Food sovereignty
Food sovereignty
Food sovereignty
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT THING TO ME!!
Do y'all have any idea how many edible plants there are that we don't eat for cultural reasons (racism and classism?)
Example #1: Amaranth
Amaranth refers to any of plants from genus Amaranthus for our purposes, some of these are domesticated to varying extents
Amaranthus species are primarily important in the USA due to being our most costly agricultural weed.
This plant has declared war on industrial monocrop agriculture. Like all the best weeds, it is ridiculously adaptable. Its resistance to herbicides like Roundup keeps getting stronger and more expansive. In 2022, Amaranthus palmeri was found with SIMULTANEOUS resistance to SIX herbicide modes of action (six separate families of herbicide!)
So remember Roundup Ready corn? Yeah, that shit is basically obsolete in many places because every weed under the sun has evolved glyphosate resistance. So Monsanto spent ten years developing crop varieties resistant to Dicamba as well so crops could be sprayed with Dicamba to control weeds, and within 5 years, Dicamba-resistant weeds were proliferating.
I could go on forever about how european agriculture ran roughshod over the north american continent fucking up things you wouldn't think COULD be fucked up through pure malicious ignorance, but rest assured the era of chemical-dependent agriculture is in its decline because weeds can evolve faster than we can develop new technologies.
Guess what, though? Amaranth was a CROP for Native Americans and still is, domesticated varieties are popular in Mexico, and it's high in protein, gluten free, and a dual purpose crop where you can harvest the leaves as vegetables 2-3 times a year without impacting the eventual seed harvest.
Researchers are already investigating it for its utility as a crop in areas that will be heavily impacted by climate change.
North America USED to be flourishing with food sources cultivated carefully by Native Americans for the benefit of the whole ecosystem, we had abundance of oaks (boil out the tannins and acorns are edible!) hickory nuts, pecans and American chestnuts, but Europeans stopped doing controlled burns and chopped down virtually all forest in the East, and now they're dominated by more fire intolerant species rather than the nut-producing species...and of course the American chestnuts fell victim to introduced chestnut blight.
Canebrakes! Ough! Did y'all know we have native BAMBOO?? The Southeast used to be covered in immense swaths of bamboo forest, and it was almost entirely obliterated (extincting the Carolina parakeet and helping with extinction of passenger pigeons in the process). Genus Arundinaria, you can look it up. American bamboo shoots can be used culinarily just as bamboo is eaten in Asian regions where bamboo grows.
Arundinaria bamboos have been called "the plastic of the Southeastern Native Americans" because they used (and still use) it for EVERYTHING. Bedframes, baskets (WATERPROOF!), backpacks, containers, fish traps, blowguns, flutes, you name it. Unlike some introduced Asian bamboos you may know, it grows very straight and has no groove (sulcus) in between the nodes, meaning it's hard and doesn't deform at all as it grows.
If you cook milkweed, it's edible! In ethnobotanical databases it's referenced a TON as a vegetable. The flowers can be used to turn lemonade pink. Virginia springbeauty has tiny potato-like tubers that can be eaten the same way as potatoes.
Did y'all know we have wild grapes? They're referenced in To Kill a Mockingbird, they're called scuppernongs. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries...all native to the USA. We have passion fruit (Passiflora incarnata), we have mulberries (Morus rubra), we have native wild plums and cherries, and PAWPAWS.
I got to eat wild pawpaws last year. I got a whiff of something unbelievably sweet and banana-y in the woods and climbed down the hillside to find the source, and spent like half an hour messily devouring ripe pawpaws in a pawpaw grove. It was literally the most incredible fruit experience I've ever had. They are like a perfect blend between a mango and a banana, with a velvety, creamy, soft texture that is way better than either. You can show me a picture of a pawpaw and I'll start salivating.
These trees grow wild all over the place in rural areas. Why don't we sell pawpaws in stores then? Capitalism. Pawpaws are way softer and more fragile than bananas and spoil really quickly after ripening, so they can't be shipped long distances, and thus they're almost forgotten because a fruit that can only be obtained from small local growers is useless to Walmart.
So many of these plants grow eagerly in disturbed environments. Wild strawberries love gravelly, rocky areas. Sunflowers were actually considered noxious weeds a hundred years ago. Why aren't we aware of them? Mowing, weed-whacking and bulldozing has extirpated food plants to be replaced with useless, invasive grass.
"Oof ouch we have to figure out how to feed the planet aaaaaa there's too many people on Earth to grow enough food" Over thousands of square miles we literally obliterated dozens of edible food plants and replaced them with invasive lawn grass
