Purple corn. Photo courtesy of Foodhall India.
It started with a photo from a farmer, via WhatsApp. The second clue showed up one hungry afternoon while I was checking out food shops on delivery app Scootsy. The third was on this very website’s Instagram feed, talking about a festival at fancy foods supermarket Foodhall in Lower Parel. Over the last few weeks, images of amaranthine beads lined up tightly on cobs have been showing up in places I least expected. Why was so much purple corn suddenly so easily available in the city, especially if you knew where to look?
I started calling farmers, hoping to write a detailed story about this healthy flint corn variety loaded with 20 per cent more protein than regular corn and a good dose of anthocyanin. I was going delve into how it might not any more be alien to us than our (increasingly unpopular) white bhutta corn – both were first grown in Mesoamerica in 8000 B.C – but after I dug around a bit, the maize story became a minor element in a larger trend.
It turned out that purple corn is not the only unusual produce that has become obtainable in the last few months. Our attention has swelled and then waned for zucchini, iceberg, broccoli, and other ‘English’ vegetables, watery varieties of which can now be found at every bhajiwala. There’s a new crop of ingredients that is way more flavourful and exciting than these. Chefs and restaurateurs, and even all of us regular folk cooking at home now have all of these to play with: baby kale, shishito peppers, black tomatoes, ancho chillies, white bird’s eye chilli, yellow and black paprika, round Parisian carrots, wasabi rocket, komatsuna (or Japanese mustard spinach), blackberries, white sapote, watermelon radish, butterhead lettuce, shiso leaves, garlic chives, lavender, apple mint, fennel pollen, and dozens more.
Here’s what’s even better. None of them are imported. Thanks to our country’s microclimates, they’re all grown within India and many of them are harvested not far from Mumbai. So they’re fresher, a third or fourth of the price of imported produce, and their carbon footprint is way tinier. This also means we’re likely to see them more frequently on restaurant menus and online food shops and in farmer’s markets and grocery stores. The volumes produced are still relatively small compared to the romaines and the zucchinis that make most of the money for farming businesses, which are betting on scores of these ‘super exotic’ varieties becoming trendy in the near future. Though the initial crop is small, their belief is that in a couple of years, demand will explode leading costs to drop, and the investment to pay off.
Of course, there is the argument that they aren’t local or traditional. But here’s the thing – they aren’t local yet. Much of what we consume and consider intrinsic to our food culture came from assimilating ingredients from around the world. It’s common knowledge that chai came after tea, which came to us, via the British, from China. Rajma has its origins in the first beans found in Central Mexico and Guatemala (first seen in 7000 B.C.), which travelled with explorers to the Indian subcontinent only in 1500 A.D. The potato? Between 8000 B.C. and 5000 B.C., the first domesticated varieties were found in south Peru and northwestern Bolivia. It made its way to India only four centuries ago, thanks to the Portuguese. Fenugreek, as the name implies, originally is Greek, as is our beloved kothmir or coriander. Tamarind? Tropical East Africa. Ginger? South China.
For millennia, seeds, plants and animals have journeyed long distances thanks to trade, war, colonisation, marriages, and migration. Now all it takes to bring a seed or a plant here is an internet connection, an online seed catalog and a reliable courier delivery service. For it to grow and flourish though, we’ll always need farmers who give the seed or sapling the attention and love that it needs. Finally, we need chefs and cooks who understand the ingredient.
The farmer who sent me an image of purple corn on WhatsApp is Nameet Modekurti, the founder of First Agro, a pesticide-free farm in the Cauvery Cluster in Karnataka. Two years ago we’d discussed the disappearance of white corn and so a few weeks ago, he’d thought to message me as soon as he’d harvested purple. His product list is a world tour via produce – there are Asian greens such as tatsoi and mizuna; South American chillies including a vast Peruvian portfolio; Mediterranean herbs like summer savoury, and way more than I can list here.
