After a quick tour through aserene college campus, a few steps ahead was the sound of busy young girls in their teens getting ready to present their spin on India’s favourite sweet and savoury treats.
With 2018 being declared as the National year of Millets, the teachers and students of the institution decided to take an active step towards bringing “Millets back to plate” through an exhibition by the students and teachers of the Department of Food and Nutrition.
Millets are small-seeded grasses, such as ragi, pearl millet, foxtail millet and small millet, that adapt to harsh environments and are high in nutritional value.
With a wide range of natural and home-made snacks such as ragi sandigae [millet fritters], red rice flakes chiwda [sweet and savoury mixture], protein muffins, millet nachos, ladoos and jams; the girls went through a gruelling three months to create healthy alternatives to old favourites. The products that made the final cut were given for testing at the Ramaiah lab and underwent continuous variations of standardisation and sensory evaluation. “So when we say that something is calcium rich, we have the test results to prove it,” says Nethravathi G, a 2nd semester MSc Student.
A long stretch of tables were set up side by side, each one manned by students proudly displaying their products. “We wanted to develop value-added products. This year being the national year of millets, we’ve added millets to almost all the products. That’s why we’ve called it [exhibition] millets back to plate,” adds Nethravathi.
At just 24, Pavithra K, another student, had the ingenious idea to create calcium-rich ladoos made completely from three kinds of millets- jowar, finger millet and pearl millet. Her aim was to create fibre-filled treats that were tasty but packed with numerous health benefits including boosting energy, generating warmth etc., and are safe to eat for pregnant women as well.
When asked about the motive behind the project, Pratibha M, another student from the college, says: “Basically, commercially you get the products for much higher prices, like if you see the nachos, it’s more than ₹150 or ₹200 , but here you get the same thing for much higher quality but less price.” Most of their products were between the ₹20-60 price range, providing quantity, and quality at an affordable rate.
The girls seemed driven to provide healthy alternatives to quintessential tea-time treats, “The things you get in the market are all junk and people blindly buy it. They [products] have a fancy tagline and a fancy name so people just go behind that,” says Sripriya Dubey.
“We need to promote our millets. They’re the most important nutri-foods. There’s talk of all kinds of lifestyle diseases, so to prevent that we’re doing this. We’re more inclined to eat those foods, ready to eat, processed foods but we want to replace that with healthy nutri-foods,” says Dr. Usha Devi, the Head of Department.
While the aim was primarily to boost millet-infused products to the general public, the students and teachers had specific target audiences in mind as well, “For example, if the products are energy rich, then a sports person can also have it. Snacks that we get outside, like nachos,have little nutritional value, but here we added value and made them nutrient dense,” says teacher-in-charge Dr. Navaneetha R.
With a list of products that are preservative-free and rich in flavour, these young minds have created “tasty-cum-healthy” foods that could have great potential in the market.
