A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
famine food
A famine food is something edible that a culture knows how to prepare but does not normally eat, kept in reserve for a year when the usual crops do not come in. The category is defined by preference rather than by nutrition. Typical members take a lot of processing for a modest return: acorns that need leaching, bracken rhizome that needs pounding, inner bark that needs boiling, tough seaweeds, lichens, and roots that have to be cooked for hours.
Etymology
The English term is a twentieth-century coinage from ethnobotany and agricultural economics, and it names something every food culture has without previously having had a word for. Famine came into English from French, from the Latin word for hunger, which also sits inside the modern Italian and Spanish words for the same thing.
Notes
The interesting part is what the category preserves. A famine food is a piece of botanical knowledge held in a community for generations without being used, and the knowledge has to be transmitted in the good years to be available in the bad. Several ordinary staples arrived this way: Acorn flour is a regular ingredient in parts of Korea, Iceland moss is still boiled into breads and porridges, and Sámi and Nordic peoples used pine inner bark as a routine ingredient rather than a last resort.