Category: Mainstream

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Ancient candy bars waiting to be rediscovered

It was something of a throw-away comment in the paper on the Kibale protected area in Uganda which I blogged about recently:

Tribes knew of coffee’s stimulant properties and mixed crushed coffee beans with animal fat to create “iron rations” used by warriors and travelers on long journeys (McCoy & Walker 1991). 1 In the KNP region, coffee beans were used in blood rituals and in the ceremonies of Toro kings.

It piqued my interest, but I did nothing about it. But then, as often happens, I came across a slew of similar things, such as this write-up for a “new” kind of candy bar. And then a reference in a discussion about how cacao was consumed by the Maya:

Sometimes the Maya mixed the cacao with cornmeal to create a tightly packed material, almost like a hockey puck, that was more transportable. That’s how they stored it. There are texts that say it ended up being stolen by enemies since it was very highly valued. It was also taken by the warriors when they went to their next job, if you will. When they were on the go, they’d just take these things out of their pockets and eat some. They were like early energy bars!

Now there’s a topic for someone’s dissertation. Are there also examples of ancient energy bars using tea, qat, or coca, for example?

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Sweet potato fries brains?

It is actually hard to know whether Tom Barnett’s tongue was in his cheek when he gave a recent piece this headline: The sweet potato silver-bullet?. In fact, in light of his article and its source, the headline makes no sense at all, except that it did persuade me to sit up and take notice.

The thrust of Tom’s piece is a report in the Wall Street Journal about industrial food giant ConAgra trying to create a sweet potato ideal for frying. 2 The WSJ’s botany is not all that sparkling, referring to the sweet potato as the “step-brother” of the “ordinary” potato. That suggests to me that they share one recent parent. And how about this:

Sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, but the roots of a plant.

But I digress. The WSJ’s beat is business, not botany, and it reports in wonderful detail on ConAgra’s goal, to create the raw material suitable for an industrial business process: uniform shape, size, colour and sweetness.

[T]hree years ago, ConAgra started working with scientists at the Louisiana State University AgCenter and elsewhere to change some characteristics of sweet potatoes.

“We’re wanting to deliver to [ConAgra’s] factory something that looks like a brick,” says AgCenter researcher Don LaBonte as he brandishes a sweet potato shaped more like a croissant. “We don’t want them with that pretty shape like you get in the grocery store.”

Read on, for an insight into how the food industry views its raw materials and its final products. There are, of course, other approaches. A chum of Luigi’s reports that in Taiwan in the 1980s “SP fries were the standard in local fast food. It was changed to potato fries when the giant international chains entered.” The same chum is working on sweet potato leaves as a vegetable green, not an entirely new idea. Well, they’re a huge component of livestock feed; how nice to reverse the normal pattern of animals eating our food. And apparently sweet potato leaves might do well in space.

One of the commenters at Tom’s blog asks why people don’t just “eat a baked sweet potato, all funky shaped”. He clearly doesn’t understand the business of food production.

And frankly, neither do I.

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Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest

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Nibbles: Potato chemistry, Millennium Seed Bank, Sacred sites, Japanese festivals

  • Measuring micronutrients and stuff in potatoes.
  • Kew wants you to adopt a seed, save a species. Easy as that.
  • Maybe religion can do some good in the world after all? Allow me to be skeptical.
  • Wait, can I change my mind? The wonderfulness that is Japanese penis festivals. Well, they mainly take place in the spring. Agrobiodiversity mainly grows in the spring. There is a connection, surely.