Walk into most Indian kitchens today and you will find rice and wheat. Walk into the same kitchen eighty years ago and you would have found four or five other grains besides — grains that needed no irrigation and no marketing.
"Millet" is a clumsy English word for a very large family. A Tamil kitchen never called them one thing. It called them kambu, ragi, thinai, varagu — each with its own season and its own job.
Kambu (pearl millet)
The hardy one. Grows where almost nothing else will. Nutty, faintly earthy, coarse enough to stand up to strong flavours. In southern Tamil Nadu, kambu koozh — a fermented porridge drunk cool with buttermilk — was the working person's summer lunch long before anyone called it a functional food. Sprouted kambu laddu →
Ragi (finger millet)
The standout calcium source among Indian cereals: the ICMR-NIN Indian Food Composition Tables put it at roughly 344 mg per 100 g, against about 41 mg for wheat and 10 mg for rice. Naturally gluten-free, with a mild malty flavour that takes sweetness well. Sprouted ragi laddu →
Thinai (foxtail millet)
The old one — it appears in Sangam literature. Cooks light and fluffy, closer to a fine couscous than to rice. The one we recommend to people who find the others heavy at first. Thinai laddu →
Varagu (kodo millet)
The quiet workhorse. High in fibre, firm and separate when cooked, good in place of rice for pulao. Less famous than ragi and rather better than its reputation. Varagu laddu →
Why they came back
Millets did not disappear because they stopped being good. Rice and wheat were subsidised and easier to mill at scale, and millets became "coarse grains" — a phrase that did a great deal of quiet damage.
What brought them back was arithmetic. Millets need substantially less water than rice, wheat or sugarcane — commonly cited at around 70 per cent less — and tolerate drought and poor soil. The UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets on a proposal led by India, which grows roughly a fifth of the world's supply.
If you are starting
Do not replace everything at once; millets carry more fibre than polished rice and a stomach adjusts gradually. Begin with thinai in place of rice once a week, and drink more water than you think you need.
To try all four together, Combo 2 has ragi, kambu, thinai and varagu in one box. These are sweetened with jaggery — eat them as the sweets they are. For the savoury side, the sprouted millet porridge mix has no added sugar.
These are not new superfoods. They are old food that never stopped being good.
Sources: ICMR-NIN Indian Food Composition Tables, 2017; FAO, International Year of Millets 2023.
