Çava, cassava?

Suddenly everyone is talking about cassava, also called kamoteng kahoy (scientific name Manihot esculenta crantz, of the family Euphorbiaceae or Spurge, this information courtesy of Ramon Lim, our education section editor). Because of the tragedy in Bohol where 28 children died after eating maruya and pitsi-pitsi made with cassava flour, this previously benign tuber has achieved infamy. I was curious about how cassava, which you hardly give a second thought to, can contain so much poison as to cause such death and sickness. In the process I found out some really interesting things about the lowly cassava.

My manang, who is also from Bohol, said that they should not have been eating cassava in the first place, since there has not been rain for a long time and you’re not supposed to eat dry season cassava. And you can’t eat the crop after the first rain either. "Talagang may lason ’yan," she insists.

How you plant cassava is said to affect its toxicity as well. The tall main stem of the plant is cut up and each section that is stuck into the ground grows into a new cassava plant. The trick, I was told by more than one source, is that if the wrong end is stuck into the ground (planted "upside down") the tubers become poisonous. How you are supposed to ascertain, when you’re in the market, if the cassava was planted upside down or not is the tricky part. There was another caveat about offshoots of the main stem being red or green–one is poisonous, the other not, but I forget which is which–but again, if it’s the tuber you’re buying in the market you’re not going to be able to determine the characteristics of the rest of the plant or its pedigree.

I took all of this information to my friend Francis, who has a degree in zoology and got a flat 1.0 in botany at the U.P. He looked at me with great disdain, pooh-poohed my painstakingly researched data as pure nonsense, and said that some toxic chemical must have found its way into the maruya and pitsi-pitsi through–and probably reacted with–the oil.

The Department of Health–much in the news not just because of this incident but because of another program (see cover story on page 10)–finally cleared the cassava of culpability, pointing instead to pesticides and/or contaminants in the oil or the kitchen as the probable culprits. This should hopefully put maruya and pitsi-pitsi back on the menu and cassava back in the palengke. At the Salcedo tiangge last Saturday, the gulay vendor was horrified when we asked if she had cassava, my friend Francis insisting on disproving my research theories by cooking up some maruya.