Ethnobotany and Food

An Indonesian sambal.

What people eat is a large part of ethnobotany, the study of how people use plants.  Every culture draws from a particular variety of species and then prepares them in particular ways.  When we think of this topic we tend to think of the unfamiliar; for example, what is eaten in Mongolia or Indonesia, not what we pick up at the supermarket.  Yet our settling for carrots in plastic bags is a curious phenomenon as much as the many ways that Indonesians create a condiment called sambal.  Reggie Surya and Felicia Tedjakusuma of Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta (2022) have written an article on this type of chili paste.  It comes in many different forms and includes an ingredient, cayenne pepper (Capsicum annuum), that was brought to the islands by Portuguese and Spanish sailors in the 16^th century, when their nations were major colonial powers.  Before that time, sambal, which has a much longer history, was made with native peppers and spices.  However, cayenne pepper soon became the major ingredient favored in most areas. 

            Using cookbooks as a source, the Jakarta researchers surveyed 110 different varieties of sambal in Indonesia.  They found that the island of Java accounts for over 60% of sambal varieties, and that 80% of the recipes involve crushing and then cooking the ingredients.  Since Indonesians favor spicy foods, it’s not surprising that cayenne would be key, but there are many other ingredients used in differing proportions.  Plant items predominate but about 20% of the recipes include fish and seafood, and there is one from Central Java with chicken liver.  To give a sense of the diversity in this condiment, the authors included photographs of eight different types that range in color from reddish or mustard color to almost black and in apparent consistency from chucky to a relatively smooth paste.  There were also photos of commercially available types, an inevitable consequence of modernization, but also a way to export the product.  Indonesia is a large and very diverse country, so it’s natural that one of its distinctive foods would also take on local flavors, so to speak.  What Surya and Tedjakusmua did was to document the diversity at one point in time.  It would be interesting to redo the survey in another hundred years to see what changes have occurred and if some of the variety has been lost.

            With the ethnic diversity in Indonesian, there are almost endless ways to study its food plants.  One interesting approach was taken on the island of Belitung and its surrounding smaller islands where the population is largely Malay (Chikmawati et al., 2023) It was done in response to the COVID pandemic, when it was difficult to transport food, and so there was greater reliance on what was available locally.  Researchers wanted to evaluate how well these resources could meet the population’s needs.  By a combination of interviews and surveys of local markets, they identified 181 plant species used as food, 59% being wild plants.  These represented all food categories, the most used plant organ being the fruit.  In four sub-districts the coconut (Cocos nucifera) had the highest Index of Cultural Significance, a measure of the use value of a plant.  In another area, it was orange konci (Citrus x microcarpa), a hybrid fruit that’s common in Belitung and that probably originated from a cross between the kumquat and mandarin orange.  Of course rice was an irreplaceable staple, and pepper had the highest economic value for the community.  The conclusion from this study was that there was an abundance of plants, both cultivated and wild that could sustain the population in case of future shortages of imports.

            An earlier ethnobotanical snapshot in time was created by Aleksandr A. Yunatov a Soviet botanist who did research in Mongolia in the 1940s and 1950s resulting in his Fodder Plants of Pastures and Hayfields of the People’s Republic of Mongolia (1954).  In support of this work he went on a number of field trips to Mongolia, worked with the country’s Scientific Committee, and collected specimens, with a map on each noting where the plant was gathered.  A group of Mongolian researchers recently examined Yunatov’s  work and its significance in providing basic information on how a primarily nomadic people used plant resources to sustain their lives and those of their herds (Zhang et al., 2021).  He conducted a series of interviews with livestock breeders to learn about forage plants and with both male and female elders who had knowledge of edible wild plants.  Yunatov was not an ethnobotanist or an anthropologist, but he was fluent in at least one of the local languages and traveled with a Mongolian assistant/translator. 

            Yunatov was interested in the forage plants that Mongolian nomads encountered in the various locales through which they moved their herds in a yearly cycle.  However, he also recorded information on what the nomads ate.  He divided these plants into five categories:  grains, seeds, and bulbs as sources of carbohydrates, wild vegetables, wild fruits, tea substitutes, and seasonings from the wild.  In one interesting side-note he reported that they gathered rhizomes of alpine bistort (Polygonum viviparum) from hoards accumulated by mice, referring to the practice as “opening the alpine bistort palace.”  Much has changed in Mongolia since Yunatov did his research, and the authors of this study argue that it would be difficult to replicate today, thus making it a particularly important contribution to ethnobotany. 

References

Chikmawati, T., Sulistijorini, S., Djuita, N. R., Prasaja, D., Yamini, T. H. A., Miftahudin, M., & Fakhrurrozi, Y. (2023). Ethnobotany of food plants utilized by Malay Ethnic in Belitung District, Indonesia. Biodiversitas Journal of Biological Diversity, 24(5), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.13057/biodiv/d240552

Surya, R., & Tedjakusuma, F. (2022). Diversity of sambals, traditional Indonesian chili pastes. Journal of Ethnic Foods, 9(1), 25. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42779-022-00142-7

Yunatov, A. A. (1954). Fodder Plants of Pastures and Hayfields of the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences Publishing House. (in Russian).

Zhang, Y., Wurhan, Sachula, Yongmei, & Khasbagan. (2021). Ethnobotanical profiles of wild edible plants recorded from Mongolia by Yunatov during 1940–1951. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 43(3), 100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00428-0