Thursday, February 09, 2012

Peculiar Plantlife Potpourri

By virtue of our umpteen months of rural reclusion, Tana and I now enjoy the titles of de facto farmers-in-residence. As seasons have worn in and out, we’ve come to appreciate the intricate relationship between man and vegetable. That's why today in the spirit of this relationship, we present to you some scattershot anecdotes, ramblings, and factoids on the strangest specimens in West African plant kingdom and how they impact our world at large.

Kola Nut

The most recognized brand on planet earth, Coca Cola, was born one 19th century day when some pharmacist dude from Atlanta combined extracts of two rare imports: Coca (cocaine) and Cola (kola nuts) into seltzer water. Today, one of those two original ingredients remains in the company’s secret recipe, and it comes from our own backyard. (Hint: it’s not cocaine.) 
Kola nuts can only be found here in West Africa and certain pockets of the Middle East. Locals here have a pastime of chewing on them on lazy afternoons for a caffeine rush comparable to a triple espresso shot.

Weda Fruit 
(AKA Saba Senegalensis or Zaban)

If you’ve ever wanted to surgically remove and eat the innards of a Martian, look no further than Weda. Though it may appear just another wild West African fruit of the vine, the experience of eating Weda truly has the air of an alien autopsy. Once you break the splotchy, rough-textured shell on the inside of your knee nutcracker-style, you’re confronted with a dozen or so slimy, yellow globules the size of grapes. Those who dare to disentangle these stringy little organ-like pods can enjoy a few minutes sucking on them and then spitting them out. 

Despite its sci-fi facade, the Weda fruit tastes surprisingly like American candy. Its intense acidity and tartness matches that of Sour Skittles, as another volunteer James once observed. Weda only ripens during a narrow window of the year, so only on occasion am I surprised to see it at market, in a juice bottle, or out in the woods.

I thought I’d also throw in below this picture of the cocoa fruit, also native to these parts and similar in many ways to Weda. Who would have guessed that the origin of all brownies and hot fudge is such a freakish, otherworldly thing. 


Fromager Tree 
(AKA Kapok, Ceiba)


Behold the utter majesty of a tree whose name sounds like the French word for cheese. Its bark is white and thorny. Its gargantuan, weird-looking roots usually protrude out of the ground from all sides at 45-degree inclines like skateboard ramps. According to neighbors, the fruits aren’t edible, but a mean tea can be brewed from the flower petals for headache relief. In terms of enormity, Fromagers look like something straight out of the rainforest, so I always do a double-take when against a barren landscape I notice a single four-storey tree that seemingly got lost and wandered away from his jungly home.

If you follow Burkina’s latitude line with your finger around a desktop globe, Fromager trees crop up in this climate on every continent. Amazonian tribes use the cottony fluff in the seeds to wrap their blow darts. And wouldn’t you know it—in Cambodia, there’s an overgrown Fromager posing for tourists at the famed Angkor Wat Temple.



Ackee Fruit

Here’s another familiar sight among Banfora’s plethora of flora: the mighty Ackee fruit. When it’s ripe, the bottom pops open, revealing three black marble-sized seeds and yummy spongy stuff. Ackee fruits (as well as shea) contain fatty acids that make for top-notch traditional cooking. People appreciate it here, but not in the same way they idolize such Ackee-based dishes in the Caribbean. Apparently, ever since it was introduced by way of slave ships in the late 1700s, Ackee has remained a dietary staple for islanders and is Jamaica’s national fruit.

Bissap 
(AKA Hibiscus)

On our first week in village in December 2010, a jolly neighbor lady filled up two heaping bags of dried purple petals and handed one to each of us as gifts. A couple days later, we bravely yet naively stepped into the kitchen to prepare them. Attempting to replicate the local hibiscus tea we’ve so enjoyed, we failed miserably in our own homebrew. Following this disaster, the leftovers sat in our kitchen for an additional six months gathering dust until they were pitched. We still drink street bissap all the time, so I’m sure that hibiscus tea will be one of the things I miss most once we’re back in Virginia.


Cashew Apple


Who among us hasn’t kicked back at a football game and plunged their hand into a can of mixed nuts? If you aren’t already a certified mixed nut expert, you might be surprised to discover that cashews originate underneath the exterior of the bright red or yellow fruit. Now, here’s the part I don’t understand. Why did Mother Nature encase such a tasty kidney-shaped nut in a poisonous green shell made of rash-inducing acids, allergens, and toxins? That’s like wrapping a birthday cake in barbed wire. 

From January to May each year, local nut exporters, like my association UPPFL/CO, go to great lengths to extract the nut from its toxic shell by way of assembly line. Even throughout this process, one must beware of a deadly curveball—burning cashew shells causes them to emit a noxious, asphyxiating gas. Everything about the cashew screams danger.

I’ve also been warned on separate occasions that eating cashew apples while drinking milk will make you die. I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but I’m not yet willing to sacrifice my body in the name of science. Cashew apples taste grapefruit-ish and have an amazingly unique citrusy smell that I really enjoy wafting on bike rides through the orchards. Interestingly enough, in some of these orchards, West Africans encourage weaver ants to build nests. This is a cost-effective means of protecting the cashew apple/nut harvest from hungry bugs. 

