The Food-Covid Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Food Covid Podcast. My guest for this episode is Abhay Bhatia, one quarter of OOO Farms in the Sahyadri Hills of Western India. My conversation with Abhay started with talking about disruptions in the supply chain during lockdown and moved to indigenous seeds, wild foods, sustainable farming and forests. OOO Farms has a website (http://ooofarms.com/shop) from where you can order indigenous variety of rice, pulses, grains etc. Also check out their donation drive to help farmers and daily wage workers during COVID-19 (http://ooofarms.com/covid-19). Please rate and follow the podcast if you like it, and share your feedback with me on Twitter and instagram @shirinmehrotra.

My guest for today is Chef Rishim Sachdeva who has worked at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck and Marco Pierre White’s The Oak Room. Till last year Rishim was heading Olive Bar and kitchen in Bandra before he moved to London to start his own vegan and plant based pop-up restaurant called Tendril. I am talking to him about how he adapted to the COVID-19 situation to ensure his kitchen was running.

Hard times need smart measures and this episode features a similar smart measure from a small village in Uttarakhand. Anand Shankar, who runs a social enterprise called Tons Trails in Upper Tons Valley of Uttarakhand tells me about the affects of the pandemic on tourism industry, and an initiative to export locally grown apples to the rest of the country by directly connecting with the consumers who can pre-book the produce, which will be harvested in July. If you wish to pre-book a box (or a few) and support the farmers, you can see the details here - https://www.tons.travel/apples.

During the first phase of lockdown in India, a video from Karnataka went viral which showed milkmen throwing away fresh milk in a canal. While the initial few days were difficult for the dairy supply chain, things eased out as milk was an essential item. But, does that mean the problem was solved for all dairy farmers? Not really. In this episode I speak to Rajas Paranjpe, the founder of Bodhishop (https://bodhishop.in/), an online marketplace for A2 cow milk and milk products. Here’s an excerpt from my conversation with him where I talk to him about the Donate Fodder initiative and pick his brains on the issues with dairy industry in general.

India exports around 40-50 MT of fresh mangoes every year with Maharashtra contributing to 80% of it. For many farmers in the Konkan region, mangoes are the main source of income. But this year the situation is dire; with lockdown during peak mango season the farmers are not able to sell their produce even in the domestic market, and incurring huge loss.

In this episode I am talking to Megha Desai, marketing head of Jumpnetworks Limited who along with a Mumbai resident Anushka Kotwani has come together to put a delivery system in place and provide some respite to the farmers. If you're in Mumbai/Pune, get in touch with Sabkanet at +91 9987028746 to support the mango farmers. You can also reach out to them on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SabkaNet and Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sabkanet

In this episode of The Food-Covid Podcast, I speak to Ruchit Garg, founder and CEO of AgriFinance company Harvesting. Ruchit speaks to me about his twitter initiative which is helping the farmers directly reach the consumers and sell their produce during the lockdown period. Follow @HarvestingFN on Twitter to know more about this initiative and to meet farmers in your area.