Beneath the earth, or inside the refrigerator

The writer’s first taste of raw cassava came under pressure from an entire bus full of passengers. Traveling toward northern Malawi’s border, she was invited by the driver and an English-speaking passenger to try a freshly peeled white cassava stick bought from a roadside seller.

She later learned that cassava can contain high levels of toxic cyanide before cooking. By then, however, the bus was waiting for her verdict on an ingredient central to the region’s food culture. She chewed what she could, smiled and said the fresh cassava was delicious. Laughter broke out through the open windows: the foreign visitor had eaten cassava.

Long before cassava became vital across Africa, the tuber grew beneath the Amazonian soil. Ecuador’s Amazonian Kichwa communities have regarded it as part of their own ancestry for generations, according to anthropologist María Antonieta Guzmán. Women contribute cassava to family food supplies in the same way men contribute through fishing.

In Ecuador, cassava grows sustainably and abundantly in the eastern provinces, while commercial cultivation is more common along the coast. People in the highlands also eat cassava bread and muchines, although potatoes, bread and rice appear more often on their plates.

Sociologists Cristina Cielo and Cristina Vera Vega have examined cassava’s relational role in both Amazonian chakra gardens, which are biodiverse agroforestry spaces, and commercial farms in Manabí supported by public and private agricultural projects. Their discussion of the “affective ecology” of processed food focuses on how industrialisation can make it harder for consumers to understand and connect with the environments that produce what they eat.