Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Amazonian ethnobotany from the beginning

The main rubber tree, which the British took to Malaysia, was the basis of all plantations. There are nine other plants in that same group from which the Indians once got rubber. But the plantations had started to supply the world with better and cheaper rubber than the Indians had been producing under terrible — almost slave — conditions. So the Indians had three or four generations when they hadn’t tapped wild rubber, and we were sent into the various countries to try to stimulate this for the war effort. I had been in the Amazon of Colombia, so I went right back among my Indians, and I worked on that during the war.

That’s the Father of Modern Ethnobotany, Richard Schultes, in part of a long interview he gave in 1990 for something called the Academy of Achievement. You can read it, listen to it, or watch videos of it. Fascinating.

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If they can do it in LA, why not in Kibera?

I’m gobsmacked by something that’s happening in Los Angeles. Here’s the idea:

Document your food purchases. Every 2 weeks, we’ll be asking you to record your purchases of a different food type. We’ll send you an email to let you know what it is. So, during the fortnight that the food type is bananas, every time you buy a banana, whether you’re at the supermarket, filling up at a petrol station, or grabbing breakfast to go at a coffee shop, we want you to whip out your phone, open Foodprint LA: Bananas in Kullect, 1 take a quick photo of your banana(s), enter the price, choose from a list of vendors, and contribute your individual banana purchase data to help create a bigger picture of the Los Angeles banana-scape. Repeat step 3 as many times as you buy bananas during that two-week banana-data Kullection.

Why?

We’ll take the data (anonymised, of course), analyse it for patterns and insights, and create data visualisations — infographics, maps, and charts — that we can share with everyone who wants to understand the city’s foodscape a little bit better.

The resulting data won’t replace a rigorous foodshed study in the city’s planning process, of course. Nonetheless, we think that crowd-sourcing the data-gathering process and then mining the resulting information to tell stories and ask new questions will be a fun way to build awareness and encourage conversation about where the Los Angeles’ food actually comes from.

That has to be doable in Kibera, or anywhere that people are struggling to access good food. And think of the insights. My head is spinning …

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Nibbles: Seed mothers, Bees, Strawberry, Chilli collection, Talk on agrobiodiversity

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Brainfood: Medic systematics, Fruit wine, Alfa paper, Marula diversity, Cardamon pollination, Protein, Ants, Peanuts, Truffles, Ethiopian barley, Citrus diversity, Biofuel trees, Honeybush, Czech garlic

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Nibbles: Aberdeen, Sahelian agroforestry, Seed companies, Haiti seed donation, Seaweed, Taste, Books, Logging, Cheese boycott