Are we ready to redefine Farm to Table?

If I were to mention two over-rated but mostly and sadly misconstrued terms prevalent in today’s food ecosystem, they would be – Sustainability and Farm to Table.

Belonging to a family of farmers and having grown up at our ancestral farm, my connection with food was quite simple.

We ate what was in season and we ate what we grew. I was not aware then, but I learnt eventually that this was Sustainability and Farm to Table being practised at its best!

Sadly, one of the main consequences of the Green Revolution was Monocropping. The soil is used for the same crop again and again with nothing else to replenish it in the interim. And that further leads to a necessity for synthetic supplements, in the forms of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The net effect is on the food that reaches the table, along with all the chemicals to boot.

When we concentrate on just 1 or 2 grains, it isn't just our overall health or the farmers that/who suffer, the soil suffers too.

Another aspect of worry is that most dietary perceptions often include, and wrongly so, moving away from a staple only to latch on to another. And that creates an imbalance, not just in our nutrition profile, but also the ecosystem. 

The impetus on organic and healthy farming, especially growing millets has been a much-awaited transformation, though still in the nascent stages. Millets for eg, are hardy, need very less water to grow and naturally reinstate the soil's nutrition. 

However, we live in a marketing-driven world and unfortunately there’s a need to make a product a hero. Making one millet a hero again runs the risk of not giving due attention to the other millets/indigenous grains. Consequentially this will lead to the same cyclical problem that we are facing now.

The need, therefore, is to market the cause as a whole and not just a product/crop. We do not want one millet becoming the next wheat or rice, causing just that one millet to be grown repeatedly which will be a continued manifestation of monocropping.

Coming to the other concept en vogue, Farm to Table, it has come to mean adding more variety to the menu with ingredients sourced from a select set of Urban farmers.

While Urban farming is great, we need to be more mindful and supportive of the actual farmers who grow the same crop several times over. What we truly need, is a Farm to Table model that helps the real farmers and not just the Urban farmers.

With all these in mind, the questions that arise are:

• Isn’t it high time we took a joint stance in supporting and sustaining what's good for the long run, instead of depleting what we are left with?
• Are we truly ready to support 'Sustainability' in its authentic form, i.e, eat what’s in season and grown locally, and thereby support the farmer growing seasonal crops instead of pushing him/her to join the commercial race?
• Are we willing to accept that local and seasonal would mean that in some seasons we would be working with limited variety of ingredients available to us and hence, the usual variety that we are used to, would be missing?
• Are we ready to help redefine Farm to Table, where we are consuming what grows around us, consuming local and seasonal produce from farmers, who do what they do best?