Foraged from the love of liberty

Recently, while reading online about the Arawaks, I felt inspired by the fact that they ate off the land – primarily corn, beans, peppers, pumpkin, cassava, peanuts, birds, lizards, rodents, turtles, snakes, fish, wild plants.

The day after reading the account, I encountered an article about six male Tongan teenagers who, in 1965, stole a boat and were shipwrecked on Ata, a deserted island. For 15 months, until they were rescued, the boys survived on wild chickens, root vegetables, bananas, rainwater, and blood from seabirds when water was not available. Fish, plant matter and other natural sources also sustained them.

Coincidentally, the day after reading about that, I came upon another story – two sisters and a brother swam to the safety of a deserted island north of Australia, after the small boat carrying them, their parents and baby brother met difficulty. Their parents, who told them to swim to safety, stayed with the baby in open water and perished. The siblings survived for six days on the island, consuming whatever the land provided. The children were not as helpless as others might have been; youngsters from the islands of Torres Strait (their home) are taught survival skills, in preparation for such eventualities.

Perhaps "basic survival skills" should be taught in TT schools: fire-making, water purification, first aid, CPR, shelter-building, knot-tying, simple navigation, and signalling for help. One never knows when these skills may be required.

The message that struck me in the above-mentioned instances was the diet of the survivors. It is said that one would do best-consuming foods grown or sourced within ten miles of one’s habitation. Yet many people consume foods that have been shipped across thousands of miles.

Generally, we in the modern western world have moved far from the consumption of natural resources. Most of what we eat is purchased, processed, packaged in plastic, drowned in oil, pumped with hormones, and laced with sugar.

Inspired by the idea of eating as purely and healthily as the indigenous and island survivors did – natural, of the earth, acquired through foraging in nature and/or grown at home – I took a bike ride to a small plant stall in the community. There, I purchased several lettuce, patchoi and kale plants. As I write this, approximately three weeks later, they are all flourishing, enjoying recent days of rainfall.

As I rode my bike around the community some mornings after, a noni fruit from a tree at the side of the road dropped to the ground with a notable thud. It occurred to me that, were I foraging for food like those island castaways, noni could be something on my menu, for alternative medicinal purposes, consumption as a raw fruit and the leaves that may be used in salads, soups and stir-fries.

For the remaining duration of my ride, I kept my eyes open for other potential foods. On one back street there was a sapodilla tree, so huge that branches were hanging over the fence, its bounty of fruit hanging low over the pavement – a forager’s banquet, hopefully without the consequences of praedial larceny. I took note of the coconut, mango and other fruit trees, wild spinach, chadon beni and other edible vegetation growing on the roadsides.

Foraging opportunities are all around us, but in many cases, not sufficiently plentiful to be sustainable, especially with the rise in construction causing the decimation of naturally growing food sources. Pre-covid, Joefield Park in Bon Accord was maintained as a "herbal garden," a self-started initiative of the CEPEP coordinator and workers assigned to that area. Their produce, grown and tended to daily in the park, included cabbage, lettuce, cauliflower, patchoi, tomatoes, celery, caraille, passion fruit, ochro, lime, plantain, different varieties of bananas, pepper, peas, bhagi, sour cherry, small-leaf and big-leaf thyme, rosemary, aloes, plums, five fingers, pommecythere, soursop, mango, avocado, custard apple, star apple, coconuts (red, yellow, green)...In an article I had written about them at the time (2017), I referred to their impressive edible display as an urban paradise. They had planted for people in the community to come, harvest and eat freely. They had even created bird feeders from bamboo and calabash with the rationale that “not only humans must come here and eat.”

I would love to hear a politician make a promise like this:

“We will create employment through the establishment of multiple national public food parks where citizens can forage at liberty for fresh, natural foods – resulting in lower food bills and low to no medical bills as national health increases!”