Around 22,000 visitors thronged the campus of the Indian Institute of Management, on 10 and 11 December 2005, when the third Traditional Food Festival Sattvik was organized by SRISTI, NIF, GIAN and IIM. The venue was an enchanting spectacle, with a wide spread of culinary delicacies on either side, even as the center space was devoted to grassroots innovations. The festival posed certain fundamental questions about the kind of foods we consume and how we could make it more healthy and nutritious. In the process, could we also ensure that the poor farmers who cultivate such healthy food grains get a fair share of the profits? The food festival aims to generate market based incentives for such lesser known, organically grown crops and their varieties. After all, unless the urban consumers start demanding these grains, the income will never flow from our pockets to the small and experimenting farmers. In most cases, the grains grown by these farmers are not only more nutritious, but are also ‘compulsively’ organic, because many of the farmers cannot afford to use any chemical growth promoters or pesticides…for more download report

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