“Eating traditional foods the traditional way”: constraining commodification in millet markets of India

Abstract

Millets, traditionally a marginalized subsistence crop, are transforming into coveted health food commodities. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi-National Capital Region, India, during 2023—the UN International Year of Millets—this article follows a critical sub-narrative emerging in response to trends in millet markets. While several farmers’ cooperatives and startups are counting on value-addition to make millet farming viable, a diverse cross-section of farmers, entrepreneurs, retailers, chefs, activists, bureaucrats, and consumers are opposing value-addition into foreign foods, or opposing commercial value-addition altogether. These interlocutors call for “eating traditional foods the traditional way,” translating to eating only Indian/indigenous millet preparations and/or taking millet processing out of the commodity value chain and into the household. This discourse fears that large food corporations and specialty health food markets targeting urban elite consumers will co-opt and gentrify the grain, foreclosing the potential for improved nutritional outcomes, affordability, and cultural authenticity of alternative food systems. Building on Hazareesingh and Maat’s (2023, 2016) analysis of millets as “anti-commodity,” I find my interlocutors engaging in what I term “constraining commodification,” to steer millet markets closer to anti-commodity forms, paradoxically thwarting the entrepreneurial aspirations of producers and further burdening marginalized women with laborious foodwork.