Forest Foods of Konkan Western Ghats

Bharat Mansata (6-7-22)

End summer and early monsoon is the season of maximum abundance of forest foods at Vanvadi – a 28-year old, collectively regenerated forest in the Sahyadri foothills of the Western Ghats.
The months of May and June saw the fruiting and ripening of Karvanda, Mahua, Mango, Jambul, Tembrun … With the first rains, also emerged the shoots of Shevla. Brilliantly coloured and exotic looking at closer sight, this locally relished vegetable is cooked in a special way with another forest plant, to remove its itchiness. It fetches a fancy price in the not-too-distant towns like Badlapur and Kalyan; also in the Dadar market of Mumbai. All through June, small hordes of neighbouring villagers fanned out in the Vanvadi forest to hunt for the Shevla. Also the tender, young shoots of several varieties of creepers that are cooked as a delicious vegetable, and are quite abundantly available till about mid-July.

A few varieties of tubers like Ol-Kand, are also consumed in the rains by the older generation of the local people, who swear by their high nutritional value. The Ol-Kand tubers are securely tied in a small cloth bundle and left overnight in a flowing stream; then boiled and eaten the following day. The elders recall that in the past, especially during periods of food shortage, they survived quite healthily on this tuber.

The history of farming is barely 10,000 years old, according to India’s National Commission on Farmers. Before that, humans – like all other creatures on earth – depended entirely on food provided directly by nature. And we faced no nutritional handicap in our evolution!

There are an estimated 80,000 edible plant species on earth, says the ‘Gaia Atlas of Planet Management’ (Ed. Norman Myers, Pan Books, 1985), not counting the many edible varieties of each species. These uncultivated foods are free, nourishing gifts of Nature, growing wild, requiring no human labour, except in harvesting or gathering.

Today, with the spread of extensive industrial monocultures – grown with toxic chemicals for distant urban markets, barely 20 plant species now provide 90% of the entire human diet. And just 8 crops (of a very few varieties) provide three quarters of all human food! That is a miniscule 0.01% (or one in ten thousand) of the edible species gifted by Nature. So under all the glitter and packaging of our current ‘multi-brand’ market economy, are we really progressing, or getting nutritionally impoverished?

In February 2014, I was fortunate to attend a vibrant Tribal Food Festival at Bissam Cuttack in the Niyamgiri foothills of Odisha. Over 600 adivasis, about 80% women, gathered from over 200 tribal villages of different states in eastern and central India – to celebrate the rich diversity of their traditional foods. More than 1500 food varieties – cultivated and uncultivated, raw and cooked – were on display, including over 900 uncultivated forest foods, and 400 ready-to-eat recipes for sampling.

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Almost two decades earlier, in 1994, a number of us had pooled resources to buy undulating land, now known as Vanvadi, in the foothills of north Western Ghats; our primary aim – ecological regeneration and local self-reliance. Over the years, the clear-felled land regenerated into a magnificent forest: tall, dense, and rich in biodiversity. A survey of the botanical wealth of Vanvadi, based on local tribal knowledge, surprised us with 52 species of uncultivated forest foods that provide edible yield (leaf, fruit, flower, stem, tuber/root), usually at a certain time of the year. The peak availability in our region is in early monsoon, when the agricultural produce of the past year has been largely consumed; and the farming population needs nourishment for the hard work of the new planting season.
Of the 52 edible species listed at Vanvadi, we identified the botanical names of about 30 plants, and verified their use as food from ‘The Wealth of India’ and ‘Food from Forests’. The former – a multi-volume encyclopaedia of India’s biological wealth, published by the National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, CSIR (www.niscair.res.in) – is a treasure-trove of information on the myriad useful plant species of India. The latter – published by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), 590 pages – provides an account of almost 600 uncultivated food yielding species from various forested regions of India; and there are many more.

Yet another very valuable resource is, ‘A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India’, by Sir George Watt, first published by Oxford University in 1889-90 (10 volumes), and digitized in 2006. For more condensed data – drawn from ‘The Wealth of India’ – ‘The Useful Plants of India’ (918 pages), published by the ‘Publications and Information Directorate’ of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), provides summary information on over 5,000 useful plant species, including their local names in various vernacular languages for easy cross-identification.

