“Most danger! Most danger!” A cab driver, seeing me plucking leaves from the tree above the kerbside kitchen he was lunching at, rushed up in horror. Every part of the tree is poisonous, he assured me, and would immediately send me into a sleep from which I would never wake up.
The tree in question was the portia tree, Thespesia populnea, or bugari mara in Kannada as another bystander told me. This second man didn’t know anything about it being poisonous but said it certainly wasn’t eaten where he comes from.
To add to my trepidation, several online articles about Thespesia populnea noted that the tree could be confused with several other species (Hibiscus tiliaceus, Hibiscus pernambucensis, Thespesia garckeana, Thespesia grandiflora and Thespesia thespesioides, to be precise). I ruled all of these possible lookalikes out but was confused about the flowers which didn’t look as they should. I also noticed that some of the dried fruits cracked open and others didn’t, a difference which at least one authority said distinguishes Thespesia populnea, whose fruits don’t crack open, from Thespesia populneoides, whose do. Others though say the two trees in fact the same species. All pretty technical for an amateur forager only looking for something to eat with supper…
It’s times like these when I wonder if we really are as mad as people think. With no botanical training and no one to guide us, can we really distinguish edible from inedible, and from poisonous?
An hour, and much flower/leaf/fruit analysis later (I finally figured out that the flowers change colour from yellow to pink),
we were enjoying delicous portia flower fritters and a stir fry of the young leaves and buds. By night, all of us hale and hearty, I could breathe easy.
Jokes aside though this does raise a few important points. The first and most serious is that it is easy for amateurs such as ourselves to mistake one plant for another with possible dire consequences. The second is that it’s not very clear to me what we mean by toxic or poisonous. Potatoes are poisonous if not cooked. Spinach, eaten too much and too often, is toxic. I think perhaps there’s a blog post to be written on this. Third, we are too often scared off potential wild food by people saying they don’t eat it and/or it’s poisonous. Fourth, why is it that there is such regional variation. Why do some communities eat a plant that is growing on their doorstep in abundance and other not? Witness our neighbours eating neither the delicous ferns nor the prized mushrooms that flourish in their land. Fifth, how on earth do we learn how to cook and eat this stuff?
Jeune and I have been talking about how to spend time with India’s foragers par excellence, the tribals. After all humans have thrived on a diet of wild food for millenia not by studying botany, reading hand books or watching YouTube videos but by spending time both with the plants themselves and those familiar with them.
Jungli Food 