Dumbing down our food systems
Us: So, what do you think you’re grandparents ate when they were children?”
Child: No akka (sister) , our grandparents didn’t have any ‘thindi’ (food) those days.”
Us: What do you mean they did not have any food? Did they starve?
Child: No…my grandmother told me they used to eat tubers from the forest, meat and other forest produce
Me: So, isn’t that food as well?
“Child: No! But they did not eat ‘annam’ (rice) like we do!
A student during one of our conversations
Our young initiative — Rela has been working on exploring inspiring learning spaces for adivasi children and youth from rural Andhra Pradesh. As we take our first baby steps, we engaged with government run Gurukulam hostel schools run specifically for adivasi children. Rela’s approach has been working with children towards co-creating a fearless and joyful space for learning where inquisitiveness is celebrated rather than condemned. Our work involves exploring various facets of sustainability not just in the contemporary context but also attempting to understand it from their traditional contexts.
During one of our sessions around food systems, we asked the children what their ancestors ate. The children promptly said in unison that their grandparents didn’t eat any food. When probed further we realized that they did not grow rice as their staple food then which the children are forced to eat in the hostels without any scope for experiencing millets, tubers and whatever constituted their traditional food. So understandably, they qualified anything other than rice failed to qualify as “food”. This pushed us to explore more about their fast disappearing traditional food systems which the present generation considers a sham as compared to their “abundant rice”.
The dominance of white rice
Rice has been a fairly recent food which has rapidly taken over the food systems of various communities who were otherwise sovereign. The taking over of rice over other indigenous crops (mainly millets) has happened through the introduction of various government schemes which gave subsidized rice as part of the Public Distribution System. Rice varities such as barnyard millet, foxtail millet, sorghum etc have slowly disappeared with the introduction of the polished white rice. There has been a steep fall in the production of millets since 1960s in India.
“We don’t grow our food anymore”
Through our conversations with various indigenous communities of Andhra Pradesh, one common thread has been how they do not grow their traditional food anymore. In my experience I have observed the communities that are more in tune with “development” and “modernity” are disconnecting to their traditional food systems than the ones which still live as “primitive”. One of reasons for not growing of traditional millets was according to the Jatapu community was the introduction of cashew plantation schemes which took over their agricultural fields as it taught them to depend on the market for survival.
Food defining identities
You might find it strange that something like food is given so much importance. Isn’t it something that we eat and forget about? The fast paced urban lifestyle is all about buying food from a supermarket cooking it and gulping it down sitting in front of a television. A consumer does not bother about where the food comes from, who all it connects to in the process of reaching the plate or even where the poop goes eventually.
Through conversations what I gathered is that adivasis have always been sovereign about their food systems. They controlled the seeds and the process of growing their own food. In most of the communities that I have seen, women have been the seed savers for the next agricultural cycle.
Food not only means control over what we grow but also plays a very important role in the culture and adivasi identity. Their festivals revolve heavily around the agricultural and food cycles — for example, the Konda Reddys celebrate the ‘Mamadi Pandaga’ (mango festival) which commemorates the mango season after which they consume the fruit. Jatapu tribes from Vizianagram district of andhra Pradesh no longer grow their traditional food (mainly millets) as they have been growing cashew on their agricultural fields. The mono plantations of cashewnuts, rubber, eucalyptus etc. promoted by government have completely changed the landscape in these areas.
The changing relation of the adivasis to their bodies of knowledge clearly reflects in the Koya folksong where the daughter is unable to process, pound, boil and cook the gantey[1] grains which her mother gave her in the morning and asks her mother to teach her the process. The song subtly narrates the disappearance of knowledge in the present generation and the intricate relationship shared by food crops and women interwoven by culture.
Gantey nicho, Gantey sallo,
Me poee eetasallo,
Useenjo eeta sallo, Uskana nalango,
Eskana aero salloo, koskana tudoo……
Food system & education system???
One might wonder, what has the education system has to do anything with the food systems of adivasi communities? Adivasis/ tribals or indigenous are considered “backward” not just by the government but also by the larger mainstream society. This often puts them in the limelight whenever someone thinks of “helping for the betterment of the downtrodden”. Sadly, the “charitable” and “developing the backward” mindset has done more harm than anything else to the adivasis. As part of one of the programmes by the government, the children from adivasi communities are put into hostel schools at an early stage of their childhood. These hostels are like the chicken coop that we see as part of the industrial farming system. All the children are expected to get up at the same time, wear the same clothes, speak the same mainstream language (either English or Telugu) and eat the same food. Due to various reasons (corruption, general mindset towards adivasi children) the children live in deplorable conditions. As part of the regime the food they eat often involve low quality rice and dal. Children are conditioned to think that rice is better than the millets or the forest produce they get at home. As these children are admitted into the hostel schools at an early childhood (as early as class 3) they grow up unaware about the different cuisines that their culture cooks. When they go back home during vacations or after school, they constantly look for rice for which their taste buds have gotten accustomed to. Often when we ask the children about the food they eat at home some of them have responded by saying,
“Akka, you won’t like what we cook. Your food is much better than ours”
For a short period as part of our work we spent some time in a remote village with the kondareddy community. We were excited to stay in the village and eat the food that the community ate. However our host constantly apologized for feeding us the “low quality” food according to her, which included wild mushrooms, bamboo shoots, forest tubers. It took us more than a month to make her understand that we prefer food that is organically and naturally produced than the chemically grown vegetables we get at the market.
One of our first experiences in a government run school for adivasi children was the low quality food that they serve for the children and staff. I remember how for the first 5 minutes after serving the food the students will wade through the rice for 5 minutes looking for stones in the rice. We were aghast to see how nobody from the student to the teacher complained about the low quality of rice, dal they were getting.
While it may administratively be easy and simplistic to design a schooling system and curriculum that is highly generic and homogenizing in nature and make it applicable to all groups of people across the nation, I strongly feel like questioning if such an education system is worthwhile at all if it cannot adapt itself to address and enrich the soul of every community. In our conversations we have seen how most children of the new generation from these villages cringe and make a face when we ask them if they’d want to consider agriculture as a possible future engagement. The more educated the child becomes, the farther away from agriculture they seem to want to be and begin longing more for a desk job which in their opinion, is held higher than agriculture. Perhaps this is because our very education system still suffers from heavy influences in design from colonial times when the larger machine merely needed more cogs and not individuals who can think freely and act with true prudence. To me, it explains why education across the country still largely remains as a means of earning ‘bread’ for the people and why the education “sector” is being commercialized. If every child who gets educated starts falling prey to this illusory hierarchy of putting agriculture as one of the last options, then wouldn’t we be feeding the entire country with people who practice agriculture mostly because they are stuck with it and do it without putting their heart? That is a truly sad state for any country to move into.
From a larger perspective, seeing how a growing number of people in the cities are yearning to go back to millets and organic, traditional food, it is saddening to see how the market, media and education systems are directing the new generations of these adivasi communities, who have been deeply rooted in the treasures of deeply meaningful traditional wealth away from their roots. The sadder part is that this is done by constantly building hierarchy through images of what is ‘’cool’’ and what is not and slowly robbing people of their fundamental freedom and power — their food. It is now more important than ever for us to reassign our priorities and find ways to add value to the things that are truly valuable to life — whether we participate in the market, media, law enforcement or the education system. It is time to point the “cool” factor needle within us in the right direction. Perhaps then, we could truly take the power away from other exploitative forces out there who wish to manipulate us into eating unhealthy, contaminated, genetically modified food by preying on our desire to be “cool”!
[1]millet
