Naturally
grown high nutritive forest food which is apart of the local cuisines is
collected from the wild and is never grown. This enormous list of wild edible
plants must be conserved in its naturally growing state, but, the grassroot
farmers should be trained to propagate them in their homestead gardens.
Research needs to focus on these food plants and develop the ways of
cultivating them in the homesteads. The growing techniques must also tap the significance
of the natural resources that can be utilized to make organic manures and
bio-pesticides to ascertain healthy food production system. Through the
conversion of those bio-resources like fallen dry leaves, green biomass
considered as weeds, animal manure etc. a natural farming system of those
unsung high nutritive, high value, health-food flora can sustain a balanced
healthy life.
The
ever-growing wellness food industry touching the heights of about 500 billion
US dollars demand those food plants in different forms of processing.
Communities around these plant growing areas have inherited skills of
processing and consuming them. Standardizing their traditional ways of processing
with blending of technical skills of Food experimenters with renewable
energy-based technologies can create an economy of permanence for the grassroot
practitioners.
Wild growing
fiddle head ferns with high nutritional qualities like high protein content is
an example of the lying bio-resource on ground which can be processed to
dehydrated health-food. Centalia growing wild in the paddy fields can be
processed into wellness food by active participation of the women farmers and
processed into different high value and low volume food products. Bread Fruit
growing wild in the forest needs its seed collected to grow into orchards. The
sour fruit can be processed into high value juice and the seed can be used like
peanuts. Thus, these under-rated naturally occurring bio edible resources can
be converted into bio-wealth.
When we say
bio-wealth, it is based on the principle of developing a circular economy which
is the requisite of the Climate-friendly food production system which is going
to be mandatory to follow for all humans to sustain life on this planet.
Conversion of bio-resources into bio-wealth must be devised in such a way that
we know our carbon footprint in every stage of the process. Preparing
bio-diversity registers of those miracle food floras, mapping community’s ways
of evolving with their food floras(the food culture), proper food value
analysis, selection of those resources, develop ways of cultivating, building
nutritional securities of the communities is the need. Building up livelihood by
processing the surplus into low volume but high value Wellness Health Food
Products (WHFP) is the way forward.
