The despised superfoods that could help curb hunger in Brazil

1. The despised superfoods that could
help curb hunger in Brazil
Many of these species produce edible fruit. Others are vegetables that grow spontaneously
in agricultural fields and flowerbeds, but are seen as "weeds".
In common, many of them are considered superfoods because they have a large amount of
nutrients - such as minerals, vitamins and antioxidants.
Edible weeds

2. Resistant, several edible spontaneous vegetables tolerate large climatic variations and
require special care. An example is caruru, which has leaves with properties similar to those
of spinach and seeds with 17.2% protein.
Another plant is purslane, rich in omega-3 and vitamins B and C, in addition to having
antioxidant properties.
Every year, however, many farmers resort to herbicides to destroy large amounts of caruru
and purslane before replacing them with exotic species. And, in many cases, the new
species planted have less nutrients than the previous ones, are more subject to pests and
are dependent on fertilizers, whose prices are also on the rise.
A researcher from the branch of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation)
dedicated to vegetables, agronomist Nuno Rodrigo Madeira tells BBC News Brasil that
vegetables such as caruru and purslane have more nutrients than many conventional
vegetables precisely because they are more resistant.
"As they are not fertilized, they trigger metabolic processes to be able to live in adversity and
withstand heat and drought, and this makes them more nutritious for us", he says.
For Madeira, the contempt for these species is due to the "distance between society and the
origin of food".
"We distance ourselves from production, we only understand markets, and the market wants
us to spend more, otherwise the GDP reduces", he says.
Selling vegetables in supermarkets that grow on their own as "weeds", he says, would not
be as lucrative as selling conventional vegetables - hence the sector's resistance to
incorporating these items.

3. Only commercial logic, according to Madeira, explains why in a hot city like Manaus, farmers
resort to ice cubes in order to grow vegetables like lettuce, while so many native species
adapted to the heat are left out.
And this does not only happen in Brazil.
Professor at the Federal Institute of Amazonas (Ifam) in Manaus, botanist Valley Knupp tells
the BBC that 90% of the world's food today comes from 20 types of plants - although it is
estimated that up to 30,000 plant species have edible parts.
The numbers sound even more paradoxical in Brazil, a country that is home to between 15%
and 20% of the plant species on the planet, but feeds most of its population with the same
limited menu - and mostly foreign.
Almost all of the country's main agricultural products are foreign, such as soybeans (China),
corn (Mexico), sugar cane (New Guinea), coffee (Ethiopia), oranges (China), rice (
Philippines) and potatoes (Andes).
Among the rare plants that made the opposite journey, leaving Brazil to reach other parts of
the world, are cassava, cocoa and peanuts.
"It's too little," says Kinupp. "We live in an agro-food imperialism."

4. In the book "Non-Conventional Food Plants (PANC) in Brazil", which Kinupp launched with
fellow botanist Harri Lorenzi in 2014, 351 food species "underused, poorly known and
neglected" by the Brazilian population are listed.
Many of them are native; others, exotic species already naturalized and acclimatized to the
country. Several are known by a number of different popular names (to avoid confusion, we
have listed the scientific names of the main species cited in this report at the end of this
report).
In recent years, driven by the movement, some markets and fairs have expanded the range
of PANC, chefs have incorporated them into restaurants, and cooks have created accounts
on Instagram and YouTube to share recipes.
But he claims that there is still a long way to go before these plants are no longer considered
"unconventional".
In the case of the wild species on the list, for example, it is necessary that farmers and
research institutions dedicate themselves to studying them - just as they have been doing for
millennia with plants such as rice and wheat.
And when the plant only exists in natural environments, such as the buriti, it is necessary to
work with traditional communities and small farmers to support collection, processing and
commercialization networks at a fair price.

5. What is PANC
Kinupp clarifies that some plants in the book are consumed in parts of the country, but
ignored in others.
One of the species that excites him the most is the thorn tree, a vine native to the North,
Midwest and Southeast regions that produces edible tubers that can exceed 180 kg.
"This plant is the solution for agriculture in the humid tropics", he says. According to the
researcher, the tubers can be stored for up to 120 days outside the refrigerator without
rotting and can be consumed like potatoes (fried, boiled, pureed) or turned into flour.
Today, however, he claims that the species is only consumed in indigenous villages and rural
communities in the Lower Amazon.
Other species mentioned in the book have more popular penetration or have already been
more consumed - the case of ora-pro-nóbis, a shrub with fruits, flowers and edible leaves
originating in the South, Southeast and Northeast of Brazil, and which belongs to the typical
cuisine of Minas Gerais General.
Its fruits are rich in carotenoids and vitamin C, and the leaves, when water is disregarded,
have up to 35% protein.

