False banana: A new superfood?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As the spectre of food insecurity grows and climate change threatens lives and livelihoods, could enset play a part in assuaging hunger? Elizabeth Hotson delves into the many and varied properties of a crop consumed mainly in parts of Ethiopia and she asks how it might be possible to widen the appeal of a plant which takes months to turn into an something edible.
Dr Wendewek Abebe from Hawassa university in southern Ethiopia is a leading researcher of enset and he explains why it’s known as the ‘tree against hunger.’ Dr Abebe also takes us on a trip to meet a farmer who cultivates the crop and considers it a superfood. Back in the UK, Dr James Borrell, a research fellow at Kew Gardens in London explains why cultivating - and ultimately consuming enset - takes a lot of time, energy and local knowledge. And Berhanu Tesfaye, owner of Zeret Kitchen, an Ethiopian restaurant in London, shares a rare meal of kocho - bread made from enset.
(Photo: Enset crop in Southern Ethiopia. Credit: Getty Images)
Presenter/producer: Elizabeth Hotson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I had this secret. I robbed banks in my spare time. Lives less ordinary from the BBC World |
| 0:09.0 | Service. This is not a good thing to do because police are after you. Find out more at the end of this |
| 0:16.4 | podcast. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hotson and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:24.3 | On today's program, we're looking at Nset, also known as Faultz Banana. |
| 0:29.0 | It's hoped that the crop could provide a much-needed food source in parts of the world |
| 0:33.6 | affected by climate change. |
| 0:36.6 | But I'm coming with Chutalakamak, he mentioned that it is a superfood. |
| 0:41.2 | It can support, you know, so many people, so it is really an important culture. |
| 0:47.1 | But we'll also hear why growing n-sets is only the start of the story. |
| 0:52.3 | You would harvest this plant and then you would break off all of those leaf bases, all of those |
| 0:56.7 | big long sheaths and you'd scrape those into a pulp, pulverise the core and all of that |
| 1:02.7 | would go into a pit. It would be fermented for three, four, five, six months. |
| 1:08.0 | And then you've got to bake it. This is Business Daily on the BBC. |
| 1:15.6 | It's the next big thing. |
| 1:17.4 | It's a superfood. |
| 1:18.9 | It's the magical solution to all the world's hunger problems. |
| 1:22.7 | That's the kind of claim that seems to crop up, pardon the pun, every few years. |
| 1:27.7 | And the latest, unassuming item to have the spotlight shone on it is Nset or false banana. |
| 1:33.0 | A crop widely grown and harvested in South and Southwest Ethiopia and then made into porridge or bread. |
| 1:40.2 | It's high yielding and relatively straightforward to grow and it's been suggested that as climate change creates harsher conditions for agriculture, it could help solve the looming specter of food insecurity. |
| 1:52.5 | So is it ensets time to shine? |
| 1:55.5 | Well, as you might have guessed, it's not that simple, and we'll hear why later. |
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