There’s a heart-warming story in The Atlantic Channel about a young woman, Emma Clippinger, who started an organization called Gardens for Health International, that helps people with HIV in Rwanda to grow the food that they need to ensure they respond well to anti-retroviral drugs.
That sounds awfully complicated, but apparently it wasn’t.
Many of the country’s HIV patients did not have access to ample food. HIV/AIDS drugs work most effectively when patients are eating a sound diet. They work poorly when patients are malnourished. … Healthy Rwandans were taking charge of their food supply. But AIDS/HIV victims were excluded from these governmental programs because they were deemed physically incapable of participating.
The effort is spreading, and what is really nice is that it makes full use of agrobiodiversity to deliver better nutrition and health:
“Crops are chosen mostly on the basis of their nutritional value.” They include papaya, avocados, amaranth, spiderplant, cowpea, soy beans, beets, swiss chard, collards, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, chili pepper, tephrosia and … “some sunflowers (for their seed, for their aesthetic value!)”. Growers have been especially enthusiastic about indigenous greens called dodo and isogi, which have a higher iron and vitamin A concentration than spinach. Provisional ingenuity prevails: pesticides include neem, garlic, and chili peppers; multivitamins come in the form of leaves from the moringa tree; old tires serve as planters; no kitchen gray water is wasted.
Staples too. What we need to know is: what are dodo and isogi?
Isogi seems to be Gynandropsis gynandra and dodo Amaranthus cruentus. Here’s the reference. Both fairly common traditional greens in Eastern and Southern Africa.
How strange, and not atypical. Gynandropsis gynandra is a synonym of Cleome gynandra, which is the binomial of a plant commonly known as spiderplant (among many other things) which is referenced in that list right after amaranth, which I’ll bet includes dodo.
I well remember a discussion, shortly I arrived in my current place of work, with an esteemed scientist, about the fact that he had included different taxonomic synonyms for the same species in a long list of nutritious and neglected species. His attitude was “pshaw”. Mine remains that of the pedant. Unless we use the same names for things, we cannot know that we are talking about the same thing.
Gosh, but do you realize what that would mean? That people would have to know the basics of taxonomy, for pity’s sake!
Better: a good reference book. The Zander Handwörterbuch der Pflanzennamen is a handy one. To my knowledge the best source of correct names.
If you work in a Hispanic environment, Enrique Sánchez-Monge y Parellada’s Diccionario de Plantas Agrícolas is a must.
Books? Nobody reads books anymore. If it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist.