Forgotten foods can be a lifesaver

HULU LANGAT: Ingredients such as unripe watermelons and millet (sekoi) might sound foreign to many Malaysians but they were in fact commonly eaten in the past by locals.

Crops For the Future (CFF) CEO Prof Sayed Azam-Ali (pic), a firm believer in saving centuries-old recipes, hopes that ingredients such as these could be re-introduced into the modern diet so that populations in future would have not only enough food to eat but also have a more diversified diet.

“It’s important to collect, preserve, and study the recipes of our ancestors because if we don’t preserve them, the knowledge will be lost forever,” he said in an interview.

 

This search for more varieties of foods to prop the modern and future diet led to the creation of the Forgotten Foods Network, a worldwide initiative that collects and shares information on foods, recipes and traditions that would have otherwise disappeared.

CFF, from its headquarters here, is spearheading the network.

Sayed said that out of 7,000 species of plants that were farmed throughout history, only about 30 types are grown around the world.

And four of these, rice, maize, wheat and soy, feed more than 60% of the world’s 7.6 billion population, he said.

The huge reliance on only four types of crops will not be sustainable in the long run, he said.

Sayed said that supermarkets offer rather homogenised foods when for thousands of years, each community had their own kinds of foods.

Delicious and nutritious: A plate of watermelon ‘kerabu’.

 

Besides collecting information of the “forgotten” foods, he said CFF also conducts studies on the nutritional content of food ingredients used and the feasibility of using the ingredients to feed the growing world population.

By 2050, it is estimated that there will be 9.7 billion people on earth and that posed a challenge in finding food to feed another 2.1 billion people while the earth is expected to face the challenge of a hotter planet, he said.

He said scientists had projected that the earth’s temperature would increase by three degrees Celcius by the end of the century.

As such, the crops needed to be able to withstand the higher temperature, he said.

Sayed said the answer could lie in the ingredients used in foods of the past.

Citing the Bambara groundnut, which originated from Africa and has been grown in the country for years, he said that it was hardy enough to withstand hotter and dryer weather.

“And it’s full of nutrition,” he added.

Britain’s Prince Charles was served murukku made with Bambara groundnut during his visit to Malaysia recently, he said.

CFF staff members Anis Diyana Ahmad’s late grandfather had used unripe watermelons to make kerabu while G. Janaki’s late grandmother used to grind millet she grew herself to make kevaru roti, he said.

The staff members shared their families’ recipes to enable the recipes to be preserved and the ingredients studied, he said.

Sayed said that once the ingredients were studied, CFF plans to market new varieties of foods to the public.