Photo: ©kpstudios

With food, poorer is often richer. Onion soup wasn’t created by any celebrity chef.  Nor was apple pie.   

But
now comes the news that remote tribes in dense tropical forests or
frozen polar wastes are keepers of a vast treasurehouse of healthful,
nutritious foods — many with extraordinary properties — that more
affluent societies can only envy.

This is among the main findings of a recent book,

Indigenous People’s Food Systems, co-published by FAO and  McGill University’s Centre for Indigenous People’s Nutrition and Environment (CINE).
 Says Barbara Burlingame, FAO Senior Nutrition Officer, Nutrition
Assessment and Nutrient Requirements, “This book shows the wealth of
knowledge in indigenous communities, in diverse ecosystems, and the
richness of their food resources.”

Receding habitats

The
bad news is that as wild habitats recede under economic pressures and
globalization increasingly standardizes lifestyles, these native
foodstuffs are vanishing fast — together with the diets that once kept
tribespeople healthy and trim.  

Nonetheless, in the Karen
community of Sanephong, close to the Myanmar border in Thailand, 661
inhabitants still get to choose from 387 food species including Wax
gourd, Jack fruit and Tree Ear, the book’s researchers found. Local
cuisine featured many mouth-watering specialities not readily found at
one’s favourite local restaurant, such as painted bullfrog and
bush-tailed porcupine.

Nature has clearly been generous to the
Karens, who enjoy 208 species of vegetables and 62 different kinds of
fruit. But even in an arid, drought-prone zone such as the territory
inhabited by Kenya’s Maasai tribespeople, 35 different species of
herbs, leafy vegetables and wild fruits are documented, while in
Canada’s frozen north, the Inuits of Baffin Bay boast 79 different
wildlife foods including caribou meat and ringed seal. 

Four crops

By
comparison, diets in industrialized western countries are far more
restricted, depending heavily on just four commercial crops — wheat,
rice, corn, and soy — often consumed as processed foods or, via animal
feed, as meat. Even more alarming are FAO estimates that about
three-quarters of the genetic diversity once found in agricultural
crops has been lost over the last century.

Traditional foods
not only generally taste good but also frequently contain very high
levels of micronutrients. In Mand, a hamlet on the Micronesian island
of Pohnpei,

Utin Llap, one of the 26 local varieties of
bananas contains huge amounts of Beta-Carotene — more effective in
combating Vitamin A deficiency than any pharmaceutical preparation.

Of
the 12 indigenous groups studied in the book, the percentage of adult
dietary energy obtained from traditional food varied between 93 percent
for the Awajun of Peru, among whom obesity is almost non-existent, and
27 percent for Mand’s 500 villagers who now face a series of
diet-induced health problems. 

Diet disorders

Says
Burlingame, “The shift away from traditional food resources to
commercial, convenience foods is often accompanied by an increase in
diet-related disorders like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.”

It is therefore important to preserve such resources, not only
for the indigenous groups concerned, but also as an important store of
biodiversity for all nations. A first step, says Burlingame, is to
conduct more research to better understand the importance of these
foods nutritionally.  Indigenous peoples take pride in their local
foods when they know how unique and beneficial they can be. A second
step is to help them find wider markets, locally and farther afield,
not only for their food produce, but for the medicinal plants they
often have in abundance.

But some of this could already be
happening. Among the Inuit, who have developed an appetite for frozen
pizza, spaghetti and carbonated soft drinks, 31 percent of total energy
came from traditional food sources  a decade ago, whereas in 2006 the
figure had risen to 41 percent. This indicates a return to tradition.

And
it could be that in the not too distant future the choice for dining
out will no longer be between national cuisine and ethnic but feature a
new entry:  “How about indigenous tonight”.

Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems is on sale through the

FAO Online Publications Catalogue