Through the traditional cuisine Mujai serves at her café, she promotes the consumption of neglected and underutilized edible plant species found in and around her village. These forgotten plants are usually foraged from the wild or harvested from paddy fields where they grow as uncultivated greens (or “weeds,” in modern parlance).

Mujai—affectionately referred to as Kong Plantina, kong being a term of respect for older women in the Khasi language—sits down to share her about her journey of running the first of six Mei-Ramew (or “Mother Earth” in the local Khasi language) cafés. These cafés connect the food stall owners like Kong Plantina, small-scale farmers, foragers, café customers, and the larger community with the rich native agro-biodiversity.

As a young girl, Kong Plantina learned traditional cooking from her grandmother—recipes that used wild greens, bitter tomato, dried or fermented fish, and many other indigenous ingredients, as well as traditional techniques, like cooking in a bamboo tube. But when she began her food stall nearly 30 years ago, she cooked what she calls “market food”: dishes that customers wanted to eat, like white rice, dal, and potato dishes. The ingredients for these dishes were purchased from the market, with no indigenous ones used.

According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, of the thousands of known edible plant species in the world, just 150 to 200 are actively cultivated for human consumption. Just 12 crops and five animal species form 75% of the food consumed by humans. Rice, corn, and wheat make up the overwhelming majority of plant crops consumed. The commercial production of these crops and their global transportation has a huge carbon footprint. That over-reliance on a few foods also puts the food system at risk for disease and disruptions, like the ones caused by COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and the climate crisis. Initiatives like the Mei-Ramew cafés that focus on Indigenous agro-biodiversity offer a form of climate resilience.

A mapping exercise conducted by North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society, an organization working to strengthen food sovereignty in Meghalaya, documented 319 edible plants in and around Khweng village. “When we began working in this area in 2012, we saw so much biodiversity,” says Janak Preet Singh, senior associate of livelihood initiatives. “But we were not seeing it in people’s plates.”

Read the full article about Indigenous food cafes by Anne Pinto-Rodrigues at YES! Magazine.