Foraging Food: Eating Wild in the Andaman Islands

On the wooden dining table at our field station in the Andamans, surrounded by open field guidebooks, sat a small yellow fruit with limp spikes along its sides. We let its unwieldy botanical name roll around in our mouths, struggling to crack the Latin syllables — “Dra-con-to-melon dao”. The toughness of the word is dissonant with the piercing sweet-sour flavour and fibrous texture of this fruit; a gross injustice.

I work in the Andamans researching its incredible tree diversity and carbon storage potential. Relatively fresh off the boat, I struggle to learn the names of the trees I have proposed to measure. In a more honest and experiential way, the forest appears on my plate aided by field staff who bring generations of forest knowledge from Central India (the Ranchi) and highland Myanmar (the Karen). While I stumble over the complex botanical vocabulary of the field guidebook, some of the field staff flip through the guide like a menu card from a familiar restaurant, pausing to remark “Too bitter!” or “Tangy, good with salt!” I now have thousands of lines of spreadsheets with measurements of trees, but in the homes of my friends and in the common kitchen at our field station, I have experienced these forests in the most direct way possible, through the palate.

Typical of a good meal, my personal journey with forest foods in the islands began with a soup, when I was sent to pick tender leaves of Acacia concinna (shikakai) for the lady of a Karen-Burmese home. She cooked a simple soup broth, but it was incredibly exciting for me because this was not from a grocery store or even a kitchen garden, but from the wild. Salads here are unusual as well: boiled shoots of bamboo or wild turmeric, sometimes sliced banana flower. Meals often have a side dish of raw leaves called ta-doh. At the start of the monsoon, you eat the new flush of jungli chakod (Rinorea bengalensis) and the powder puff tree (Barringtonia racemosa) and at the end of it, raw young leaves of cashew (Anacardium occidentale).

Ranchi communities on the islands are native communities from the Chotanagpur region in Central India. They cook elaborately with leaves to make some of the most flavourful main courses I have tasted. Meethabhaji, Champereia manillana, is an evergreen tree with dark green leaves that have wavy margins, like the pages of a notebook that got wet around the edges. We plucked the tender leaves of the tree and cooked them on an open fire with tomatoes, potatoes, onion, and garlic, and ate it with rice. Being evergreen, this tree has a continuous supply of leaves; and plucking new leaves and pruning older branches nudges fresh flush to emerge in a couple of weeks.

Unlike the steady meethabhaji, phutkal bhaji is made more delicious by the fact that it is seasonal. At the entrance to our field station stands an old ficus tree, called phutkal by the Ranchi community. None of the veteran researchers, nor the new taxonomists have a clear binomial ID for this tree; Ficus geniculata is only a guess. Around mid-February, after a week or so of leaf-shed and bareness, wick-like pink sprouts emerge all over the branches, inside which are curled the new leaves — tangy and delicious. The key is to capitalise on this brief interlude. If you wait a few days too long, the leaves unfurl, toughen, and become unpalatable. Once the leaves are collected, by climbing or cutting a branch, they are cooked in a unique way. They are boiled and left to sit for a day or so, for flavours to mature, and then mashed and cooked with a little oil, onions, and tomatoes. They can also be eaten simply boiled and salted to fully relish their soggy sourness.

Foraging is not just of plants. I recently had the good fortune to taste weaver ant chutney (called demta). We harvested eggs from the scattered leaf-ball-like ant nests across our field station in a bizarre experiment. As one person poked it with a long bamboo pole, another hoisted a bucket below to catch the drizzle. We then spread it out under the sun for the bycatch of aggressive orange drones and sluggish pea-green queens to leave. I crunched into creamy-white larva and flinched as a shot of strong formic acid sprayed onto my tongue. Exhilarating! Half a dozen nests and countless bites from angry drones later, we learned that nests with dried brown leaves were a trivial (and fatal) pursuit; the freshest nests are with green leaves and have the most eggs. The last nest, on a Barringtonia tree at the edge of the property, broke open like a pinata and eggs showered down on the sheet spread below, like the pitter-patter of acid rain. Winnowed eggs were later roasted with onions and mustard seeds and served at teatime.

In my first solo flight with foraged food, away from my forest mentors, I offered to cook an easy meal of guinya bhaji or wild colocasia, for a few friends. The plant, with leaves like large ears, grows in the wet soils along natural streams, waterflow channels, or around ponds. Its buttery tuber and the heads of linking runners make for belowground bounty. But the most common harvest is the leaf; if you part a clump of stems, at the base, there are often curled up new leaves, ready for the plucking. In the kitchen, you coat your hands with coconut oil, clean out the thin film on top, chop and cook it on a hot flame with onions, garlic, tomatoes and plenty of tamarind juice to neutralise their itchy toxin.

I found a patch of guinya rather easily by the roadside on picture-perfect Havelock Island. I lugged a big bounty to my friend’s kitchen, cleaned it up and put it in a vessel on her induction stove. Adrift in the romanticism of how this harvest binds us so tightly to these islands, I urged her to try a tiny piece while it was still cooking. The next few hours were infernal for her — pins and needles from active toxins irritated her throat. The dish was edible after many more rounds of reducing with tamarind, yet the shadow of an itch loomed at the back of our throats. Perhaps the itch was proverbial; perhaps beyond the meal, I am nagged by the doubt that foraging is not for me.

But first, I should pick an orange areca nut lying around, cut a piece of the seed and chew. It is not by mere chance that I haven’t eaten foraged food regularly before. I stand rooted in cultures that have pushed foraging to the margins of society to plant our coconuts and areca nuts, simultaneously destroying ecological and cultural diversity. Where former diverse forests stood, our areca nuts suck the soils dry; where former diverse cultures and people lived, the hegemonies of our economy remain. And so, my celebration of forest foods is merely appropriation, a fad, unless I acknowledge how my history is responsible for centuries of disenfranchisement of forest-dwellers and their knowledge systems, and the repeated dilution of laws that protect them. I can be a tourist, even a guest in these forests and in the homes of my friends, but to truly belong I will need the intention to right historical wrongs. I should chew on that.