Category: Fruits and nuts

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Depictions of sacred plants in Maya pottery investigated

Hot on the heels of the belated identification of the “penis pepper” depicted on Moche pottery comes more news of ethnobotanical detective work involving plant iconography. Natural historian and archaeologist Charles Zidar of the Missouri Botanical Garden and botanist Wayne Elisens of the University of Oklahoma looked at 2,500 images from southern lowland Maya (Belize, Guatemala and Mexico) ceramics dated to the Classical Period (AD 250 to 900). They focused on depictions of Bombacoideae, “which are easily identified morphologically and have culinary, medicinal, ceremonial, economic, and cosmological significance to the Maya.” Of the ten species present in the area, four or five were found represented on the ceramics.

“I was surprised that a variety of plants from this family were depicted,” says Zidar.

Among them is Ceiba pentandra:

Considered the “first tree”, or “world tree”, the ceiba was thought to stand at the centre of the Earth. Modern indigenous people still often leave the tree alone out of respect when harvesting forest wood.

The thorny trunks of the ceiba tree are represented by ceramic pots used as burial urns or incense holders, which are designed in a strikingly similar fashion.

Investigation of the plant images is continuing, and is being extended to animals. Here’s Zinder again:

By determining what plants were of importance to the ancient Maya, it is my hope that identified plants can be further studied for pharmaceutical, culinary, economic and ceremonial uses. More should be done to conserve large tracts of forest in order to properly study theses plants for their value to mankind.

LATER: By the way, there are some depictions of plants in Mayan art which have yet to be identified.

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The Indian mango problem

What’s going on with mangoes in India? It seems I can’t fire up my feed reader these days without some tale of mango woe popping up. If it’s not Noor Jahan being down to its last four trees, it’s the Kesar variety being cut down in Gujarat. And the Mango Mela — an agricultural fair held in Bangalore — only featured 20 varieties last year, after a really bad, low quality harvest. The latest thing is that Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh has gone from 700 varieties to just a few due to market pressures:

“The reason for certain mango varieties facing extinction threat is the fact that mangoes like Dussheri, Chosa, Lucknowi have taken over the market in a big manner. Mango growers get a good price for these varieties. However, mango varieties that are facing extinction are not able to make their presence felt in the market as there are few trees grown of these varieties,” Haji Kalimullah Khan, a veteran mango cultivator said.

It might be the season, I suppose. There does seem to be a spike of interest in mangoes in March-May. But are things really as bad as all that? Or is the press just focusing on the bad news and ignoring the good, as usual? And if things really are bad, is anything being done about it? Perhaps an expert on Indian mangoes will explain it all to us.

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Unripe for plucking

Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”

“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:

One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.

But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?

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Go Local recognized by CDC

We’ve often referred here to the sterling efforts of Lois Englberger and the Go Local team in Pohnpei in promoting agrobiodiversity-based solutions to the many, grave health and nutrition problems afflicting Pacific Islanders. The karat banana story is only one example.

Now we hear that the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) and Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have listed the Go Local campaign as one of their success stories in reducing the burden of chronic disease across the U.S. The full list is online. Look under Federated States on Micronesia (p.29). Congratulations to the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, the NGO behind Go Local. Some of the other success stories also look interesting.

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Location, location, location

Tracing Paper had a fun mosaic of food-themed maps yesterday. We’ve blogged about a couple of them before, and lots more actually, as it’s a bit of an obsession around these parts, but it’s fun to see them all together like that. And while we’re on the subject of geography, I got 8 out of 9 on the beer geography quiz that was also concidentally on Mental Floss this week. Can you beat that?