
According to Thiam, as fonio is versatile, it can be used as a substitute for most grains in any recipe. It can be served as a side, a salad, a porridge, pasta, or baked into bread.
“Today’s chefs are opinion leaders and can influence their audience through various platforms. I have dedicated one of my cookbooks to the journey of fonio to better educate people about it,” Thiam added.
The chef has won many awards and accolades for his cooking and advocacy, which includes The James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame 2024 Awards.
Women’s crop
As a crop, fonio has been traditionally cultivated by women in northern Ghana, especially in the district of Chereponi. Millets are mainly considered women’s crops. An important fonio farmer is Christabel Kwasi, who found that it was easy to feed nutritious food to her children by cultivating fonio. As a versatile crop which can be grown without fertilisers, fonio can be consumed after being boiled or made into porridge. It can also be made into flour.
A project implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in collaboration with Chef Binta, has given fonio farmers the reliable knowledge that they can rely on this crop throughout the year. With Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture backing the project, women farmers are enhancing their cultivation skills, boosting productivity and also household income. Kwasi can now cultivate fonio even during the dry season.
As the Fulani are a nomadic pastoral tribe, the community prefers foods available in arid and semi-arid environments. This is the reason for the love for fonio. According to chef Binta, the first African to receive the Basque Culinary World Prize in 2022, fonio has potential as it requires less water and can be grown in poor soils. Her journey with fonio started after her escape to Ghana when she found that other grains failed to sustain communities.
Like millet processing in India, which is mainly carried out by women using traditional methods and implements, the method of fonio processing is also the biggest challenge for African women. It requires pounding the grain by hand for threshing and winnowing. Then it is manually dried.
So, apart from popularising fonio recipes, Chef Binta is providing processing machines and training to women on how to operate the machinery. This will minimise an otherwise time-consuming and labour-intensive process. Women fonio producers will be able to process fonio in greater quantity while ensuring quality.
Millets are essentially grown and nurtured by women. This reporter found that in Odisha’s Koraput, millets carefully stored in houses help women exchange the grains for dried fish and vegetables through an age-old barter system still in vogue. In the state’s Niyamgiri hills, the dominance of pineapples for profit has pushed millets aside. This has changed the local dietary pattern.
In a way, millets give women a say in households.