6. Another example is the babassu, a palm tree native to Mato Grosso and several states in the
Northeast, whose nut can be consumed raw or toasted, as well as processed for milk
extraction or transformed into flour for bread and porridge.
This nut contains 60% to 70% oil rich in lauric acid, similar to that present in coconut oil and
palm oil.
In 1984, Embrapa identified the existence of 12 to 18 million hectares of babassu groves in
Brazil. On the page of their book dedicated to the species, Lorenzi and Kinupp state that
babassu has "great food potential" and "should be on the market".
And there was a time when the fruit was actually on the shelves.
In the 1990s, according to the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), around
300,000 families worked with the fruit.
By 2017, however, the number had plummeted to 15,000 families.
Researcher in family farming and sustainable development at Embrapa Cocais, in
Maranhão, agronomist Guilhermina Cayres says that today almost all current extraction is
destined for the cosmetics and cleaning materials industry.
She tells the BBC that Maranhão had several industries dedicated to the production of
babassu cooking oil. However, the sector has not been able to compete with soy oil, which is
cheaper, and has suffered from the expansion of livestock over babassu plantations.
In addition, Cayres states that many workers have left babassu because they associate it
with poverty and because they consider the activity strenuous.

7. A large part of the work done by the families consists of breaking the coconut that holds the
nuts by hand, an exhausting task normally performed by women.
The researcher says she hopes that the scenario will change with the development by
Embrapa of a tool that facilitates the breaking of the coconut.
The invention, which is already being manufactured by a small local company, was a finalist
for an award on social technologies by the Banco do Brasil Foundation in 2021.
Cayres is also betting on the development of babassu-based products with greater added
value, such as cookies and ice cream.
Food that goes to waste
Also considered are PANC species that are consumed nationally, but have edible parts
discarded by the majority.
An example is the papaya core, which can be transformed into sweets and flour. Another,
the mangará ("heart") of the banana tree, which can be served sautéed or as a filling for
pastries.

8. Today, however, almost all commercial papaya and banana plantations in the country
neglect the items.
Even the pulp of a very popular fruit, the cashew, is discarded by the tons in the Northeast
by industries that process the fruit's nuts, sociologist Carlos Alberto Dória, author of several
books on gastronomy, tells BBC News Brasil.
"The branches (of the cashew trees) are used as firewood, and the nut is roasted and
exported", he says. "The rest, the pulp, goes to waste in a significant amount", he says.
One of the partners at Lobozó, a restaurant in São Paulo inspired by the old caipira and
caiçara cuisines of the state, Dória says that the movement for valuing PANC has a limited
reach.
"It's a middle-class thing that wants to try something new and is distressed by the disdain for
diversity," he says.
He also says that regional ingredients, which are only produced or consumed in parts of the
country, tend to disappear from the shelves because the industry favors products with a
national reach.
"The exception may be açaí, a regional product that has become a commodity, but this is
very rare," he says.

9. urban agriculture
What means then would there be to not only preserve but also expand access to such rich
foods, which require so little and occur in abundance in Brazil?
Researcher Nuno Rodrigo Madeira, from Embrapa Vegetables, suggests three paths.
The first would be to encourage the cultivation of unconventional food plants, offering
technical support to farmers, creating fairs for the sale of these items and spaces for the
exchange of knowledge.
The second would be to deepen the debate about food in schools; teach children from an
early age the importance of consuming fresh and nutritious products, make them question
themselves about the origin of food and understand how food is made.
He says that the movement around the PANC is not just about food, but also about learning
to observe nature, being able to identify the species that surround us, feeling part of a living
and integrated system.
The third way to diversify and make food cheaper, according to the researcher, would be to
bring food production closer to the population - especially the population that lives in cities.
People who live in houses with backyards could become almost self-sufficient in vegetables,
he says, if they grew a few plants of species like ora-pro-nobis, chaya or moringa - all of
them evergreen trees or shrubs that produce abundant edible leaves year-round .
But as not everyone has space at home to produce, the researcher argues that cities
allocate spaces for the creation of urban gardens.

10. He claims that it is possible to grow vegetables for all the inhabitants of a city in 10% of its
area - an initiative that has already been successfully adopted, according to Madeira, in
cities such as Detroit (USA), Havana (Cuba) or even in Sete Lagoas , in Minas Gerais.
The choice of species would take into account the aptitudes of each location, mixing
conventional and non-conventional plants.
He says that producing food within cities would reduce their costs, as it would save on
transporting items to markets, and could occupy homeless people and other marginalized
groups.
"It doesn't make sense to spend a world of fuel to take carrots from one state to another, as
is done today in Brazil", he says.
Madeira says that growing food was precisely what led to the emergence of the first urban
centers in history, as families gathered around plantations.
"Cities were formed because of agriculture, and agriculture cannot be far from cities," he
says.