Local food and the Visitor Centre

I agree with the farmers that communication and awareness campaigns are the key. Actually what Auroville needs is not more shops, but more kitchens and tiffin centres with a variety of styles so we can get closer to the way in which Mother envisaged our internal society would care for itself. That would not only enable us to use more Auroville products. It would also hugely cut down on our waste and free us from shopping and cooking and thinking about what to cook.

It is regretted that the farmers feel so unacknowledged that they forget to mention what is already being done. Many Auroville farm products are being taken, for example, by PTDC, Visitors Centre and Solar Kitchen. Most days, the healthy plates at the Visitors Centre cafeteria feature Auroville grown cereals (varagu, red rice, complete rice, ragi in the form of noodles) and we have actually developed some very attractive recipes such as varagu pesto croquettes. We have now developed a recipe for couscous at Le Zephyr that uses varagu and a number of local veggies. In season we make as many pickles as we can from mangoes and lemons and this lasts us several months. We supply both Sadhana Forest and PTDC with them. If we had more time we could make jams.

All our milk, except in the very high season when we cannot get enough, is Auroville milk from four different farms. In the summer, when Auro-Orchard cannot get rid of its eggs, we take whatever surplus they have.

Every day we take fruits and vegetables from Foodlink – local produce like yams, cooking bananas, lukkis, snake gourds, pumpkins etc. for the rice meals and soups, and fresh stuff for the salads, as well as pesto and rucola. Some produce, like yams and cooking bananas, we often have to buy from outside.

However, we cannot use the particular variety of white rice supplied by Annapurna Farm for the rice meals as most of our rice-eating customers are South Indian and are particular about which types of rice they eat.

Communication needs to be seriously improved between the farmers and the eateries and outlets that take their produce. Frankly, from the point of view of the Visitors Centre cafeteria it worked better when we had direct contact with the farm. We are trying to revive this direct link with Auro-Orchard and have sat with the farm managers to explain what kind of local vegetables and fruits, such as big lemons for pickles, we would be needing and how much.

Auroville also needs another food processing unit as I don’t think Naturellement can absorb everything that needs to be processed from our farms.