cassava

Starchy, versatile, and nearly indestructible in the wild, cassava is one of the world’s most important tubersIn this country, the question of how to round out a meal of meat and vegetables with a starch usually leads straight to the potato.

A lack of awareness is undoubtedly a factor, but cassava also finds itself the target of misinformation and even controversy.

While cassava has recently become more visible in this country as an ingredient in health-conscious snacks and plant-based food products, it hasn’t quite found its way onto the average American’s dinner table.

This year, he expects to incorporate different products — cassava from Brazil and small, sweet peanuts from Equador — and add more dishes from his homeland.

You can walk through recumbent, tin-roofed villages pursued by retinues of uproarious children, then up the sides of extinct craters whose inner slopes have been intensively cultivated so that their bowls overflow with coffee and cassava.

A quick turn at a small stand of banana palms and cassava plants led us to a clearing and, then, back centuries.

When a friend had potato greens for lunch, I traded her some of my cassava leaves.

Sometimes the attacks happen on their way to and from the market or their cassava fields.

Then, a fresh lot of cassava having been procured for the Indians, the journey was resumed.

It happened to be a season of exceptional drought, and cassava, and food of all kinds, were extremely scarce.

When a man of note dies his relations plant a field of cassava; just as the Nicobar Islanders plant a cocoa-nut tree.

They gave him some cassava bread and boiled fish, which he ate voraciously, and soon after left the hut.

It is the root of a shrub called Cassada, or Cassava Jatropha, and in its crude state is highly poisonous.