PRETORIA - The world is five years away from the 2030 deadline to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and we are no closer to ending hunger and food insecurity (SDG 2). Yet food security is just part of the battle – we also need to fight to keep indigenous biodiversity on our plates, and not allow local and regional crops to be swallowed up by the globalised food system.

A team from the University of Pretoria (UP) is ensuring that “ignored and orphan crops” find their way back on the menu.

“Of the world’s 400 000 plant species, just six of them account for 57% of the primary crop production (around 9.5 billion tonnes),” says Dr Hennie Fisher of the Department of Consumer and Food Science. These crops include sugar cane, maize, rice and wheat. “With about 3.2 billion people worldwide unable to afford a healthy diet and 900 million people experiencing severe food insecurity, we need to move away from diets that contain higher proportions of cheaper, nutrient-poor, highly processed foods, and embrace the value of indigenous crops.”

According to Richard Hay, curator of the Future Africa Institute’s Indigenous and Orphan Crops Collection, many of our indigenous and orphan crops are both nutrient-dense and adapted to growing under local environmental conditions.

“By eating a wider variety of plant species and diversifying our diets, we can build resilience into the food system while improving health outcomes for consumers,” he says.

With agricultural development focusing on selected species, about 75% of global crop genetic diversity has been lost as farmers adopt higher-yielding, genetically uniform cultivars of a few species. This agricultural system does not preserve the land.

However, it’s not just quality of life that will improve with crop diversity; lives could be saved too. Reliance on cheaper, nutrient-poor foodstuffs has seen an increase in diet-related non-communicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension. According to Stats SA,2 South Africa alone saw deaths related to these diseases increase by 58,7% over 20 years (1997 – 2018).

Clearly, education is needed.

“Our work focuses on combating global dietary homogenisation by screening consumer acceptance of underutilised plant species among young consumers, and determining if exposure to novel plant species through the teaching and learning environment is likely to alter future cooking behaviours,” Dr Fisher explains.

A class of 38 second-year BConsumer Sciences and BSc Culinary Science students was provided with two recipes and instructed to execute each recipe in duplicate, one with a standard commercial herb species and one with an alternative indigenous species of a similar flavour profile sourced from the Future Africa Indigenous and Orphan Crops Collection.

The students found both indigenous species – African wild rosemary (Eriocephalus africanus) and golden sage (Salvia aurea) – to be viable alternatives to common rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) and sage (Salvia officinalis), with 82% of them likely to use African wild rosemary in their cooking. Golden sage was not as popular, but the experiment did prompt 65% of the students to explore the use of other indigenous herbs in their cooking in the future.

All the participants reported that they would enjoy having more indigenous herbs incorporated into the practical curriculum.

“Slowing down a full-blown ‘blanding’ of our global food diversity may be achievable if we understand how modern consumers accept and appreciate a wider diversity of edible plants,” Hay says.