Barnyard millet tart, millet doughnuts and sugar-free ‘caramel’ sweets. These are just some dishes on the menu at Yumiko Otani’s Tubu-Tubu cooking classes for the culinarily curious.
Tubu-Tubu is the nickname Yumiko has given to millets and sorghum, her favourite traditional grains to cook with, and since the 1980s she’s built a career on reintroducing people across Japan to them through dozens of cookbooks, in-person classes and her Youtube channel.
In her online videos, she easily explains the different traits of each – which ones turn milky when cooked, which ones are best for bread and which can be made to resemble steak.
But it was hardly love at first sight for Yumiko. “For a long time I had thought of traditional grains as poor and tasteless, even though I had never tried them,” she admits in one of her videos. When she finally gave millets a try at age 30, she was surprised: “[They] were like little memories and with such diverse flavours.”
“I wondered why such delicious traditional grains, which people had been living on as an essential staple since ancient times, were disappearing.”
Soon, she opened a weekend-only restaurant and ingredient shop in Tokyo and started cooking seminars. Today, she’s CEO of Fu Future and Life Laboratory, and she runs a countrywide network of cooking schools with some 120 cooking instructors.
The cooking lessons teach people how to cook millets in healthy ways. What’s more, since most of the instructors are women who host the classes in their own homes, the Tubu-Tubu schools have contributes to women’s empowerment by encouraging them to grow their own small businesses.
Over time, Yumiko built strong relationships with farmers, too. Early on “I discovered that the number of millet farmers was getting smaller and smaller,” she recalls. Fearing that soon there may be no one left to grow millets in Japan, she commissioned growers directly. “I asked small but thoughtful farmers to grow millets without using chemicals, with the commitment that I would buy all they could grow.”
Next, she and her partner Kazuo Gota established a delivery service that connected growers with buyers across Japan. The last piece was to get people directly involved in growing their own millets.
Through their “Life Seed Campaign”, they’ve been encouraging people to share traditional seeds and teach cultivation since 1995. Today, they organize millet-growing workshops in six locations in Japan, which is not only keeping millets production alive and strong, it also helps small farmers increase their income by involving them in teaching others how to cultivate and process millets.
“We keep working to ensure we maintain these delicious grains.”
