Category: Plants & People

On Tulasi Puja, which falls on Utthana Dwadashi day, people make Surnali (sweet dosa) in the morning, in addition to various other things including pattoli, a sweet dish steamed inside tamarind leaves.

Sweet potatoes originated in Central and South America. But archaeologists have found prehistoric remnants of sweet potato in Polynesia from about A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1100, according to radiocarbon dating. They’ve hypothesized that those ancient samples came from the western coast of South America.

World-changing algae and plants caused disastrous environmental shifts that lasted millions of years. Humans are world changers 3.0—the first animals to make the list.

Most of what we taste we actually smell. The only sensations that we pick up in our mouth are sweet, sour, bitter, umami and salty. Without its smell, coffee would have only a sour or bitter taste due to the organic acids. Try it with your next cup of coffee – hold your nose as you take your first sip. The rich satisfying sensation of coffee is almost entirely due to the volatile compounds produced when we roast coffee beans. (Click on title for full story.)

If someone handed you a peach 6,000 years ago, you might be surprised: the sour, grape-sized lump you’d be holding would hardly resemble the plump, juicy fruit we enjoy today.

“These people know so much about the way animals work in the forest and the rivers. Fishing is in their blood and they are born with a net in their hands. It makes sense for researchers to work with them and act as a bridge to bring their knowledge to the scientific community and vice versa.”

Persuading people in an overwhelmingly agricultural society to think twice before cutting down trees and burning land to make way for maize and other crops has not been easy.

In the first century ce, Dioscorides prescribed its oil and milk mixed as a cough syrup in his pharmacopoeia De Materia Medica. The legendary pre-Islamic sage Luqman al-Hakim recommended taking hazelnuts with marzipan (sweetened almond paste) to fight anemia. Later, in the 11th century, the polymath Ibn Sina suggested its paste be applied to dog bites and scorpion stings. The Missouri Botanical Garden of St. Louis, which researches modern ethno-botanical medicine, suggests, however, that the nuts simply be “left for the squirrels.”