Going back to our ancestors

Juar or Jwari is a millet and almost all across rural India, people eat this energy rich food, on a day-to-day basis. In English parlance, it is known a sorghum and news is that rich nutritious millet is gaining immense popularity and is a big thing on menus. Sorghum, once a staple foodgrain along with other millets lost out to rice and wheat over time, is now making a comeback in Indian kitchens, with a health-conscious middle-class increasing its millet consumption.

Eatrite, the food-processing arm of the Indian Institute of Millets Research (IIMR) is busy preparing chips, biscuits and flour made of this millet for a Mumbai-based retail chain. And India Inc is taking note of this comeback. Britannia, ITC, Heritage Fresh and 11 other corporate firms have showed interest in the technologies that make valued added products using sorghum. They have joined hands with IIMR to bring into place a standardized protocol for the grain and spend its energies and resources on research to create seed varieties that can trigger a demand to the nondescript crop, whose sowing area is vanishing over decades.

The area of sorghum acreage dwindled to 6-7 million hectares now from 18 mha in 1960s, with cash crops, rice and wheat devouring the area of traditional crops.  It is indeed good that this ubiquitous and humble millet is finally gaining its due and getting the place on Indian menus that it deserves.

What this also indicates is much deeper – our ancestors might have lived  a very simple life, with no complexities of technology but they ate well and knew exactly what to eat. Today, we have all the knowledge at our disposal but yet we eat so unhealthy. Looks like in many ways, we are going back to their life styles….