Baobab

Baobabs with their abnormal rotundity and gnarled branches look like something Tim Burton would dream up. The trunks of some of these trees grow big enough to fit a car inside. Much like cactuses, they’re famine-proof desert dwellers with water reservoirs inside their bellies. The flowers smell like death and are bat-pollinated. The fruits, called “monkey bread” by locals, can be prepared into teodo, a pulpy bland-tasting juice with the consistency of apple sauce. Apparently it’s pretty nutritious, but there so many better local juice options I prefer: for instance, passion fruit juice, mango juice, hortchata (a soy-milk-like drink from the Bambara groundnut), and bissap.



Ronier Palm

In the picture above, the baobab is surrounded by rone palm trees. The rone may look like an ordinary palm tree, but it's actually a special type that’s vital to a key industry in Southwest Burkina: alcohol consumption. Not only do its nuts make tasty munchies at traditional bars, its wood helps build bar benches and secure walls, and most importantly the sap is extracted each day and fermented to produce palm wine or banji. Barflies like Tana and her dad Ken can sip this translucent white liquid out of a calabash like the one she's holding. This sap comes out just below the leaves on female trees, so the sap collector making his rounds has to repeatedly shimmy up two-storey heights. Ken liked the palm wine, but opted not to sample the menu option: caterpillar soup.

Banana & Plantain

Human meddling, selective breeding, and genetic tweaking are responsible for the current lineup at America's grocery stores, an assortment of mutants no one thinks twice about. We take for granted the orangeness of modern carrots, but before medieval times the only existing breeds were purple. All modern sweet/seedless navel oranges stem from one 19th century tree in Brazil. Corn used to be finger-sized a few millennia ago, growing with multiple stalks to one tiny bush. Believe it or not, bananas have undergone an even weirder transformation.

Around 8000 B.C.-ish, ancient civilizations first cross-pollinated two inedible berries, bringing into existence the first incarnation of our own delicious modern banana. Modern iterations have evolved since then into overblown, contorted caricatures of what the plant technically is: an herb with berries. This weak, unstable hybrid is afflicted with many shortcomings: it can't naturally propagate, it's radioactive (weird, huh?), and it's uber susceptible to disease. American supermarkets since the 1940s have lost three different varieties of banana to worldwide disease epidemics with each successive type being slightly less tasty and sweet than the last. This means that the "Gros Michel" type of bananas that my grandparents once ate will never be eaten again. If another apocalyptic banana/plantains disease strikes the world, there may be no way to save the species!

Miracle Fruit

Back in the States, I heard about how American urban hipsters throw these “miracle fruit parties” where they have miracle fruits shipped to them from West Africa and give one to each guest as he enters the apartment. Laid out on the kitchen table, the guests find normally bland foods, such as cauliflower and pickles. Then, a chemical called miraculin in the fruit temporarily changes the way taste buds perceive flavors, so bitter and boring foods magically morph into candy. Sounds fun, right? Well, now I’m here at the fruit’s place of origin and I keep asking around about it, but nobody has ever heard of it. Nevertheless, I'll continue my search to experience this so-called flavor tripping.

Shea
(AKA Karite)


While poking around kiosks at a fair, a local women's group proudly presented me a glossy color brochure for their product. They make a butter from the nuts of a fig-like fruit that grows on shea trees in West Africa. In America we use the fatty acid properties of shea butter for cosmetics and makeup, and here it's cooked or eaten after plummeting off the limb. It's an acquired taste, but the scent is rich like coffee or chocolate.

As you read the following excerpted passages of the haphazardly translated English brochure of this local business, imagine a big [sic] after every sentence:

"About Shea Butter: The shea tree is an African majestic tree, venerated since thousands years by people living in the sahelian areas. It grows naturally in the savana and can reach more than 15 meters high and live many centuries. The shea tree is exploited because of its many resources. Shea tree is used the agro-alimentary or agro-foods. It is also associated in the production a lot of industrial products destined to women, men and children. 

Main Uses of Shea Butter for Hair and Scalp Hair: Shea butter promotes hairtraffic of traumatised breaking and dryness hair. Shea butter is an excellent anti-wrinkles. It moisturises and satins your skin. Helps protect skin from the sun, wind and cold. It attenuates oldnesseffets, soothes irritated skin. Shea butter is used in lips or in massage after shaving. Due to its scaring and disinfectant actions, shea butter is an organic treatment based for skin's irritations such as rodent, eczema, herpes, chapped, burns, etc. Due to its softing and stimulating actions, shea butter helps relieve stretchmarks, can decongest nasal in case of rhume and other allergies. Naturally rich in steroid, shea butter fortifies muscles before and after sport.

Range of Natural Shea Butter Based Treatments: Apply a blend of shea butter into palm, massage carefully on sensitive skins. It helps protect against climate attacks."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That palm wine was really good but they can keep the caterpillar soup !!! - Ken

Anonymous said...

Wow! This Darwinesque posting leads one to believe that you guys may not be intending to come home until you have traveled the globe to do additional research. Perhaps we should check your notebooks back home to see if you have catalogued the many varieties of moss growing in your parent's front yard in spaces usually reserved for grass. We feared you might be embarrassed by the brownish nature of our turf. Now it seems as if our horticultural failures may have awakened a latent research gene. So we take credit for you drive to research and label all flora, both big and small. Nice start. What's next?
The Gardener

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