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There is food in plants and trees in forests. And if you are familiar with them, you will never starve when you are lost in the woods.
Take balete (English name: Indian rubber tree).
Mention this species and what instantaneously comes to mind (among Filipinos, specifically) is a tree with spreading branches that is the favorite abode of the unseen (spooky creatures).
But what is not popularly known is that its young folded leaves can be cooked as vegetables. Its seeds can also be roasted and used as substitute for coffee.
Kaong is a common palm whose fleshy kernels are cooked and eaten raw as salad or cooked as vegetable, and its sweet sap is used in the production of sugar, starch, vinegar, and tuba (a native drink).
Jade vine is known for the blue-green color of its luxuriant flower clusters. But many are not aware that its young flowers can be prepared as salad.
Paco, usually found along rivers, is a fern whose young fronds are good leafy vegetables that can be eaten raw or cooked, used as an ingredient of stew or even pickled, and its young fiddle heads eaten as salad.
Thirsty? Then look for lipang kalabau, an endemic plant that thrives in thickets in northern
Balete, kaong, Jade vine, paco, and lipang kalabau are but among 100 trees and plants with food uses contained in a book titled “Food from the Wilderness”.
Compiled by Mercedita Polinag of the Los Baños-based Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau (DENR-ERDB), the 208-page volume was published by the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Agricultural Research (DA-BAR).
Complete with colorful photographs, the publication contains the entries’ scientific name, family name, common name, local name, description, distribution, and propagation.
The entries range from fruit and commercial tree species to palms, bamboos, shrubs, and ornamental plants.
Examples of the trees, shrubs, and palms are bignai, alibangbang parang, tuai, himbabao, buri, pitogo, kauayan tinik, kakawate, nipa, bakauan, babae, katuray, limuran, and malunggay-hapon.
The small and ornamental plants include saluyot, kulitis, gumamela, paco, oregano, apulid, pansit-pansitan, quiapo (or kiapo), olasiman, wild sunflower, lagundi, and niog-niogan.
For the project, a team of DENR-ERDB experts conducted a research on wild plants that have become part of the diet of many Filipinos.
The result is an informative handbook that, in the words of Polinag, would open new doors in addressing the problem of food security, particularly in remote rural or upland areas. — Rudy A. Fernandez
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