Greetings, Here's a quick self-intro, focusing on my history with millets (such as it is) and interest in the International Year of Millets (IYOM).
Over the years, I have been employed several areas, including international development, where one of my specializations was agriculture. I've worked with farmers in West Africa who grew pearl millet and sorghum, however, I've done no extended work or formal research on those or other millets. I took a particular interest in millets beginning in 2015, but my personal history with these grains goes back four decades. (I'll take the opportunity to do a long version here, since it touches on many millets, but intros on this list can certainly be brief and concise)
Like most Americans of my generation, I grew up with only a vague notion of "millet" as one minor grain often associated with bird food. It was in Togo with the Peace Corps that I was first introduced to "millet" as a food. That actually meant pearl millet, often called in the regional French, "petit mil." Among the other foods I encountered for the first time there were two other grains considered "millets" in the upcoming IYOM: sorghum (aka "grand mil") and fonio.
Later, in Mali, I encountered a broader range of foods made with pearl millet and sorghum, and in Guinea, again ate a lot of fonio (altho possibly a different species).
Along the way, I had teff in the form of injera in Ethiopia.
Back in the US in 1987, I got some "millet" in the bulk section of a food coop, but it looked and tasted nothing like the pearl millet I had known in West Africa (It was proso millet, I later learned.)
In the 1990s I first encountered foxtail millet in the form of Chinese congee. In 2010, I tasted finger millet for the first time in a non-alcoholic Ugandan beverage called bushera - quite tasty.
In 2015. I finally came across pearl millet in the US. That was in an Indian foods store, where a package of flour called "bajri" looked familiar, but when the ingredients label just said "millet flour," I had to confirm the identity by web search. I found a number of other millets as well as sorghum in that and other markets (as grain, as flour, or in other products), and began cross-indexing some of these with my previous experience (above). I do actually try these products and have worked several millets into my diet.
Over the ensuing years, I've written casually on the variety of millets and devoted attention to the range of products made with them, and to trends in their cultivation, use, and marketing..
When the proposal for the IYOM was first raised by India in 2018, I began to think about how such a year could - in addition to its primary aims to help smallholder farmers (including women) and improve nutrition in their families - be used to raise the profile of millets in the US and the whole of North America. And that led me to talk with others about how to actually make that happen. This email list is one tool to facilitate expanding that discussion.
Don Osborn
East Lansing, MI, US
