Thanks to Paul Bordoni at the Global Facilitation Unit for pointing us in the direction of this illustrated compendium of African recipes, including this one involving egusi, which are the seeds of various cucurbits.
A consumer view of a neglected species
We normally blog production aspects here; for a change, go read the food diary of someone who decided to try and eat as much hemp — for the omega 3 oils — as she could. Committed consumers are clearly useful, as is good marketing. But the final conclusion seems to be that timing is everything.
That other groundnut
This article in African News Dimension sings the praises of Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea), saying it could be grown and consumed a lot more in Malawi. Interestingly, one of the reasons why it is underutilized may be customs such as the one which says that only grandparents and widows are allowed to grow it.
Selling African leafy vegetables
Not for the first time, a study suggests that indigenous and scientific knowledge can add value to each other. This one comes from South Africa’s Human Science Research Council (scroll down to p.14 of the pdf). It found that any interventions to assist small scale farmers in the study area — two districts in Limpopo — would have to be low-cost and based on locally available resources and technologies. One of these resources turns out to be local leafy vegetables. The survey found that almost all respondents consumed African leafy vegetables, and dried and stored their leaves for use during the dry winter. It suggested that the communities could generate significant income by marketing this produce more widely.
New medicinal plants
Speaking of medicinal plants, a remarkable study in Peru traces the traditional use of plants for all kinds of curative purposes from colonial times to the present. There’s an article on the work on SciDev.Net here but it is in Spanish. Although many plants used in colonial times have disappeared from the area of the study, traditional healers have replaced them with other species and have thus maintained their pharmacopeia. This is very much a living, evolving tradition.