Barnyard millet tart, millet doughnuts and sugar-free ‘caramel’ sweets. These are just some dishes on the menu at Yumiko Otani’s Tubu-Tubu cooking classes for the culinarily curious.
Tubu-Tubu is the nickname Yumiko has given to millets and sorghum, her favourite...
In Boiram village, in Gambia’s Central River Region, there is hardly a family that doesn’t grow millets. Here, at the heart of the West African country, the small grains are a staple held in high regard.
“We prepare millet dishes for dinner for the e...
Mamoutou Traoré takes pride in coming from a long line of millet producers in Mali’s semi-arid Koulikoro region. Although millets are popular here, his father’s production had gradually declined over the decades, he says, so when Mamoutou started farming his own land, it was up to...
As the sun rises over Asinge Village in western Kenya, Josephine Okolodi checks on her fields of finger millet with a mix of worry and excitement. For years, Josephine and other smallholder farmers here, an hour-and-a-half’s drive north of Lake Victoria, have struggled to find a ...
Speak to an older farmer in Senegal and chances are they’ll vividly remember the 1970s. Recurring droughts that decimated crops and tested the resilience of Senegalese farming families. But as often is the case, hardship also sparked mobilization, and some 50 years l...
Chef Mokgadi Itsweng from South Africa knows that her work is about more than just cooking food – it’s also about teaching its origins. "Chefs are important because they can tell not only the story of the farmer but also the story of the ingredient on a plate," ...
Watching Ahmet Alper Güner inspect the lush foxtail millet growing in his fields on the edge of Denizli, in western Türkiye, few people would think he started producing only seven years ago. Even fewer could imagine the unconventional journey that brought him here. &n...
Allow us to introduce you to your new favourite cooking staple”, the South Tyrolean company Dr Schär, which produces food for special nutritional needs, boasts on its website. The secret ingredient? “Sorghum.”
While the company has been using the grain for years in its glut...
One of Falguni Shah’s earliest memories is hiding in a bull-drawn cart full of wheat and millets, watching farmers bring in the harvest on her grandfather’s land in Gujarat in northwest India.
It was the 1980s, and three-year-old Falu, as sh...
For Naima Dhore, millets bring up memories. She fondly remembers eating them for breakfast as a child in Somalia – the home she and her family had to flee as a child because of a civil war. Now, living thousands of miles away in the United States of Amer...
If one were to fly from the northernmost point of Chad down to its southern border with the Central African Republic, the country’s many climates would reveal themselves in the landscapes below: miles of harsh Sahara sands would give way to the shrub-speckled Sahel and ultimately ...
On a recent sunny morning, some 30 locals gathered in a shed in Narrabri, on the east coast of Australia, to watch bushels of native grasses disappear into various machines. Others were thrown onto old-fashioned sieves, where skilled hands extracted kernels from stalks. When ...
The first time Thaís Barbosa dos Santos saw millets, it was on the shelf of a store that sold animal feed. She was still a child then, growing up in the Southeast of Brazil, and she had no connection to the grain that could suggest it would become the centre of her career. ...
Sitting on the front porch of her home, Anjamma Nadimidoddi proudly displays her seed collection of 80 rainfed crops – most of them millets, pulses and oilseeds. She never went to school or read about them anywhere. Yet, she knows everything there is to know about these seeds, th...
Digging a spade into the soil around Xinglongwa, some 600 km northeast of Beijing, can bring up a lot of history. Today, it’s a bustling town, but its fame comes from the prehistoric settlements that were discovered here in the 1980s, including the oldest-known village in China, ...
Mariam Kouanda has been producing millets since her early childhood. Not a rainy season has passed where she did not grow, she says. “I grew millets with my parents and I still produce them in my own household – it has become like a custom for us.”
Mariam...
When he started his own farm more than three decades ago, Patrick Mutepeya didn’t think twice about growing maize. Raised in rural Zimbabwe, where maize had always been king and the harvests of the 1980s plentiful, it was the obvious choice to make.
He witnes...
