The Guardian has a slideshow on small-scale farming in Ethiopia, mostly showcasing the Wrold Food Programme’s Meret project. Which is great, if it draws attention to the ways in which the Ethiopian people are working to make themselves more food secure. But (and there’s always a but, because we always want more) can you really trust the information in the picture captions? Slide 6, for example; is that really pigeon pea the women are harvesting? Doesn’t look like it to me. And slide 13? The plants shown are said to include “false banana (it looks like a banana tree, but is actually cassava)”.
The pedant will sneer at banana being described as a tree; we’re OK with that. But what is this false banana cassava, “called kobe in Amharic“? ((Come to think of it, the website I got that from is top of the Google search for “false banana cassava”. Can Guardian fact-finding be that lame?)) Many more sources seem to think “false banana” is ensete (Ensete ventricosum). That makes sense. and quite a few refer to the fermented starchy corms of the plant, called kocho. But of a link to Manihot esculenta, not a sign.
What’s that you say? “Look who’s a pedant now?” You clearly don’t understand our thirst for true knowledge. Someone, somewhere must know for sure whether someone, somewhere, truly calls enset cassava.