What We Put in Our Grocery Basket Matters

Millets don't have to replace rice and wheat. Perhaps they simply need a permanent place beside them.

Open an Indian kitchen cupboard and you'll probably find a few things that don't require much thought.

Rice.

Wheat flour.

Dal.

Spices.

When they run low, they simply go back on the grocery list.

Millets once occupied a much more ordinary place in Indian food systems too. Today, as they return to conversations around food, we're often presented with a dramatic choice:

Should we replace rice and wheat with millets?

Perhaps that's the wrong question.

Maybe nothing needs to be replaced.

Maybe millets simply need to come back into the cupboard.

The idea: our grocery lists send signals

We tend to imagine the food system moving in one direction.

Farmers grow something. Companies process it. Shops stock it. We buy whatever eventually appears on the shelf.

But there is another direction to that relationship:

What we repeatedly buy becomes demand.

Researchers from the ICAR–Indian Institute of Millets Research have examined exactly this issue. Their work identifies declining millet consumption as an important part of the millet economy, alongside factors such as the greater demand and profitability of competing crops, lower millet prices, urbanisation and income growth.

In other words, what disappears from our plates can eventually matter further back in the food system.

And what returns to them can matter too.

But there is a chicken-and-egg problem

Imagine wanting to eat millet more regularly.

First, you need to find it.

Then it needs to be cleaned and processed. Perhaps milled into flour. Maybe turned into something convenient enough for a weekday breakfast. It needs suitable packaging and storage. A retailer needs a reason to give it shelf space.

And somewhere at the beginning of that chain, a farmer needs a reason to grow it.

A major 2023 review of India's millet value chain found that weaknesses in areas such as processing, storage and transportation are among the obstacles preventing large-scale millet consumption. The authors argue that bringing millets back to urban and rural plates requires strengthening the whole value chain.

That creates a loop:

Limited demand → fewer products → weaker distribution → less convenience → limited demand.

But loops can potentially move the other way too:

More demand → more products → better availability → greater convenience → more demand.

No individual grocery basket creates that change.

But collectively, grocery baskets are what markets eventually respond to.

Maybe we don't need to “switch” at all

This is where we think the millet conversation sometimes becomes unnecessarily extreme.

Rice doesn't need to become the enemy.

Neither does wheat.

And every dosa doesn't suddenly need to become a millet dosa.

Perhaps a more realistic goal is simply more variety.

Keep the rice.

Keep the wheat.

And make a little room beside them.

Ragi one morning.

A foxtail millet dosa another.

Jowar when it works for the meal.

Bajra occasionally.

Not because every meal needs millet.

Not because one grain is “good” and another is “bad.”

Simply because an old food remains part of a living food culture when people continue to cook it, ask for it and buy it.

Convenience isn't necessarily the enemy of tradition

There is another piece of this that matters.

Traditional foods sometimes require time.

Soaking. Grinding. Fermenting. Cooking.

Those methods deserve to be preserved.

But modern households also have school mornings, commutes, meetings and tired evenings.

If traditional grains can only survive when everyone prepares them exactly as previous generations did, their place in modern kitchens becomes harder to maintain.

That's why thoughtful processing and convenient formats can have a role too.

A millet dosa premix doesn't have to replace traditionally soaked and ground batter.

It can simply make a millet breakfast possible on a Wednesday morning.

The 2023 value-chain review similarly identifies processing and product-development challenges as part of what must be addressed for wider millet adoption.

Sometimes convenience doesn't erase tradition.

It helps tradition fit into a different kind of life.

From novelty to normal

Perhaps this is the real challenge.

Getting someone to buy millet once isn't the same as bringing millet back.

A health trend can create a first purchase.

A government campaign can create awareness.

A social-media post can create curiosity.

But food systems aren't built around what we try once.

They're built around what we keep buying.

And that brings us back to something wonderfully ordinary:

the grocery list.

Perhaps bringing millets back doesn't require a food revolution.

It doesn't require throwing away the rice.

It doesn't require abandoning wheat.

It might simply begin when ragi, jowar, bajra, foxtail millet and other traditional grains stop being something we occasionally try — and become something we sometimes buy again.

One household doing that changes very little.

But enough households repeatedly asking for something?

The food system has a word for that.

Demand.

Perhaps the future of an ancient grain begins with something as ordinary as writing it back onto the grocery list.

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