EATING WEEDS
Sue Derwent finds the ankle-biting blackjack makes a delicious and nutritious addition to the pot
T here can be few South Africans who don’t recognise blackjacks. You know the spiky, thin, black seeds that hook onto your socks in the veld? I am not too fond of a blackjack. So imagine my surprise when, on arrival at a KZN Slow Food convivium meeting, I discover we are off to Richard Haigh’s veggie garden to pick not just blackjack leaves but a whole bunch of other weeds too. Not only that, we are then going to wash the jolly things, cook them and eat them. No way! These didn’t seem like friendly plants. Certainly not ones I wanted to eat.
What is it about food prejudice? Most of us are delighted to eat lettuce and rocket, but ask us to eat “weeds” and we turn up our noses. Yet the only difference between them and the leafy greens we buy in shops is nice packaging and good marketing.
In SA, indigenous edible “weeds” of a leafy green nature, collectively known as imifino, grow wild. They do not require fertiliser or labour to cultivate, and seeds are naturally dispersed (respect those blackjacks). Imifino outranks commercial leafy greens on the nutritional scale, yet continues to be dismissed by the mainstream. Farmers and suburban gardeners destroy and discard highly nutritious edible plants and cultivate less nutritious vegetables in their place.
Trainer Cor Zondi guides me away from some edible leaves I am trampling and tells me that in peri-urban and rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal some common species of imifino are regularly eaten. These include imbati, a tree stinging nettle which, happily, I couldn’t find in the garden; imbilikicane or lambquarters, and imbuya or amaranthus, which pops up around cattle kraals when cultivated crops are finished and other fresh foods are becoming scarce. Then there’s my old friend the blackjack, the leaves of which are nutritious, tasty and known as ucadolo; imifino yezintanga, the collective name for pumpkin leaves; amakhasi embumba, or cowpea leaves, and amakhasi kabhatata — sweet potato leaves. Zondi says each has a specialised use in traditional recipes.
As rural villagers move to a more urbanised, Western lifestyle, says Zondi, so the knowledge and popularity of imifino is in steady decline. While people increasingly dismiss imifino as weeds and “poor people’s food”, those who still use them regularly know, understand and value them. They know when various leaves will be available — plants are often ready sequentially between the growing seasons of cultivated plants. This is useful in terms of food security. They know how and when to harvest and how to dry a variety of imifino.
Natural drying is a specialised skill requiring the retention of as much leaf colour as possible, thereby maintaining many of the micronutrients needed to help build and support the immune system.
Sadly, all these skills are at risk. Knowledge of imifino is steadily being lost, as is a whole culture that it supports. This could be considered a nutritional, social, cultural and even ecological tragedy.