Food Sovereignty Among the Halba Tribe of Bastar: An Anthropological Study of Traditional Food Preservation Practices

Central Indian tribal communities face nutritional challenges due to rain-fed, single-cropping Kharif monoculture. In the Bastar Division, the indigenous Halba tribe of Kondagaon District experiences a seasonal resource crunch termed the ‘Lean Period’ during which households are socio-economically isolated from fresh perishables. This empirical study analyses the unwritten Indigenous Knowledge Systems utilised by the Halba community to achieve food sovereignty without modern refrigeration or synthetic stabilisers. Fieldwork was executed across four tribal settlements using purposive sampling to interview 120 key informants, paired with participant observation. The results establish that traditional preservation is a biochemical intervention aimed at reducing Water Activity, disrupting cellular breakdown, and degrading anti-nutritional factors. Botanically, practices range from dual thermal parboiling and solar cavitations of acrid tubers (Colocasia esculenta) into stable Khuila, to anaerobic, weevil-suffocating paddy storage inside straw rope Mair silos. In the ichthyo faunal domain, perishable biomass is transformed into durable Suksi variants through hypertonic dry salting of Mastacembelus armatus, vertical wood smoke phenolation of Esomus danricus, and chemical mortar compounding of Oecophylla smaragdina with wild tamarind to drop pH below 3.5. These zero-energy, zero-chemical methodologies offer climate-resilient blueprints for sustainable food packaging and off-grid security frameworks.