Endangered and Forgotten Foods of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.

When we speak of "Forgotton Food”,  we are also talking about "Forgotten People”, "Forgotten language" because these are the keepers, these stewards of traditional knowledge and culinary art that have been forgotten in the rush for globalism. It's the food, the leaves, the  stones, the type of fire wood that’s used, the leaves used to wrap and cover the food, the way the food is prepared and cut all add the delicate dimensions that make up the full distinct flavour of an area or a key signature dish from an area and this can vary from family to family as well. 80% of the worlds food is produced by peasant (I don't like to use that word but, that is what IFAD and other large agricultural organisations use) farmers, which means that 80% of the worlds seeds and agrobiodiversity are in these hands. What we are actually faced with is flavour and food extinction that falls in line with linguistic and cultural extinction. We came from a world filled with diversity and with each passing day and each passing elder, thousands of years of food consciousness is lost and with that loss is the loss of food diversity. We need food diversity for nutritional diversity and so with each passing year the food we eat becomes less diverse and less nutritious. Our body needs a diverse range of nutrients, micronutrients and phytonutrients to flourish. If we are not conscious about what we nourish our body with then we loose sight of who we are as human beings, where we came from and everything then becomes intrinsically linked to money. Money may be able to buy us many things but it cannot buy back the collective consciousness which is what we are speaking of here in the Pacific. It is a collective knowledge that is being lost.  We are becoming less and less connected to the food on our plates. All we care for today is the immediate satisfaction of our palates but if we paused to reflect we would realise that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We need to refocus and remember who we are and where we came from and food is central to all of this. Some foods are only made during certain ceremonial gatherings and as we loose sight of culture in the pacific so too those relationships wither and dry, the ancestral pathways we used to walk before have become overgrown and we have become lost. We can’t find our way back. But through this Pacific Island Food Revolution we can create a new path, a stronger path, a pathway that we decide and a destination that we determine and we can bring together our collective memories of flavours and foods so that we can face the future stronger, physically and spiritually, because what we have is special and unique. 

#helping #donations