In Person of Interest we talk to the people catching our eye right now about what they’re doing, eating, reading, and loving. Next up are Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, and chef Pierre Thiam, author, chef of Teranga, and founder of Yolele Foods, who speak with Bon Appétit about their partnership around a teensy African grain with huge potential.
When brewmaster Garrett Oliver spotted chef Pierre Thiam at a party in 2019, he made a beeline through the crowd. Oliver had just watched Thiam’s TED Talk on fonio, an ancient West African grain. They were at a benefit for the Museum of Food and Drink honoring Questlove, and Oliver had to introduce himself. He’d been inspired by Thiam’s telling of a resilient, nutritionally dense grain going back 5,000 years that is resistant to climate change, needs no fertilizers or inputs, and doesn’t require irrigation, especially in an area considered difficult to cultivate. “I wondered if Pierre had considered making beer with fonio,” says Oliver, who just celebrated 30 years at Brooklyn Brewery.
A native of Dakar, Senegal, Thiam learned about fonio while researching a cookbook in Kédougou, in the southeast. Once popular throughout Africa, fonio is now primarily found in the Sahel, a semi-arid region that extends from the Atlantic Ocean and Mauritania in the west to Sudan and the Red Sea in the east. It has an earthy flavor and can be eaten as a cereal, formed into noodles, incorporated into baking, or enjoyed as salad, like couscous. Historically, fonio carries deep reverence and myth. “The Dogon, another great culture of Mali called it “po,” or the “seed of the universe,” Thiam says in his talk.
Fonio is nutritionally dense, requires little water, and needs no inputs or fertilizers to grow in an area often thought of as difficult to plant by outsiders. Flavor-wise, the ancient cereal with an earthy flavor had myriad possibilities like other grains: it could be eaten as a salad, formed into noodles, incorporated into baking, and more.
For Thiam, fonio was a delicious food that had been buried under the blanket erasure of colonialism, desertification, and a depletion of economic opportunities for locals. When foreign entities banned ancestral farming methods, and forced deforestation and mass planted cash crops, they blamed indigenous people for the changes in the land’s soil that occurred only after their time-tested land management practices had been disrupted. “Fonio can not only restore the soil, but it can bring economic opportunity to the community,” Thiam says.
For Oliver, fonio bridged diasporic heritage with beer culture. As one of the most prolific brewers in the industry Oliver’s impact speaks through the beer he’s made and collaborated on throughout the world. But since the pandemic, he’d been making concerted efforts to shore up inequalities in brewing and distilling opportunities and bridge connections through heritage and culture.
“Fonio connects my background as an African American brewer,” he says. “I would like to show many communities how they aren’t just connected to this product, but that their ancestors are the originators of it.” For Thiam, fonio was a delicious food from a naturally resourced region that “can not only restore the soil, but it can bring economic opportunity to the community,” he says. The goal was not to make a single product, but to inspire brewers around the world to use it regularly, just as they do barley and hops.