Economic Wealth, Food Wealth, and Millet Consumption: Shifting Notions of Food, Identity, and Development in South India

• Published in: Food, culture, & society culture, & society, 2008-12, Vol.11 (4), p.463-485
• Main Author: Finnis, Elizabeth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: agricultural transitions; Agriculture; cassava; Change; Farmers; Food; Forecasts and trends; Identity; India; Millet; Practice; Social aspects
• ISSN: 1552-8014; 1751-7443
• DOI: 10.2752/175174408X389139

Agricultural transitions among small farmer households are part of a broader process of the reorganization of everyday life. As agricultural regimes change and traditional crops are abandoned, the symbolic meanings associated with food and farming practices shift, reflecting the reorganization and reenvisioning of what it means to be a small farmer in a given place and at a given time. I examine this process through an analysis of the ways that farmers living in three south Indian communities think about the symbolic meanings of their traditional minor millet crops. I argue that the complex and sometimes contradictory social and symbolic meanings ascribed to minor millets reflect farmers' uncertainties about the economic and agricultural transitions that are taking place in their households and in their communities. An analysis of local, symbolic meanings ascribed to different food and agricultural practices provides insight into the ways that global processes of agricultural commercialization are played out on the local level, affecting notions of identity and the moral economies surrounding specific types of foods.