Preface

Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for several hundred thousand years, and for most of that time, much of the food that people consumed was available only seasonally and from a very restricted local region. By definition, hunter-gatherers were limited to local food. Indeed, most people subsisted in the past on foods produced or acquired within a day's travel from their home. Increasingly during the last several centuries, international trade has witnessed a rising tide of importation of foreign foods. Spices were the first class of food plants to be imported in large amounts. Spices by their nature are high-value, low-weight, compact commodities with long shelf life, hence easily and relatively cheaply transported. For centuries, spices were relied on in the absence of refrigeration to preserve food and to flavor otherwise unpalatable but cheap food. However, with the exception of spices, the lack of refrigeration and other technologies, slowness of transportation, and poverty of most people prevented many foreign culinary delights from being imported, except as luxury items available only to the rich and privileged elite of society. Globalization has dramatically altered this. With progress in food science since the late nineteenth century, there has been an increasing worldwide flow of goods, including numerous plant-based food commodities. The North American food industry now offers more than 300,000 food items, and an average supermarket often stocks more than 30,000. Many foreign-origin foods, such as banana, chocolate, coconut, date, and pineapple, have become dietary staples almost everywhere. Moreover, with the growing establishment of ethnocultural populations in Western countries, there has been increasing exposure of everyone to the unique dietary offerings that are standard fare in foreign places and increasing acceptance of many items by the general population. There is still another consideration contributing to a greatly increased diversity of food: the growing recognition of the value of eating a wide variety of plant foods. It is now clear that (1) the healthiest human diet is based mostly on consumption of plant foods, (2) eating a highly varied diet is an ideal strategy to ensure adequate intake of the numerous plant constituents that contribute to health, and (3) a varied diet contributes to avoidance of the monotony that leads to obesity. Fruits in particular are now considered to be especially healthful when consumed fresh, and fresh exotic fruits are increasingly being imported.

Of course, in the modern world, transportation not only brings foreign foods to our local supermarkets; the reverse also occurs, with people migrating to other countries and necessarily being exposed to foreign foods while there. Thus, tourists, immigrants, work transferees, and business travelers are exposed to foreign cuisines for a shorter or longer period and often acquire permanent tastes for international flavors and ingredients.

Despite a huge increase in availability of foreign-origin, plant-based foods, there have been countercurrent forces contributing to a restriction of the typical Western diet. The most important problem is the increasing consumption of "fast foods" and "convenience" (prepared) foods, which suffer from "seven deadly fast food sins": (1) too salty; (2) too fatty (with saturated fats); (3) too sweet (with added sugar); (4) too calorific and too much; (5) too deficient in nutrients; (6) too contaminated with additives, preservatives, enhancers, dyes, and the like; and (7) too monotonous. People naturally crave salt (often difficult to obtain in precivilization times), the satisfying mouth feel of fats (fats are calorie rich, hence desirable back in the era when food was difficult to obtain), and sweet things (a genetic heritage of the times our simian ancestors depended on fruit trees; unfortunately, sugar is incredibly cheap and lacking in nutritional value). Most modern food products have been synthesized to sell at low cost in a mass market. Too many people have become conditioned to consumption of commercial food preparations that have been engineered with remarkably limited relevance to long-term human health, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic. Although the mass marketing of fast and convenient foods is still mainly a Western phenomenon, multinational companies are now peddling the same unhealthy foods in most areas of the world, diminishing the diversity of local indigenous cuisines. A chief goal of this book is to familiarize many with a wide range of natural plant foods that are capable of contributing to a healthier diet.

Another concerning trend has been the growing dependence on a very small number of food plants. Although at least 20,000 plant species have been used as sources of food by humans and approximately 5000 are eaten regularly, only approximately 150 food plants have entered world commerce, and only 12 species provide 75% of the world's food. Just three species-wheat, rice, and corn (maize)-account for approximately 60% of the calories and 56% of the protein that humans get directly from plants. This dependence on such a restricted food base is alarming because (1) crop failures, due for example to the emergence of new diseases, may have disastrous consequences, in terms of both economic loss and famine; (2) the dependence on major crops has become associated with subsidies and trade restrictions that have distorted efficient production and distribution of key commodities and indeed have led to serious conflicts among nations; and (3) huge monocultures have very negative effects on the world's biodiversity, usurping increasingly scarce land and often requiring wasteful inputs of water, biocides, and energy. Fortunately, many now recognize the serous economic, social, and environmental problems associated with the dependence on a restricted number of food plants, and there are attempts underway to increase the diversity of food crops. Naturally, there needs to be market demand for plant foods, especially those that are unfamiliar to most consumers and, indeed, even many food crop specialists. Toward the goals of stimulating researchers to develop new crops for their regions and encouraging the public to become interested in attractive new food plant possibilities, this book is intended to introduce as wide an audience as possible to a selection of particularly valuable and interesting exotic food plants.

