Useful herbs and trees – Everything old is new again

EDITOR: I may be late in hearing this, but I recently learned that the Prime Minister of SVG is promoting a plant that cures all diseases and is encouraging Vincentians to grow and use it, even going as far as giving away free plants.

Apparently he was introduced to this plant by the Chinese. The source I heard it from said it was “meringue” tea, so in my naivety, I assumed that it may have been perhaps the mojito mint from Cuba, as the meringue is popular in Cuba.{{more}}

If it is a cure for all that ails, well, I want some ah dat! So, I started asking questions and I was told it was not meringue, but rather the moringa tree. That left me none the wiser, so I looked up moringa on Wikipedia and lo and behold, this was nothing new, because I knew the moringa tree from my childhood growing up amongst the East Indian families in Park Hill. The moringa tree, ‘moringa oleifera,’ is native to northern India and is a staple in East Indian cuisine and was most likely brought to SVG by the East Indian indentured labourers in the 1800s. As I recall, the tree can get quite tall. It has small rounded leaves and bears a stick-like pod called a “drumstick”. I recall a huge tree beside the main road in Park Hill, at the gate to the Medica’s residence. The East Indian families in Park Hill cooked the leaves until it dried down, no gravy, and they called this dish “side john”. They also cooked the leaves with rice and that they called “moun moun”. So, people in the village often referred to the tree as the “moun moun tree”. I do not recall the East Indians eating the drumsticks.

The moringa tree is widely grown throughout South East Asia. It is a dietary staple in parts of the Philippines, where they eat both the leaves and the drumsticks. In the Ilocos region, where my wife is from, it is known as ‘malungay’ or ‘malungai.’ The Filipinos in SVG can easily verify this. Here, in Edmonton, I can buy the leaves and the drumsticks fresh or frozen and I can now get the tea bags, in any Chinese supermarket. I can also buy the tea leaves and moringa powder in the health food stores.

The old East Indians have gone to the great beyond and their descendants are now living in England, Canada and the USA. Moringa leaves are no longer part of the diet and many of the trees were cut down to make way for the ever popular monoculture and cash crop nature of our agriculture. However, I would bet that a search of some of the older East Indian homesteads in Calder, Richland Park, Layou and Rose Bank may turn up some old moringa trees. So, the moringa craze is no great discovery; it is merely a re-introduction to something we had centuries ago.

The moringa story is reminiscent of what has happened to plant species in SVG. We have become a “chop down and throw ‘way” society with little regard for the past. All these plants that we have destroyed did not happen by chance; they were brought to our shores by our forebears for specific uses, be they dietary or medicinal. Let me remind you of the plants that we have neglected or even obliterated from existence.

Pomegranate: There was a recent craze in the consumption of the pomegranate fruit and its juice, because of its antioxidant properties. Even now, pomegranate juice is an expensive commodity. But we had dat! Every Potogee yard had a pomegranate tree in the flower garden; only that we called it “pan-gro-nut”. The fruit was so valued that the kids were not allowed to pick it. That job was left to grandma or an aunt who would carefully take off the peel to dry and save it, because it was a cure for “belly huttin”. When you had a tummy ache they made a tea with the dried ‘pan-gro-nut’ skin and gave you to drink.

Noni juice: Another craze, claiming that this is medication for diabetes, arthritis, asthma, PMS, cancer, heart disease and other ailments. But we had dat too! It is the despised “jumbie breadfruit” or “jumbie soursop”. The leaves were also used to “sweat” you when you had a fever. Who remembers when, as a child, your mother would take you to the doctor every so often, and ask the doctor to give you a “wash out”? Then you walked away with a dose of “dead shot”. Well, we had dat too! Many of the Potogee folks, my grandmother included, had the dead shot bush growing in their yards – same awful, disgusting smell.

Another despised plant from my childhood was the cudjoe root or “stinking weed”. It is claimed that it is a cure for many tumours.

Tumeric is an East Indian spice used in curries. It is claimed to have digestive capabilities. The plant is rather like a ginger and the root is like a fine grained ginger but with an orange-coloured flesh. We had dat too! My grand-mother had it in her garden. The Potogee called it saffron, most likely because when cooked in rice, it gave the rice a yellow colour, much like real saffron does; so, it was the poor man’s saffron. The Potogee probably got it from their trade with India and from their colony in Goa, India.

Another plant common among the Potogee was “Potogee basil”, a very prolific shrub. The leaves made a pleasant tea and the bush was good for washing fish and meat or even rinsing dishes.

We may all remember the physic nut tree, that tree we chopped on Good Friday and waited for it to bleed. Well, that too has medicinal properties. We had a tree in our yard in Park Hill. Now there are claims that it has uses in chemotherapy and in bio diesel production. And there is the mamie apple or mamie sapote. It is claimed that if you grind the seed, it is good for deworming.

As a young schoolboy at South Rivers School, I remember going over to Cabral Pasture to pick clammy cherries. This was not for eating, but it was a sticky fruit and we used it to paste the leaves of our torn books back together – better than any paste or glue!

Anyone remember making a fire in a coal pot or making a “boucarn” outside to roast breadfruit? What a job if you did not have kerosene! No worry, just bring back some gomier fat from Clark Mountain or Colonarie Woods and getting a fire going was no problem. And how about having to wash the dishes but there was no soap? No worries, just pick some soap bush and rub them together and you were washing away as clean as ever!

The annatto plant or “ruku”, that red stuff we painted ourselves with as young children, is another plant that has gone to waste. We are all familiar with the bright orange colour of cheddar cheese. However, cheese is naturally white, as it is made from milk. By now you have guessed it, cheddar cheese gets it orange colour from ruku. Annatto is used in Filipino cuisine, especially in the province of Pampanga where they make a dish called ‘tocino.’

Another tree from my youth is the West Indian locust or “stinking toe.” The smell is horrible, but the taste is sweet. It is one of the richest vegetable foods, due to its high concentration of carbohydrates and proteins. In Brazil, it is used to treat lung diseases. It is believed that the Caribs used its bark to make canoes.

We have to learn that monocultures in small economies are doomed to fail. We saw it with cotton, bananas, coconuts, etc. We just do not have the expertise or the cash to keep abreast of the pests that ruin monocultures. We would be better off to go back to the peasant farmer system, where every crop known to man was grown on an acre or two. Let us try to reclaim some of these plants that we have ignored or drove to near extinction, instead of placing all our eggs in the proverbial one basket. Well, so much for my botany lesson; I am off to have some “meringue soup” – cow foot and beans with moringa leaves, then I will wash it down with some malungay tea, and hope that it cures whatever may ail me.

Oswald Fereira