Cassava

Cassava, also called manioc, yuca, macaxeira, mandioca, aipim, or agbel, comes from Amazonia. It grows as a perennial, woody shrub.

#Human relationship

Humans domesticated cassava many millennia ago. It served as a staple crop for many Native American societies prior to European contact, after which humans spread it to every corner of the globe. After the collapse of civilization, cassava became increasingly popular. As a tropical plant that could tolerate periodic drought, it had an advantage in a warmer, wetter, more chaotic world. It also produced more calories for the work one invested in it than any other crop. That said, a community can’t exactly dabble in a relationship with cassava. Either it must commit to cassava, committing to gardening and village life, or have little relationship with cassava at all.

Cassava comes in sweet and bitter varieties, but both contain dangerous toxins that can cause goiters, ataxia, partial paralysis, or even death. Bitter cassava varieties deter pests but contain more of these toxins. For this reason, most people avoid these bitter varieties unless extraordinary circumstances have left them with little other choice.

One must carefully prepare cassava to make it safe to eat. The “wetting method” involves mixing cassava flour and water to form a thick paste, spreading that paste into a thin layer over a basket, and then leaving it to stand for five hours in the shade. Another method involves peeling the roots and leaving them in water for three days to ferment, then drying and cooking them.

With bitter varieties, preparation becomes even more important, often involving peeling and grating the root, soaking the gratings in water for four days to allow leaching and fermentation to take place, then cooking it thoroughly until it becomes soft.

Once processed, cassava flour can become breads, cakes, or alcoholic beverages. People in Africa and of recent African descent will often make cassava flour into the staple food fufu, to eat with stews.

#Cassava People

As mentioned before, cassava demands a degree of exclusivity from those people who wish to form a relationship with it, requiring a commitment to gardening and village life. That said, it can still form those villages in a number of unique ways. Some examples include:

Growing cassava generally requires swidden cultivation. While not necessarily unsustainable, this technique can easily fall out of balance in a disastrous way. Communities in the Fifth World who use swidden cultivation often have a number of ways in which they strictly control reproduction, including a variety of methods of birth control. These communities place special emphasis on monitoring the health of the forest and ensuring that it properly regenerates. When you find cassava growing wild in the jungle far from any garden, these communities often insist you’ve found the ruins of some village that became too large, burned the forest around it more quickly than it could regenerate, and died off.
Cassava grows well in “banana circles.” Banana plants provide shelter for the cassava below, and a third plant like lemongrass can help provide protection from insects. These circles make excellent use of compost. Cultivating these banana circles often becomes a central metaphor for such a community. The use of compost illustrates a larger principle that nothing goes to waste, while the cooperation and relationships between the plants in the guild often provide a rubric for social relationship. Some communities may even form sodalities around each member of the guild. Members of the banana society usually pride themselves on their ability to endure hardship in order to protect or shelter the rest of the community. Members of the cassava society often take inspiration from the process of preparing cassava to create a mystery cult that focuses on the perfection of one’s own self. Members of the society built around the plant that repels insects (usually lemongrass) often focus on medicine and healing. Sometimes they also take on a magical or apotropaic mission of warding off bad luck, too.
Traditionally, in the Amazon, women grow and prepare the cassava, with mothers passing different varieties of cassava down to their daughters when they establish their own homes. Communities with such traditions likely practice matrilocality, meaning that men marry into the village and women stay put. They likely also practice matrilineality, or the tracing of descent through the female line. These practices help maintain gender equality in a village context that might otherwise tend towards giving men too much power.
Because the processing of cassava requires a sieve and a long hollow tube, both woven from palm fronds, cassava-based communities prize weaving skills. They will also elaborately decorate the graters they use to grate the cassava (wooden boards into which they press thousands of tiny, sharp stone fragments). As a result, cassava people pride themselves on their craftsmanship and artistry, trading their beautifully-made crafts with other communities in continent-spanning trade routes.
Cassava people grow as many different varieties of the plant as they can, to maintain genetic diversity. Neighboring villages help communities keep their cassava stock diverse, trading different varieties with each other. This also helps maintain peaceful, friendly relations between different cassava-growing communities, with the plants themselves constantly reminding the gardeners of the value of the bonds they share with their neighbors.

#Species

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