Wild Food 1: A Meal

What, to you, is Wild Food?

Recently I attended a Wild Food Festival, organised by a Maharashtra-based farmers' collective called OOOFarms (read: triple 'o' farms).

OOOFarms is based in the Sahyadri Hills in the Western Ghats, which are home to many tribal communities who live closely with forest lands and gather food that grow in these forests. Often, a part of their daily diet comes from agriculture which is done under shifting cultivation, also in the forests.

A lot of this food culture is rooted in traditional knowledge of nutrition and medicine. The team behind the OOOFarms, while scouting the region for farmland, found that a lot of people from tribal communities in the Sahyadri region who traditionally gathered foods from the forests were beginning to clear those forests for more profitable forms of agriculture. And with the loss of those forests and food practices, a lot of their traditional knowledge too, was disappearing.

They now work with 50 odd farmers from the region and are building a database of the local and indigenous produce. Working towards incentivising the preservation of traditional food knowledge, they organised the Wild Food Festival, to create a market for some of this produce with the residents of Mumbai.

Roots, shoots, leaves

Fruits and Vegetables

Varieties of Jowar in all kinds of colours!

Rice grains of many kinds

At the event, I saw samples that they had brought, of all kinds of green leafy vegetables, gourds and tubers, grains of rice and jowar millet in colourful varieties, and edible flowers of the traditional and non-ornamental kind! After this, I also got to taste more than 20 preparations of various green leafy vegetables, and eat an elaborate lunch of traditional curries, vegetables, pickles, rices and cool beverages made from this produce.

A taste of traditional vegetable preparations

The meal

I'm always amazed by the biodiversity of food plants that can be seen growing wild - if you just know what to look for and where! So I really enjoyed the meal - it wasn't just tasty, but to me, a city dweller, it was also definitely novel.  Now I'm keen to visit the hills with the team at OOOFarms to see and learn more about this food in it's geographical context - where it is grown and eaten not for novelty, but as a matter of daily life.