October 8, 2007 10:52 AM

Eating Liberally Food For Thought: The World's Oldest Grains

It's a quiet, quasi-holiday on the blogs...but our friends at Eating Liberally haven't stopped feeding us their insights into our innards...we thought we'd take the slower news day to take a moment to look to our plates.

WHY THE WORLD'S OLDEST GRAINS ARE THE FUTURE OF FOOD

By Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

(cross-posted on Living Liberally)
Millet's been around since the Stone Age, or maybe longer. Dinosaurs reportedly grazed on this ancient grain, and it's been a staple for centuries in Africa, Asia, and India, in part because it's so easy to grow. Millet needs only two months or so from planting to harvest, and thrives in the kind of hot, dry weather that's becoming ever more common thanks to climate change. It's naturally resistant to pests, so needs no chemicals to grow. How sustainable can you get?

Plus, it's ultra-nutritious, with more protein than rice, corn or oats. Millet is also high in fiber, B vitamins, and essential minerals like iron, magnesium and calcium. It's easy to digest and low in gluten. Oh, and it's tasty, too-especially if you toast it before you cook it.

This amazing ancient grain has even inspired a millet-based movement in Japan called "tsubu-tsubu." Tsubu tsubu is advocated by a non-profit organization called The International Life and Food Association (ILFA), founded in Japan in 1982 to research and promote "food for a sustainable future." While Tsubu tsubu is centered on millet, a traditional staple crop in Japan, it also encompasses other ancient grains including quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat and barley.

The tsubu tsubu movement is based on the belief that a plant-based diet offers a way to feed the world without causing catastrophic pollution and disease. Instead of chopping down rain forests and burning through fossil fuels to maintain our meat-based diet, we could be cultivating these easy-to-grow grains and meeting our protein needs without squandering resources, degrading the planet, and feeding the "globesity" epidemic.

So what do we do here in the U.S. with this marvelous millet? Well, we feed it to the birds. In America, a bag of birdseed is nearly the only place you'll find millet; it's one of the main ingredients in most commercially sold birdseed. Unless you're a bluejay (or a birdfeeder-plundering squirrel,) you've probably never even tasted millet.

You can find it in health food stores, and it's slowly creeping into the "dietgeist," to borrow from those clever Ethicureans, but by and large, millet is utterly obscure and unappreciated in our culture despite the fact that billions of people all over the world have survived on it for centuries.

American agribusiness sinks most of our resources into chemically dependent commodity crops, planting endless acres of feed-grade corn, soybeans, and wheat. Our Monsanto-made monoculture has relegated venerable crops like millet, barley, and buckwheat to the fringes of our food chain when they ought to be front and center.

A growing number of family farmers across the U.S. are planting these heritage grains as the demand for more nutritious whole grains rises, so perhaps in the future millet won't be just for the birds in this country. Italy's Slow Food movement is (slowly) catching on in the U.S., so why not an American tsubu-tsubu contingent?

I hadn't heard of tsubu-tsubu till I attended a talk the other night by Albert Bates, author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide & Cookbook. Bates, a cheerier Cassandra than crotchety Jim Kunstler, gave a terrific presentation (pdf) on the perils of peak oil followed by encouraging examples from around the world of the many ways people are working to create a sustainable future. As Bates noted, "There is only one alternative to sustainability-extinction."

Yumiko Otani, the founder of ILFA, has a message on ILFA's home page written in exquisite Hello Kitty-style syntax:

What we eat is environmental problem closer to our lives.

If our foods change, naturally our life changes too.

Open your mind to your diet!

We can eat food that:

nourish our mind, feed every cell,

makes the earth happy

and change the world.

Change our thinking and change our actions for a sustainable future!

Millet couldn't sustain the dinosaurs, but maybe it's not too late to save us.