As I covered cassava the other day, it would be unbalanced of me not to cover millets at some point. As far as many White Brits are concerned, millet is just this grain you give to budgies, not something I’ve ever done owing to not encountering the birds much in my everyday life, except once outside Leicester Prison, drinking from a puddle. That said, I did go through a phase of cooking with millet. I treated it exactly as I would couscous or bulgur, so I wasn’t exactly adventurous with it. But just as cassava is the go-to energy crop in the wet, millet is in the dry, and unlike manioc it is quite nutritious in terms of micronutrients. However, there isn’t just one millet but at least a dozen different cultivated species, depending on how you count them, and again unlike yuca, some millet is native to temperate regions.
With the exception of maize, grain crops often resemble one common grass or another which grows wild. I have to admit I’m not good at identifying species of grass. I presume the grasses that look like millet are in the eragrostidæ, which all use C4 photosynthesis which means they could outlast other plants when the carbon dioxide levels drop in a few hundred million years time if they’re still around by then. Some of them can also be used to absorb cæsium, a common and particularly hazardous pollutant from nuclear power disasters such as the one at Cernobyl, but obviously those are not going to be used as food. They are, however, used as food for grazing animals such as bovids and sheep, though the ones concerned don’t look much like millet. Apart from sorghum, which isn’t always counted, millets have small grains. Sorghum used to fascinate me as a child because it is for some reason not widely used in England compared to the other cereals, and being drawn to the obscure, I often used to wonder about it. During the ’70s there were attempts to cross-breed sorghum and wheat. I’ll revisit sorghum in a bit, because it’s quite distinctive.
The millets are useful crops in dry conditions, because they will often grow in poor soil with low rainfall. They can also be stored for a long time. This kind of puts them in the same position as manioc in different regions owing to their similar characteristics in this respect, but unlike tapioca they don’t need to be waxed to preserve them and they’re way better nutritionally. However, because they tend to be grown on marginal land, their yields tend to be quite low, although when they are grown in better conditions this is not so.
First then, sorghum. Sorghum is also known as great millet and guinea corn, and grows between one and five metres high. They look like maize before flowering, with somewhat broader leaves, though narrower than Zea mays, but unlike maize the root system is more extensive, allowing the plant to absorb more water. The variety in the illustration is red-grained and has a bitter taste, and is therefore more likely to be used to brew beer than be eaten directly. It originated in Afrika but has been cultivated in India and China for millennia as well, in more arid areas. It’s a very important food crop in these regions and the parts of Afrika where the conditions are similar. Like cassava, it isn’t traded internationally much. In the US and Australia it’s used as fodder for farm animals, but the stems can be used to extract a syrup like that of sugar cane, which can be used in cooking, and this is done in the US, where it’s called sorghum molasses. This just reminds me of sucking and chewing grass stalks, so I presume the same kind of thing could be done with the likes of fescue or any other grass with a relatively tall stalk, although with a smaller grass it would be pretty labour intensive. Nigeria is the leading producer of sorghum by a narrow margin, growing about an eighth of the world’s supply, followed by India, Mexico and the US, but this could be misleading as Nigeria is only half the size of Mexico. Due to its C4 photosynthesis, sorghum uses less water than most other plants, although not other millets, allowing it to compete more successfully in dry conditions with other plants. It also becomes dormant in drought conditions and rolls its leaves to prevent transpiration. The grain is covered by a husk which has to be removed to make it edible, and this was one of the tasks done by women slaves during the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Due to the sugar-rich sap, it can also be used to produce alcoholic liquor and therefore ethanol for biofuel. Attempts to cross it with other cereals are motivated by the desire to grow it in colder climates, and at this point I feel there’s some missing information because there are of course temperate millets.
