volume etc with sessions on creating raised soil beds for the plants. Whip up observations on different kinds of insects, bugs, and earthworms, to understand their roles in growing a kitchen garden
From the time of planting the seeds to harvesting the garden, ensure that the students are completely soaked in knowledge regarding the nutrient content of the fruits and vegetables they have cultivated
When the produce from the garden is ready, it can be sold to schools for mid day meals, and alongside, also sell vermi-compost, vermi-wash, and bio-pesticides - all prepared by the students themselves. The students not just get nutritious meals but also a small income from the sale of the produce, giving them a taste of entrepreneurship
An army of self-sustained ‘FarmPreneurs’ is now ready. They grow their own food, profit from it and also eat healthy!
Benefits/impact of the dish:
In less than a decade, ’Farm2Food’ has established more than 5,000 School Nutrition Gardens - impacting over 100,000 young people across the country. This model has been replicated by the government in 1.2 million schools and many local families have also adopted sustainable farming practices by learning from these young students.
Any special instructions:
Get children to grow their own food and allow them to gain a sense of self-reliance
Tenacious Bee Collective
Tenacious Bee Collective (TBC) is working collectively with rural communities in Himachal to build sustainable circular economies around small scale beekeeping. They encourage, train, and equip their community to cultivate local grains, herbs and flora organically, in order to replenish local biodiversity- as well as their incomes. All in service of the bees. Increased biodiversity + Zero pesticide farming = More bees. More Bees = More avenues for sustainable, local employment + entrepreneurship.
Name of the Recipe:
Learning from the Bees
Under what category does this recipe come?
This recipe provides alternatives to corporate-controlled, market-led food system
Place of origin of the recipe. Brief history of its origin.
Tenacious Bee's journey started with a quest for pure raw honey, and a chance meeting of the co-founders, Malini and Kunal, at a community driven art exhibition in Delhi. Kunal is from Himachal, and grew up seeing beekeepers flourish around his town. However, when he went in search of these beekeepers in 2018, he found none. Instead Malini and Kunal discovered a host of problems that plague the beekeeping industry- starting with a noticeable decrease in bee populations. The industrial honey complex has driven good beekeepers away, made bee populations unhealthy, and flooded the market with poor quality honey or its substitutes. Combining their interests of engaging with rural communities for collective action, and developing exciting avenues of sustainable employment for Himachali youth, they set up Tenacious Bee Collective in a rural hamlet with a vision to address some of these issues at the scale of the community. Learning from the Bees, the collective aims to strengthen local biodiversity and ecology, while building sustainable systems to ethically harvest hive produce to supplement rural economies.
Purpose of the Recipe:
This recipe is for those who want to strengthen local economies and ecologies through site specific interventions that help foster community driven action for sustainable growth
Essential ingredients:
Love for nature, the environment and all her generous bounty. And a passion to preserve, protect and nurture her
Beekeepers who care about bees
Community members passionate about learning and contributing to sustainable local growth
Support from local governance
Traditional Knowledge from the community on herbs, flora, nuts and grains that are indigenous to their region
Wisdom from the scientists to learn best practices
A keen eye for design, representation and storytelling
A zeal to collaborate with a wide range of creative makers and professionals to grow the project
Method:
Start with boiling 1 litre water into a low simmering rage about the injustices being wrought upon our precious natural resources, leading to loss of biodiversity, declining bee populations, forcing farmers and beekeepers into exploitative, harmful practices and flooding the market with unhealthy products labeled as healthy
Add a generous portion of educating yourself on the nuances of the problem; grind these spices together slowly, until the aromas of a new idea start to waft around you
Prepare a base broth of a community that is keen to learn, engage, exchange, experiment. Cook this on a low simmer till ideas start to become reality; give it time, slow cooking tastes the best
Add to this base broth a flavour bomb of design, graphics, and creative story telling. These flavours will bring to life the otherwise abstract realities of rural living to audiences that are usually unaware
Slice large pieces of knowledge - traditional and scientific - and bind these diverse colours together to form new systems of doing things; find new ways of engaging and co-learning
Bake it all together at 250 F for the perfect recipe to empower communities to build their own sustainable local growth engines, driven by bees and nature in all her bounty
Benefits/impact of the dish:
The TBC team in the village- led by 6 Gaddi women have become confident, outspoken, professional members of the community over past three years. They speak their minds freely and help run the operations with tremendous efficiency
The network of beekeepers across Himachal- few, but critical who are keen to learn and adopt more ethical practices, and work with TBC to revive local bee populations
An increasing number of community members are asking about beekeeping, maintaining traditional hives, and permaculture farming practices, looking to adopt some of TBC’s learnings on their own farms. This is a huge step towards encouraging local farmers to grow more biodiverse crops on their small farms to increase bee habitats, and stop pesticide use
TBC’s informative and engaging content has a wide and diverse following online, providing new opportunities for collaboration and exchange. They have become like the bees- pollinating new ideas with every flower they meet
By creating a direct link between the consumers of food and the producer-makers of food, this recipe has made it possible to trace the origins of what we choose to put in our bodies. This is a critical step towards reclaiming our traditional food systems and sovereignty
Any special instructions:
Support sustainable grassroots initiatives, or start one of your own- it’s the only way to save the planet
Recipe by Malini Kochupillai- the co-founder of Tenacious Bee Collective
Forgotten Greens
Forgotten Greens is a three years old project by Shruti Tharayil. Started as a mere social media page aiming to share knowledge about uncultivated plants, Forgotten Greens has evolved into a platform that speaks about urban and conscious foraging, decolonisation of food by localising and contextualising local food and traditional knowledge system.
