Grow More Food

What You Can Do in the Islands

By Charles Reed, Apia

FEW people living in the Pacific Islands ever come to know the value of the many splendid, nourishing roots and fruits that are quite common to the Is lands. More often than not, some of these edibles abound in your locality, close by.

These valuable foodstuffs, being in the category of so-called native foods are, only too often, despised. Less than 10 per cent, of white residents in the South Seas to-day are conversant with the use and value of such foodstuffs as, say, cassava-tubers, kumeras, tanias, tropical potatoes, white taro, white yam, the coco nut, and the chufa-nut.

When the present uncertainty of regular future supplies of our customary foodstuffs is considered, it behoves the man who has anything like a quarter acre at his disposal to plant up, in a small variety, the common foodstuffs of the tropics.

Very often, this writer has entertained guests at a dinner wholly produced from a relatively small area of land, near his back door. The production of sufficient foodstuffs for one’s family requirements does not take up much of one’s time or labour, for the above-mentioned crops are among the most easily grown of any on earth.

Press a single six-inch piece of the stem of the cassava shrub into the soil.

This will produce, without any attention, enough laundry-starch for a week’s wash ing, or enough tubers for a family meal.

Yet how many people are aware of even the name of this most productive of all known tropical plants? It is the manihot; better known, perhaps, as manioca or cassava; and, in Queensland, as tapioca.

Take, for instance, a native family meal, such as will be commonly prepared in most of the Pacific Islands. Young cassava tubers are peeled and baked, or boiled like Irish potatoes. There is but little difference in the white, floury tex tme of these tubers, and ordinary potatoes. As soon as the tubers are ten der —say in about 10 minutes —the water is strained off, the tubers remain in the saucepan, and a “sauce” made from the cream pressed from a grated coconut; and to this is added salt and pepper, and either chopped onion or shallots. The sauce is then poured on to the steaming hot vegetables in the pot, and allowed to cook for about two minutes longer—just enough to cook the cream. When, some years ago, this writer served the Prince of Wales with cassava-cream (at Vai lima, Samoa) he took a second helping!

The other root-stocks mentioned above are all equally nutritious, and all most easily grown, with very little trouble.

There are no pests, in particular, that worry these common crops of the tropics.

Some of them will keep over many months, especially the yams and the tanias. Cassava, like taro, must be used in the fresh state, but it can be grown to produce all the year round.

CASSAVA, too, will yield, from a few stools of tubers, sufficient laundry starch, of the best grade, to save the household washing-bill many pounds, in a year. This starch is quite simple to make. The tubers are peeled and washed, grated and pressed. A piece of sack-cloth is used for the pressing.

Water is mixed with the yellowish, creamy juice—and the pure white starch will settle down at the bottom of the utensil, or tub. In about four hours, or more, the starch water is drained off, and the starch put out in the sun to dry, in lumps. Cleanly prepared cassava

starch will keep almost indefinitely it stored in a dry, covered tin. The residual meal will feed pigs and poultry, either fresh or sun-dried.

But, in South America, this cassava meal forms a nutritive form of cake, being baked with the cream expressed from the coconut, or from the “chufanut”. With Europeans, however, it may be years before we realize how really valuable some of these so-called “waste products” can be.

Actually, we Europeans are poor economists. The possibility of growing and producing foodstuffs for our own table never occurs to us—except perhaps a small garden for salad-stuffs. For everything, we “just go” to the store. But, in the future, will the store in the Islands be assured of a regular and continuous supply? No harm will come to the extra foodstuffs if a planting is made right now.