Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

Posted on

Saving an apple a day

The Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance organized a Forgotten Fruits Summit on March 19th at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Madison. According to Gary Nabhan, it was

…the first full gathering of America’s most accomplished back-country fruit explorers, veteran orchard-keepers, horticultural historians, pomological propagators, natural-born nurserymen and hard cider-makers concerned with the destiny of Malus x domestica, the single fruit most imbedded in the American identity.

The scary numbers:

  • There were once 14,000 named varieties in American nurseries.
  • Only some 1500 remain.
  • 30 fruit nurseries are lost every year, since the late 1980’s.

Gary Nabhan and Jenny Trotter’s Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto – Apples, which sets out “a plan of action to restore apple diversity to our farms, backyard orchards, restaurants and home tables” was on the table for discussion, and one of the objectives of the gathering was to develop “a strategy to assist those individuals who are doing the most to preserve American apple heritage.” The Manifesto is a very sensible mix of in situ and ex situ, NGO and government, private and public sector, young and old.

It will be interesting to see what the final strategy looks like, and to what extent it will be applicable elsewhere around the apple world. Gary does provide some hints about the direction the discussion took on his blog:

This spring, one of our honored participants, Creighton Lee Calhoun, will teach a workshop entitled “Grafting for the Future” from which each of the students will take home a tree grafted from one of the 400 varieties growing in the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard at Horne Creek Living Historic Farm near Pinnacle, North Carolina. On March 19th at Harvest Restaurant, founded by Chef Tami Lax in downtown Madison, we sampled some of the first world class hard ciders to come out of the new cideries flourishing in Great Lakes region, many of which are using heirloom apples that had once lost their markets. And we mentored a new generation of urban tree farmers and permaculturists that are bringing apples back to inner city landscapes that had altogether lost them over the last century.

I hadn’t come across the term hard cider before but it just means the alcoholic kind. Sounds like a fun meeting.

Posted on

This is not a pistic

Luigi’s Nibble this morning prompted me to look again for one of the seminal papers in the Italian use of wild agrobiodiversity: Pistic, traditional food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy. ((Maurizio G. Paoletti, A. L. Dreon, & G. G. Lorenzoni (1995). Pistic, traditional food from Western Friuli, N.E. Italy. Economic Botany, 49 (1), 26-30. DOI: 10.1007/BF02862273)) The abstract says:

Western Friuli, Italy, there is a small area near the town of Pordenone where an ancient rite of spring is still carried out. This is the preparation of a special dish, known as “pistic,” a collection of 56 wild herbaceous meadow and wood plants which are boiled and then sautéed together. This practice is still alive in a few areas of Friuli today and possibly goes back to pre-Roman Celtic cultures in this part of Friuli. The number of herbaceous plants used in this dish is extraordinarily high (56), especially when compared to the low number normally used in other conventional dishes. “Pistic” is therefore important, not only because it represents a quantitatively high use of wild herbs in the diet of the rural population, but also because it reflects environmental awareness, in that the archaic method of naming, identifying and using these plants still exists today. Similar rural practices include the use of “pot herbs” in Great Britain and in France the cooking of “mesclun.”

So many questions. This was more than 10 years ago; are the people of western Friuli still making pistic? What if you can only find 55 of the species? How do people remember the names of the plants? Are there any other dishes that use more species? What would it matter if some of the species could no longer be found in the wild?

Of course, the Italians, let alone the Friulians, are not alone in their use of wild plants, especially in spring. But they do seem to take wild plants more seriously than anyone else in the Mediterranean.

Posted on

Browsing Princeton’s image library

A short note in Global Voices sent me to the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts in search of anything vaguely botanical or agricultural. I found a treatise on botany with charming watercolours of many different plants, some cultivated. Perhaps someone out there who can read classical Arabic can tell us the gist.

Roaming a little further around the Princeton Digital Collections I also came across the Western Americana Photographs Collection, which has some really fascinating stuff. I had no idea that Indians stored acorns in specially constructed caches, for example. But it seems to have been a common practice in the Yosemite Valley.

Posted on

How to get high legally in Portland, Ore.

Ayahuasca is the ethnomedicinal case study. First described scientifically in the 1950s by the pioneering ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard, it is a complex phychoactive decoction used in shamanistic ritual, whose preparation epitomizes the sophisticated botanical knowledge of Amazonian Amerindians. Schultes disciple and ethnobotanical pin-up boy Wade Davis has a great TED talk about it. I bring all this up because of a short article in Portland’s Mail Tribune, of all places, “Southern Oregon’s News Source.” It seems the local chapter of the Brazil-based Church of the Holy Light of the Queen has just been allowed by the federal court to go ahead and brew up some “Daime tea,” which is another name for ayahuasca. Strictly for sacramental purposes, you understand. But I like the cut of that judge’s jib.