Name of the Recipe:
Foraging Forgotten Greens
Under what category does this recipe come?
This recipe challenges the notion of 'food insecurity'
Place of origin of the recipe. Brief history of its origin.
The recipe originated in the fields of Telangana on a hot summer afternoon. Ten years ago, Satyamma, Shruti’s mentor in foraging, took her to a farm and foraged Gangabai Kura (Portulaca oleracea) which she cooked into a delicious lentil based curry to be eaten along with millet bread. Shruti noticed how the succulent leaves of the Gangabai Kura melted into the lentil she cooked, giving the dish a slightly tangy flavour. As she foraged the greens under the scorching heat, she vividly remembers Satyamma’s narration of how Gangabai Kura helps in cooling the body during summer and was traditionally eaten in the region. It was the first time Shruti ate these greens which she thought were weeds. It marked the beginning of her journey into foraging for uncultivated edible greens.
Purpose of the Recipe:
The recipe is for those who wish to connect to the wealth of nature in their own ecosystem. The recipe challenges the notion that nature is out there in the forest and cannot be accessed in urban spaces. One of the main focuses of Forgotten Greens has been to address the abundance of nature within the concrete jungles. Another purpose the recipes serve is challenging the notion of 'food insecurity'. There is a widespread sense of food insecurity often pushed by neo-colonial players like the big corporations and governments. The perceived insecurity comes from schooled ideas about what is considered 'food'. Forgotten Greens has been attempting to decolonise this distorted concept of food, because when we start noticing all the uncultivated edible greens growing in our public spaces, we will notice the bio-diverse abundance we have, that we are unaware of.
Essential ingredients:
Traditional knowledge holders
Willingness to walk into the unknown
Curiosity to learn
Openness to constantly unlearn
Willingness to eat unconventional foods
Social media
Grit to be innovative with the much saturated social media platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp
Networking with other like hearted beings working in similar area, innovating with opportunities like the nationwide lockdown during the COVID19 Pandemic.
Method:
Take a cup full of passion for traditional knowledge systems and whisk it well. Whenever you see anyone (children or elders) eating or foraging a new vegetable, meat or greens, don’t hesitate to ask them about it. This recipe requires a generous amount of knowledge sharing
Take a teaspoon full of chronicling your own community's culinary history. Research about your own community’s uncultivated food traditions. Reconnect with your own heritage and ancestral knowledge. Root yourself in the land that has birthed you. Reclaim your traditional foods
Add a pinch of love for research and documentation - Talk to people from different communities about their traditional food systems. Document and present the information in a way which could connect to the readers on social media
Pour 1/2 cup of zeal for using social media - Social media is a highly saturated space especially when it comes to content making. However, social media has a profound impact on people in today's times and there is huge potential for small scale, self designed initiatives to reach people
Bring all these together and bake it into an initiative that is organically evolving. Add some well roasted iteration like a re-wilding food festival, enabling knowledge holders working on sustainable consumption of wild foods to share their experiences
Don't forget to garnish with a persistence to work towards reviving and rediscovering the fast disappearing knowledge system
Benefits/impact of the dish:
Forgotten Greens has reached a wide audience of more than 1000 people through its personal course and talks. After each programme at least two participants share about their shift in perspective about food. Through social media engagement, many individuals have shared about how after reading about a particular plant, they went back and began chronicling their own community's forgotten food. Similar social media handles have popped up sharing about the uncultivated greens growing in their own bio-regions. There are farms that started including many of the uncultivated greens and berries in their vegetable baskets, after going through the information shared on the Forgotten Greens instagram handle.
Any special instructions:
Forgotten Greens is solely run via the programmes and talks it hosts. Continuing the work sometimes can be daunting with the financial push and pull. If you like the recipes, do share it with your loved ones. Word of mouth is the only way initiatives like these reach more people.
Recipe by Shruti Tharayil- the founder of Forgotten Greens
Illustrated by Amrita Das
Amrita Das: Painting was a subject which attracted Amrita since childhood and in 2004 she joined the Mithila Art Institute. She loves to draw sketches on contemporary issues and women empowerment. Her debut children’s book ‘Hope is a Girl selling Fruit’ is a huge success and has inspired Amrita to continue her journey as an art devotee .