The Yam

Food Value, and Some History.

(By A. J. Vogan, F.R.G.S., in “The Sydney Mail")

AUSTRALIA is strangely ignorant of that most important of all food vegetables—the yam.

Having had occasion to spend the winters of the last twenty years amongst sixty to eighty of the lesser known islands of the Pacific, I have learned the value of this wonderful vegetable.

Mohammed, in his famous panegyric upon the date-palm, calls it “our uncle,” for it is practically the sole food of millions of believers. The rice plant to China is what the potato was to Ireland, and such is the yam to the descendants of those Asians who peopled the Pacific and introduced an expanding civilisation, until the mos quito, introduced from America (like many other pests), brought the same cessation of progress as happened in Persia and in Greece.

Anyone who has lived long in those lovely “typees” of the Pacific misses the succulent vegetables when he re turns to more civilised parts, just as the Englishman does his beefsteak or the Frenchman his coffee. And now the doctors are awakening to the fact, put before them in 1919, that where the yam is eaten no cancer obtains.

But, of course, just as there are new-laid eggs, fresh eggs, and—“aigs,” so are there “yams” and —yams. I had always thought that the white Samoan yam was the most delicious and valu able vegetable on earth until I recently spent some time in the weirdly won derful Trobriands. Mr. Lumley, the only white man there who has any attempt at a farm, has just sent me over some boxes of carefully selected tubers of the many varieties of splendid yams grown by the natives; and Mr. A. H. Joubert, of Ter ranova, on the Tweed, has undertaken to acclimatise these for future multi plication and distribution.

The intelligent brown inhabitants of the Trobriands and Lusancy Islands have devoted many centuries to the cultivation of this root; and their greatest religious ceremony is in con nection with the gathering in of the yam harvest. The roots, when gathered, are stored in very artistic food-houses shaped in a particular way, which tells the archaeologist of a connection with Babylonia and Persia, and at that period of harvest the spirits of the ancestors, who, during the year rest blissfully in the spiky little island of Tuma, where I stayed awhile, revisit their old villages and plantations to see the crops, com menting upon them through the priest chiefs. A little rumpus occurred just before I left the group because a mis sionary, having entered a village, so prevented the ancestral spirits passing over it that he upset the programme of events.

The yam is one of the many species of monocotyledons, which include most of our food plants, from wheat to onion. In the Trobriands, it reaches 15ft. and even 20ft. in length. It closely resembles the potato in composition, but is more tasty and contains more nitrogen, so being more nutritious.

Those kinds referred to above are of Indian origin, but have been crossed long since with Chinese kinds. In France, they are called igname, and varieties of Chinese origin are grown there and in Algeria. They have been successfully grown in England, but re quire more heat than obtains there.

If I may add my personal experience, I may say that I have lived for days entirely upon yams, and they are the ideal food of the vegetarian.