Bush-to-table provisioning, African style. Image: Walters Collection

A recent item in Forests News, a blog by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), about a little-known edible evergreen tropical plant induced a moment of reflection about food. Precisely, what is the definition of “food”? Does “food” shape human identity, imparting some ineffable stamp on our conscious life? Why are some edibles frowned upon because they’re not raised in fenced feedlots or in equally spaced, weed-free rows? Amid all the dire predictions that planet Earth will be overrun with 9 billion or more hungry, grasping humans by 2050, and the tremendous strain this will put on the natural resources we rely on to feed ourselves, there is little thought given to the contribution of so-called “bush” or “wild” foods that sustain many rural households.

What is Okok? Okok, or Eru, is a local name for a forest-dwelling woody vine (“liana”) of the genus Gnetum (species africanum or bucholzianum) whose leaves are harvested for food and medicinal purposes in Cameroon and adjacent West and Central African republics. For the botanically inclined, Gnetum species are gymnosperms related to conifers, but they bear broad, net-veined leaves instead of needles or scales. I worked in backcountry Cameroon and never heard about, or encountered, this plant. Or maybe I did, and never guessed its true identity. I’ve always been keen to plug into the local bush food scene wherever I traveled, but Gnetum escaped me. I’ve dined on monkeys, snakes, caiman, birds (“parts is parts”), chicha, seaweed, insects, and their gooey grubs (shades of Andrew Zimmern!), and never held back. Wild game and vegetable foods are gifts of nature, but the fat of the land is not factored into modern economic concepts of “value chain” and return on investment. The congregation of deer that convene nightly in the grassy draw on my property do not imbue it with the luster of value-added. Wild edible mushrooms that randomly appear might be harvested or not; it doesn’t matter. Chanterelles may be fetching $75/lb in gourmet markets, but their pushing-up humus here and there makes no difference at all to the landowner. Yet, when hunted and harvested, wild foods contribute significantly to human sustenance.

Okok is one of many wild foods that help bridge the gap between human nutrition, malnutrition, and rural economic sustenance. Such plants (and animals) receive little attention outside the occasional articles published in specialist publications like CIFOR. It’s impossible to say precisely how much wild food supplies human nutrition, but I would guess that the total is underestimated. Wild foods are certainly not factored into future predictions of the land productivity required to feed humanity. Where is the modern-day Euell Gibbons?

Another semi-wild food I remember from Cameroon is “le safoutier”. Safoutier, Safou, or African plum (Dacryodes edulis), is a little-known tree capable of producing vast quantities of elongated, green-purplish fruits that taste, when roasted, like a cross between butter and custard. It is unrelated to the European plum and appears not to occur outside a cluster of territories around the Gulf of Guinea. Le Safoutier was featured in the National Academy of Sciences publication “Lost Crops of Africa: Volume III: Fruits” (2008), a series of fascinating, scholarly works that I encourage the reader to browse online or download entirely from the NAS website, free of charge. In 1987, we feasted on safoutier rôti in Cameroon at the local watering holes in Dschang. Thirty years on, le safoutier is considered a crop for the future.

It isn’t. Le Safoutier, like Okok, has always been, and will always be, there for the taking by those who know the secret.

Le safoutier (Dacryodes edulis) Cameroon, Central Africa. Image: Walters Collection