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It is a tragedy that our GDP-driven ‘e-con-omic’ civilization pays scant attention to the rich diversity of organic, nutritious foods, that our natural forests provide free in a most ecologically efficient manner – without any external input whatsoever of energy, water or fertility! Indeed, the forests are by far the most efficient agents of harvesting solar energy, sequestering carbon, ameliorating climate change, conserving and regenerating our soils and their fertility, fostering biodiversity, and recharging groundwater, besides providing a huge variety of useful produce.
Late Debjeet Sarangi of Living Farms (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) – that helped organize the Tribal Food Festival in Odisha – stated: “Uncultivated foods provide a critical supplement to the diets of the local native communities. Often, in bio-diverse natural forests, there is year-long supply of several hundred varieties of foods, ensuring diversity and nutritional balance in the local diets. While the gathering and consumption of uncultivated foods varies across regions, communities, seasons, a recent study by Living Farms revealed that there was not a single household in its sample study (of the adivasis of Niyamgiri hills and forests) which reported that it does not collect or consume uncultivated foods like wild tubers, greens, mushrooms, fruits, etc. A wealth of living knowledge yet exists in our indigenous communities regarding their forest bio-resources.”

An adivasi of the Pahari Korba tribe declared, “We Pahari Korba have always enjoyed a long and healthy life for generations, without any major ailments or diseases. For every minor disease, symptom or discomfort we depended on forest herbs, plants, vegetables, to get well, and we never visited a drug store, hospital, or took any injections.”

Other adivasi tribals at the Festival related how their uncultivated forest foods have been dependable sources of nutrition even in the most critical times of drought and agricultural failure, caused by increasingly erratic or scant rainfall.

Forest Foods of Konkan Western Ghats Bharat Mansata (6-7-22)

But in many places, communities are now reporting a decline in the availability and consumption of uncultivated foods, due to a variety of external factors. Deforestation, displacement, urbanization, big dams, industrial mining, mega-plants, the spread of cash-crops and monocultures – all constitute a relentless assault on the biological and socio-cultural habitats of our enormously rich diversity of uncultivated foods, evolved over millennia.

An elderly adivasi woman, participating in the 2014 Tribal Food Festival, lamented: “Now we see our own children, educated the modern way, getting culturally alienated from us. This younger generation knows little about our rich heritage and traditional, season based food practices. I fear that our whole life, livelihood and culture may be lost forever if we do not start educating our children and future generations to conserve nature, live harmoniously with the seasons, and revive our traditional bio-diverse nutritional security.”

Devinder Sharma, a food and agricultural policy analyst states, “Modern living has snapped the symbiotic relationship that existed with nature. Not many know that India is a mega-diversity region with over 51,000 plant species existing, but with hardly a handful being cultivated.”
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At Vanvadi, a primary listing yielded over 120 forest species known to have various traditional uses. Apart from food yielding species, we discovered we had more than 45 plant species of known medicinal use; and at least 20 timber species, including four rated as ‘first grade timbers’. And then there are plants that yield natural dyes, soaps, edible oils, bio-fuels, gums and resins, botanical pesticides, leaf plates, etc., apart from fodder, fuel, fibre, manure, hedge protection, craft material, etc.
Many species have multiple uses. For example, the flowers of the Mahua tree are used to make jaggery, liquor and dozens of food recipes among the adivasi communities of Central and Eastern India. The fresh, green fruits can be cooked and eaten as a vegetable, or sun-dried and consumed months later. In our region of north Konkan Western Ghats, the seed of the Mahua fruit is crushed to yield a cooking-oil, far more wholesome than any brand available in the market. And the residual cake after extracting the oil is used to fertilise farm crops. It is also burnt with dried cow-dung to smoke out mosquitoes. When the Mahua tree dies at a ripe, old age, its wood is used for making carriages, furniture, sports goods, musical instruments, agricultural implements; and also for house and ship building.

The rich natural inheritance of our forested regions sustained our adivasi communities for generations beyond count. Today, if there are any people left on this earth who can teach our floundering ‘millennium generation’ the fine art and science of co-existing in harmony with the forest, it is these tribals. Or rather, just those among them now, who still retain the knowledge, the skills, and the native cultural perspective.