Moolika, a food festival hosted by Kadar community women, celebrates tubers

The fete hopes to popularise tubers and their nutritional values

Moolika, a food festival hosted by women from tribal communities in Vazhachal from December 24 to December 26 at Vazhachal waterfall view point, Thrissur, will celebrate native tubers such as the Diascorea and Colocasia.

“The effort is to popularise tubers which were once an integral part of our diet and also help the forest communities economically. Now, tapioca has overtaken all the other tubers in Kerala. At Moolika, tribal women will serve dishes they cooked with the tubers harvested in the upstream villages,” says Lekshmi R, DFO, Vazhachal.

Ms Lekshmi points that our diet is mostly rice-based and tubers remain under-valued. However, among forest-dwelling tribal communities, tubers such as foraged wild yam are part of their staple diet. Earlier this week, a team of two Kadar elders went on a long trek in the forests of Vazhachal in search of forgotten tubers called kanjil, nootta and theyvan. It was part of the documentation work of the People for Nature Fund (PNF) Fellow Reshmitha Raman, belonging to the Kadar tribe. Since these tubers are rare to find and laborious to harvest, it was decided to have some of them as sample display and serve cultivated yams.