Bulrush millet is probably illustrated at the top of the post although I’m not sure. At this point I’m going to permit myself a bit of a digression, on the subject of the word “bulrush” and the evolution of grasses. Firstly, there’s a pedantic tendency, though I’ve not seen it recently, to “correct” people on the use of the word “bulrush” to refer to reed maces. This is silly. Words change their meanings as time goes by and if people are habitually going to call a particular plant a “bulrush”, that’s simply what it is. It also seems to be an American vs. British usage issue. Secondly, bulrushes are sedges, i.e. monocotyledonous grass-like plants which grow near or in water. I haven’t looked that deeply into it, but I’m aware that dinosaur dung shows the indigestible remnants of grasses way back into the Cretaceous, although grasses were initially just another herbaceous plant among many and actual grasslands didn’t appear until the Miocene, which is an epoch of the current geological period, the Neogene. However, back in the Mesozoic, I suspect the situation was that some sedges gradually became better at tolerating drier conditions and they began to grow away from water, becoming grasses, but that’s really just a guess.
Whatever its ancestry, bulrush millet is smaller-seeded than sorghum and the plant is about the same height as maize. Unsurprisingly its inflorescences resemble those of bulrushes, but unlike those it’s the most drought-resistant of all millets and the most widely grown crop of any kind in dry tropical areas. It’s Afrikan in origin and provides most of the food for humans in the Sudan, the north of Nigeria and the fringe of the Sahara.
Finger millet, Eleusine coracana, is so called because its ears tend to have groups of five spikes, radiating a little like a hand. It’s grown in South Asia and also in Afrika from Zimbabwe to the Sudan. Unthreshed, it can be stored for as long as five years and is again a food crop on which many of the Afrikan people in the regions where it’s grown rely in what would otherwise be times of famine. It’s often planted as the first crop after forest clearance as it can extract the minerals from ashes well. Again, finger millet is rarely traded outside its regions.
Ethiopia has its own distinct millet known as “teff”, Eragrostis abysinnica. In the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, a species known as “hungry rice”, Digitaria exilis, is cultivated, which is local to West Afrika. Then there’s Job’s Tears, Coix lachryma-jobi:
This is, like sorghum, a little apart from the others. It originates from Southeast Asia, where it’s mainly grown, and has unusually large grains for a millet which are used for decorative and ritual purposes as beads. However, they are also edible and has a very minor and apparently now extinct tradition of use in TCM.
I haven’t been at all adventurous in my own use of millet, generally just using it as a substitute for couscous when I was short of money. I don’t even know which species I used. Nutritionally, there have already been hints that the plant is good at extracting minerals from its environment because of the use of ash as manure and the clearance of cæsium-137 from polluted locales. It’s one of those plants which could easily be fed to humans instead of bovids and sheep, bypassing the inefficient use of animal products for food, particularly in parts of the world where the land isn’t particularly good for raising ungulates. It sounds like it contributes to deforestation in a similar way to the related bamboo in China, and this could be reduced by eating it directly rather than employing it as fodder for other species. Nutritionally, millet is high in manganese, although many of the minerals involved depend on the species. An individual species may be high in some minerals which are low in others and vice versa. It’s also got three times the calories of cassava and is also high in B vitamins. Being gluten-free, it can substitute for wheat in many foods. Finger millet is particularly high in calcium, bulrush millet in iron and most are comparable to wheat in protein content. They have a low glycæmic index, making them useful in preventing diabetes. Millets cannot, however, be eaten raw.
Around ninety million people in Afrika and Asia depend on millet as food. A little over half of it is produced in Afrika, forty percent in Asia and in Europe the figure is only three percent, although I will be covering temperate millets today as well. They don’t need irrigation and their funding is less dependent on pesticides and fertilisers than many other crops, which of course means that big business may not be able to make as much money out of them and therefore that they may not be promoted as much as some other food plants. One problem with millet is that development of other grains is often preferred by governments. For instance, the “Green Revolution” in South Asia concentrated on wheat and rice and supported its planting when they are in fact less nutritious than millet, leading to health problems further down the line. Rice in particular is a bit rubbish, even though I eat loads of it and enjoy it. Diets also become more like those of the developed world, and wheat, rice and maize are also easier to sell on the world market, meaning that farmers are often more likely to prefer them to millet. Millets also have a high carbon content, meaning that to some extent they can be used as carbon sinks, an influence which would be greater if more of them were grown. To this end, the UN has declared 2023 to be the International Year Of Millets (it’s currently the International Year Of Fruits and Vegetables).