I asked Modekurti what it takes to make a seed into a commercially viable farm vegetable or fruit. He outlined the process, which entails getting seeds from collectors, taking them through propagation in a humidity and temperature controlled environment (“It’s not a greenhouse; it looks like a Godrej almari,” he said.), getting the first generation of native, Indian-born seeds, and then acclimatising them, transplanting them, and giving the first harvest to chefs with which to experiment. “We don’t decide what grows here or not, the crop decides,” said Modekurti. Of course the produce doesn’t taste exactly as it would in its home country, no matter how great the seeds. “It’s like making naan in Tokyo, even if you use the same maida, it just won’t taste the same.” Ask any shop vendor in Lalbaug’s mirchi gully – a Guntur chilli grown in Karnataka has a palatable difference from the same varietal grown in Guntur. The difference, notably, is not significant enough to affect business. Among Modekurti’s regular buyers in Mumbai are chefs from the InterContinental, ITC, J. W. Marriott, Oberoi and Taj Mahal Palace hotels.
Samar Gupta, the owner of Trikaya Agriculture and one of the major suppliers of produce for Foodhall, has been growing edamame for years. He says his father Ravi Gupta, who founded Trikaya, would say about farm plants, “Beta, seva karni padti hai.” All the advances in information and farming technology can’t speed up how long it takes from seed to commercial harvest: up to one year for vegetables, four to eight years for fruits. In his portfolio of hundreds, to name just a few, Gupta has gailon; white sapote; four varietals of avocado; wasabi rocket; Jerusalem artichokes; and rhubarb.
Because a lot of this produce is not familiar to the industry yet, both Modekurti and Gupta have stories about how it often gets abused. A batch of aji panca, sweet and smoky Peruvian peppers, was sent to a hotel while the head chef was away. It made its way to the staff kitchen where it was thought to be and used as byadgi mirch, in a tadka. Most farmers admit there is tremendous ignorance, and often cooks don’t bother to even Google things. But there are also chefs like Madhu Krishnan at ITC Hotels, said Modekurti, who will take unfamiliar ingredients like teff, and use them in ways that fit into Indian staples.
The Farmhouse Company grows microgreens on their plot in Panvel.
Awareness levels are changing rapidly, according to Namita Jatia, director of Panvel’s The Farmhouse Company, a farm that retails baby kale; baby carrots; microgreens; oyster mushrooms; and Thai beetroot corn on Scootsy. “Our farm used to supply to only family and friends, at first,” said Jatia. “The big change from 2014 to 2015 was that I didn’t need to do any marketing. People are contacting me themselves.”
In the last year First Agro has sold 1.8 tons of garlic chives. In the last season alone 15 tons of San Marzano tomatoes grown on their farms have made it to hotels, restaurants, and our tables. So when a menu at a pizza restaurant in Mumbai lists San Marzano sauce, there’s a good chance it’s not imported or canned, but from a farm not far from you. Modekurti thinks the interest in these ingredients is and will continue to be led by: the affluent travelling Indian who also wants to eat well in India, housewives exposed to cooking shows, multiple five-star hotels opening in Tier 2 and 3 towns such as Raipur and Jharsuguda. Some of Modekurti’s clients print his emails about his produce, which contain details such as their taxonomy, nutrition information as well as recipes, bind them, and use them as a training manual for their commis.
To predict which ingredients are likely to get most attention worldwide, it’s best to look towards seed collectors and their catalogues. Gupta says the best ones are in the US, Australia, China and Thailand. Concurrently, there are also seed collectors in India, who will imminently feed the revival of disappearing regional varieties, but I’ll save that story for another time. The farmers have inspired me try at least two new Indian-grown exotic vegetables a week. Wasabi rocket and Peruvian peppers are high on my list.
While supermarkets like Foodhall and Nature’s Basket stock many of these products, they might soon become even more accessible. Last week, while surrounded by baby corn, broccoli, bitters, and balsamic vinegar, I was chatting with the owner of Pick Point, run by a superbly entrepreneurial bhajiwala in Colaba Market. I spoke to him about all the new produce I had been buying and said he’ll need to up his veggie game. He promptly gave me his business card and asked me to introduce him to these farmers ASAP.