Your voice can help shape the future of India’s food system. Join us in our Millet Opinion Survey and make a difference in just 10 minutes by sharing your insights.
As active participants in the food system, each of us plays a unique role in shaping agricultural decisions. At The Locavore, we’re seeking your help to better understand this crucial aspect of our food landscape in India.
We encourage you to participate in this survey if:
• You care about the Indian food system and its many nuances.
• You are curious about heritage grains and their cultural and culinary significance.
• You are new to millets, eat them regularly, or are simply interested in learning more.
• You are passionate about all things food and wish to support our mission of Doing Good Through Food.
Your inputs will help us build knowledge that links people and processes across the millet supply chain in India enabling insights that improve these interactions.
What you can expect:
At The Locavore, we are eager to understand how you feel about millets: Have you never tried them? Eat them once in a while? Or are you a fan? Have you noticed a decline in consumption—within your family’s or your own eating habits? We’re also curious about what motivates you to eat millets: are you mindful of your health, conscious of the environment, or do you simply enjoy how they taste? Tell us more!
What crops do you cultivate? Do you grow millets, or did your family? Are you considering starting now? For those of you who are already millet farmers: why do you cultivate them? Do you grow them for personal use or for sale? What do you think would facilitate your ability to grow and sell millets?
We’re keen to know whether you’ve ever put millet dishes on your menus? If not, why? How long have you been experimenting with millets? Has the communication around the International Year of Millets (2023) influenced you in any way? Which millets do you prefer to use, and what cooking techniques have worked best? We want to know about the challenges you may have faced too: do customers shy away from opting for millet dishes? Are millets truly hard to cook with? Tell us more!
FPOs and NGOs play a crucial role in collaborating with farmers, implementing government policies, and maintaining seed banks. From your experience so far, what are the factors encouraging or discouraging farmers to cultivate millets? What are the challenges after cultivation: inadequate demand, low prices, processing difficulties? Do you encourage millet cultivation in your region, and if so, how? What impact do you think the campaigns around the International Year of Millets (2023) have had on millet cultivation? Tell us more!
Why do this?
Attempting to make sense of the complexities of a food system requires investment in research—it can inform opinions, change habits, and help plan for a more sustainable and inclusive future.
We hope to document how stakeholders in the agricultural system relate to food—be it through growing, researching, or cooking and eating it. With this in mind, we hope this study will help us meaningfully understand millets—an ingredient that we at The Locavore, and the Millet Revival Project work with intimately. Through an approach that is driven by surveys and interviews, we aim to:
• Spotlight the expertise of researchers and organisations working with millets
• Understand consumer preferences around incorporating millets in their daily diets
• Identify reasons why growers cultivate—or prefer not to cultivate—millets
• Learn what motivates food establishments to work or not work with these grains
The people and groups we intend to target include policy experts, agricultural scientists, nutrition experts, farmers, those in the culinary industry, as well as consumers. This will help us understand not only the many perspectives but also the gaps and challenges around millets, given the renewed attention they are receiving.
What are the outcomes we are looking for?
We want to use this gathered knowledge in two ways: firstly, to create outputs like this expert interview with Dr. Ruth DeFries, an environmental geographer, professor of ecology and the co-founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School. In 2014, she founded the Network for Conserving Central India (NCCI) to build a common platform for actors within this landscape to support and build on each other’s work. This includes efforts to boost millet production and consumption within this geography.
Secondly, to produce research reports that synthesise and communicate our findings in an accessible manner for researchers, policy makers, millet consumers, and food enthusiasts.
We hope that the combined learnings from this study will drive future efforts at the Millet Revival Project, eventually creating a sustained impact.
This survey is part of the Millet Revival Project, an ongoing collaboration between The Locavore and Rainmatter Foundation. We collaborated on the Millet Revival Project to create meaningful impact in our lives and the larger environment by better understanding why millets are good for both people and the planet.
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