The majority of the crops treated in this book grow in semitropical and tropical regions of the world, more often than not in developing countries. Sad facts of life are that food is a major consideration in the geopolitics of the world and that most crop development is in technologically advanced, rich countries of the temperate world. Accordingly, many of the crops examined in this book suffer from inadequate development, tending to keep agriculture in a relatively depressed state in many countries. Although food is abundant in most of the temperate world, the same is not true for semitropical and tropical regions-a situation that is not only morally reprehensible but threatens the political stability of the entire world. Hopefully, highlighting the exotic plants detailed in this book will contribute to efforts to improve agriculture in the more exotic parts of the planet where they are cultivated.

A welcome development of the global transfers of food and food cultures is the increased sophistication of culinary offerings that have become commonplace, not just by famous chefs in highend restaurants but also by amateur cooks. At least in some quarters, cookery has become more refined along with culinary taste. This is not just a matter of reproducing foreign meals (often in a Westernized version): there has been a hybridization of traditional foods of different countries, often resulting in delightful culinary novelties. Although there are innumerable cookbooks available today that deal with the traditional foods of foreign countries and of course uncountable numbers of cookbooks dealing with traditional Western fare, there is a dearth of published information that encourages combining the two cuisines (so-called "multicultural cookery" or "fusion cooking"). In addition to amateur and professional cooks, the prepared food industry has become very competitive and is currently seeking new products and ingredients to produce new flavors and attributes. Toward the goal of contributing to the continuing exploration of new culinary preparations based on combining familiar and foreign traditional foods, this book provides extensive information on culinary matters related to each food plant discussed in detail.

Globalization-the result of revolutionary technological innovations powered by international capitalism-is one of the dominant and controversial issues of our time. The result is a growing homogenization of cultures, and in the case of food, this means that many regional cuisines are disappearing. Although the task of preserving the incredible variety of ethnic foods that grace the dinner tables of the world is one that belongs mainly to cooks, cookbook writers, and the cultures themselves, hopefully this book on exotic food plants will sensitize many to some of the wonderful ethnic dishes for which information is presented.

Aside from the relevance to specialists, the general public should find this book attractive because of the huge interest today in health, travel, and cooking, and hopefully this work will serve as a vehicle for public education in the realm of science and technology. Indeed, with a large audience in mind, the book has been prepared in a style and level of language that most people will find user-friendly.

As will be discussed, just what constitutes an "exotic food plant" depends on where one lives, how familiar given food plants have become in that location, and how unusual that plant or the food furnished from it is. The choice of the plants highlighted in this book was biased toward crops that are (a) economically important, (b) encountered in north-temperate countries, and (c) interesting. The numbers of tropical and subtropical fruits and vegetables are huge, and the choice of these has been guided by the likelihood that they would be encountered either at the supermarket or during travels in foreign lands.

The inclusion of a number of species as "food plants" in this book will likely be questioned by some, and this requires some comment about just what food is. First, the old idea that equates food with nutritional value is valid but is too restrictive for the real world. Food is what society at large considers to be food, and this includes a range of plant materials taken by mouth that are marginally, if at all, nutritional. High-caffeine beverages, including coffee, tea, and cola drinks are all chiefly "stimulants," certainly not consumed for their nutritional value, and the same is true for guarana, which is discussed in this book. However, these are so familiar as snack or mealtime beverages that few would challenge their inclusion as "food." Nor would most people question that the vast numbers of culinary herbs and spices, which are ingested simply for their flavor (not for their nutritional content), are also food items. Most would also not have difficulty accepting that plants used primarily to produce alcoholic beverages also qualify as food plants, although it is probably safe to say that today alcohol is rarely consumed for its nutritional significance. Some plants that are included in this book are really more consumed for their medicinal values than as food (examples in this book include the Hawaiian noni and the acai berry), but at least they have some tradition of culinary usage. Opium poppy and hemp (marijuana) are controversial subjects because they are "narcotic" plants, but their seeds consumed as food are not narcotic. The really controversial inclusions are the "masticatories" (chewed materials) coca, khat, and betel, which are regulated or illegal (at least in some jurisdictions). The reader is cautioned to reserve judgment until these chapters are read; in the context of their cultures, these are as legitimate as coffee is to most people. Probably the least defensible inclusion is tobacco, but as will be appreciated from this book, people have been eating plants with toxins for millennia, and in most cases appropriate culinary preparation prevents harm.