How Meghalaya is honouring its guardians of earth's bounty

I do not generally open my column with pronouncements of politicians, but Meghalaya chief minister Mukul Sangma made a significant point at the New Delhi curtain raiser this past weekend for the world's largest gathering of marginal communities, Indigenous Terra Madre (ITM), which opened in Shillong on November 3.

Governments, Sangma said, must help people engaged in agriculture "to remain in the communities where they belong". Making a strong case against rural migration and the urban imbalances it causes, Sangma said the process needs to be reversed by making agriculture sustainable and more remunerative to our farmers. There was no ambiguity in his message.

Even as we celebrate food, we cannot afford to ignore those who harvest the earth's bounty. Carlo Petrini, founder-president, Slow Food International, who was present in the gathering, must have found it most heartening to hear a politician echo the sentiments of the civil society. In his speech, which had all the hallmarks of his straight-from-the-heart oratory, Petrini said that "global food corporations and intensive commercial agriculture" were "destroying the planet".

He said ITM represented 500 million small and marginalised agricultural producers in 170 countries, and they were in "great difficulty", which was "absolutely unacceptable". Making an impassioned plea to safeguard local communities and the local economy, and usher in "participatory democracy", Petrini said: "Global financial and economic dynamics are creating pain and suffering in the world. The time has come to change the paradigm. Food is not just another commodity; it is the way of life of communities, and the source of their culture and spiritual well-being." Introducing ITM, Phrang Roy, president, North East Slow Food and Agro-biodiversity Society (NESFAS), said indigenous people formed four per cent of the world's population, but contributed to 95 per cent of its cultural diversity; they owned 22 per cent of our planet's land surface, but were custodians of 80 per cent of our biodiversity.

Bringing the point home, Roy gave the example of the world's first species of oranges, Citrus Indica, the wild orange, or Memang Narang, which can be found today only in the Nokrekh Biodiversity Park in the West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya. The state, he said, is blessed with 67 per cent of the country's biodiversity. All this was news to me, and I realised how important it is for those of us who write about food to delve deeper into our country's agro-biodiversity.

"Local food systems are an important aspect of the new and emerging design of our well-being," Roy said, adding: "We have to see how best traditional systems can be combined with modern science in an agro-ecological approach to development."

His sentiments were echoed by Manjit Gill, corporate chef, ITC Hotels, and president, Indian Federation of Culinary Associations (IFCA), who shared the perspective from the last mile of the food production system. "We are on the cusp of a global culinary revolution and a new food consciousness," Gill said. Without chefs the revolution will remain unfulfilled because "cooking is the creative process that connects the toil of the farmer to the bounties of the table".

The evening ended, as you'd expect from a celebration of indigenous agriculture, with a Meghalayan feast laid out by Daniel Syngkon, Shillong's much-acclaimed young chef and a member of the ITM Cooks' Alliance, and a team from ITC Hotels.

My favourites were the blood sausage fritters encased with crunchy deep-fried local black rice and the main course items: rice cooked with banana florets and flavoured with local fresh turmeric, pepper, ginger and chicken stock; chicken slow cooked with locally fermented soya beans; fresh wild ferns tossed with garlic and local spices; and the best: prime cuts of pork cooked with traditionally fermented bamboo shoots and local bird's eye chilli.

The preparations exploded with flavours, yet they hardly had any fat. They reminded us of how indigenous systems of cooking had over centuries extracted the best of flavours from the gifts of nature without using butter, cream, corn starch and refined sugar. Nature knows how best to pamper our taste buds.