One of the big dishes made from millet is Hausa koko, a West Afrikan food which is described as a kind of spicy porridge common in Ghana. It consists of millet flour boiled in water with added ginger, garlic, pepper and cloves, and is a street food sold for breakfast often eaten with koose, spicy cakes made from blackeyed beans. It can also be lightly toasted before being boiled in stock, as it is in Nasarawa, a state next to Plateau in central Nigeria, where the aforementioned Jos Plateau is located. What I do with it is closer to Thiakry, except that I don’t use milk, condensed or otherwise. Thiakry is similar to couscous but includes spices such as nutmeg , raisins and desiccated coconut, so it’s going in the sweet direction. It’s prepared like that in Senegal and therefore I presume The Gambia. However, it doesn’t seem to be eaten much in Cabo Verde, I imagine because of the Portuguese influence.
Although millets are thought of as primarily dry tropical crops, there are also temperate species. Proso millet, also known as broomcorn or hog millet, Panicum miliaceum, has been cultivated since the Neolithic in Eurasia, including southern Europe. Ezekiel 4:9 refers to a recipe for bread including this along with lentils and some other ingredients:
וְאַתָּ֣ה קַח־לְךָ֡ חִטִּ֡ין וּ֠שְׂעֹרִים וּפ֨וֹל וַעֲדָשִׁ֜ים וְדֹ֣חַן וְכֻסְּמִ֗ים וְנָתַתָּ֤ה אוֹתָם֙ בִּכְלִ֣י אֶחָ֔ד וְעָשִׂ֧יתָ אוֹתָ֛ם לְךָ֖ לְלָ֑חֶם מִסְפַּ֨ר הַיָּמִ֜ים אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֣ה׀ שׁוֹכֵ֣ב עַֽל־צִדְּךָ֗ שְׁלֹשׁ־מֵא֧וֹת וְתִשְׁעִ֛ים י֖וֹם תֹּאכֲלֶֽנּוּ׃
- “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. “
It was also eaten by the Romans as milium. It’s actually ten percent protein and four percent fat, so it’s very nutritious in terms of macronutrients. This is the millet which is fed to budgerigars, and is an annual, growing about a metre in height. It tends to be found on landfill sites, probably germinated from bird seed. Another species in this genus, little millet, Panicum miliare, is shorter and is grown in South Asia on the edge of the tropics.
Setaria italica, foxtail millet, is annual and the most popular millet in Asia, where it originated, but its English names often refer to it as Italian, German or Hungarian. This species is entirely domesticated – it either evolved while being cultivated or its wild version died out. It appears to be descended from Setaria viridis, which is a common weed. In Russia it’s used for beer and elsewhere for silage and hay. Like broomcorn it’s used as bird seed in Britain.
Echinochloa frumentacea, Japanese millet, is grown in warm regions, particularly in Japan and Korea, where it’s made into porridge. Once again it’s used for birdseed in Britain and turns up on landfill sites. It grows up to 1.4 metres in height with a fifteen centimetre ear, and produces a brown to purple grain. In India it’s eaten during religious fasting. It’s closely related to cockspur grass:
This grows in these isles and is also known as “barnyard millet”, but unfortunately is one of the worst weeds, a weed being a plant growing in a place where a human doesn’t want it to, because it tends to remove large amounts of nitrogen from the soil. It can and is, however, eaten, which I imagine would be a controversial thing to do due to its invasiveness.
Having written all that, I’m now thinking this post will get fewer eyeballs than the one on cassava, and that’s a shame because unlike cassava, millet is highly nutritious across the board and although tapioca too is vital to the survival of many people, it’s also instrumental in causing kwashiorkor or protein-energy malnutrition. If it’s all that can be grown, fair enough, but it really seems that the millets have a much healthier profile and are sadly neglected. That said, in political terms manioc and the millets can be grouped together as crops on which much of the tropical population relies and are not traded much beyond that region, meaning they are less “cash-croppy”. In the case of millets this is less so than yuca because although the former can be used to make ethanol for fuel, it seems less exploited and at the moment they seem relatively free of genetic modification and all the issues that brings with it. So I would celebrate millet, and feel a lot more enthusiastic about it than its corresponding crop in wet tropical regions, cassava.
A Box Of Chocolates 