“Fonio never embarrasses the cook.”
Pierre Thiam, world-renowned Senegalese chef and culinary ambassador, is cooking this ancient African grain from his “Covid kitchen” in Berkeley, while I and some 30-odd participants around the world look on through Zoom. I feel a growing sense of excitement as I listen to his erudite and enthusiastic pitch. This is the same neglected and climate-resilient cereal that is included in a West African climate adaptation project I helped to design. And here, in front of my screen eyes, is an international champion for the modest yet highly nutritious grain that Gambians told me could boost food production and staunch the flow of youth, skills and hope from the country’s climate-vulnerable rural areas.
Synchronicity in the age of Zoom. The session was organised by Om Ved Gardens as part of the Chef’s Manifesto Resilience Sessions – which inspired and made me hungry in equal parts as chefs across the world cooked using their favourite resilient ingredient. Think millet in India, bambara ground nuts grown widely in Sub-Saharan Africa, and seaweed in Ireland, and thank Chef Arthur Potts Dawson and colleagues at the SDG2 Advocacy Hub for this valuable event.
Fonio, or findi as my Gambian colleagues call it, really delivers on its mythical epithet from ancient Mali of ‘seed of the universe’. Formally known as Digitaria exilis, it is a kind of millet and in all likelihood the oldest cultivated African cereal. Grains of fonio have been found in the pyramids, royal burial grounds of ancient Egypt.
Gambian farmers call it ‘hungry rice’ – it thrives in poor and rocky soils and requires little effort and no chemicals to grow. Drought resistant, it can also cope with large amounts of rainfall – important as climate change heightens rainfall variability, increasing both drought and flooding across the Sahel. When all other crops fail, fonio will probably pull through and help to fill the food gap.
And it packs a nutritional punch. Apart from being gluten free, it has a protein profile much closer to that of an egg than do wheat and other major cereals. Compared to white rice, it has dramatically higher levels of the B vitamins thiamine and riboflavin, and more protein, fibre and fats. A true fast food – fonio couscous can be whipped up in five minutes – it has a delicate nutty flavour and is considered food for royalty in parts of West Africa.
The only catch: its tiny grains, each one with a husk, make it hugely labour intensive to process using traditional threshing and pounding. Most fonio milled at the homestead gets contaminated with sand, and much of it is wasted. So although it is widely grown across West Africa, it remains hard to find and pricey in regional markets.
Enter Thiam, who can be credited with introducing the global fine dining world to West African cuisine. He is on a mission to promote underutilized African crops like fonio, and says it has been “an exhilarating journey” so far. And he is far from done.
His company, Yolélé, which he founded with the experienced natural and specialty foods developer Philip Teverow, has had triple digit growth in the US in each of its first three years. You can now buy fonio at Wholefoods stores across the nation, plus from many other retail outlets and online. I can’t wait to try the new range of fonio pilafs with superfood ingredients like moringa and dawa dawa, an umami condiment made from the fermented seeds of the African locust bean. Next up will be a range of snack foods, including three different flavours of fonio chips.
Yolélé works with farmers’ cooperatives and research institutes in Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Ghana and Guinea to support farmers to grow more fonio, and guarantees to buy their harvests. In the process, farmers’ incomes increase and their lands improve – fonio has a long tap root that can break up and aerate compacted soils, and Yolélé’s partners encourage crop rotation with a legume to improve nutrient content of the soil. The central tenet of the business model is equitable and traceable sourcing of unusual African smallholder ingredients to meet the volume and quality requirements of a global market.
When Yolélé begins operations of the world’s first commercial-scale fonio mill in West Africa, anticipated for early 2023, current export volumes will increase drastically. The mill will process 3 tons per hour, compared to current processors’ capacity of 1/10 of a ton per hour. The targets for December 2022 are to export 3,000T of fonio from West Africa, and to support 20,000 farmers’ incomes as well as 8,000 hectares of biodiverse regenerative farms.
Oh, and if all of that wasn’t enough, Thiam is about to open a second branch of his fast-casual restaurant Teranga in Brooklyn’s hip DeKalb Market. During the pandemic.
I wish him all strength with his mission to revolutionize the way the world sees African food, while regenerating African livelihoods and landscapes.