Food
Where does Bunny chow come from?
There's no bunny in a bunny chow: it's a hollowed-out loaf of white bread filled with curry. It was created in the 1940s by the Indian community of Durban, where locals still order a 'quarter mutton'.
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Food
Maca (root)
📍 Junín plateau (Lake Junín), Peru
Maca, a turnip-like root now sold worldwide as a powder, grows at 4,000 metres, where frost and wind defeat most crops. Until the late 1980s it was farmed only around Lake Junín in central Peru, where it is still roasted in earth pits.
Food
Feijoa
📍 Southern Brazil & Uruguay
New Zealanders love feijoas so much that many think they are a Kiwi fruit, but they come from the highlands of southern Brazil and Uruguay. Plants taken from Uruguay to France in 1890 later reached California and then New Zealand.
Food
Cardamom (green)
📍 Western Ghats, southern India
Green cardamom, the spice of Swedish buns and Arabic coffee, grows wild in the rainforests of southern India. Yet since about 1980 the top grower has been Guatemala, where a German coffee planter brought it before World War I.
More from Africa
Nature
Lucky bamboo
📍 Central Africa (Cameroon to the Congo)
Despite nicknames like 'Chinese water bamboo', lucky bamboo is not a bamboo and not from China: it's a dracaena that grows wild in Central Africa, from Cameroon to the Congo. Its scientific name honours Henry Sander, a German-born orchid grower in England.
Word
Cola (the word)
📍 Sierra Leone & Guinea, West Africa
Cola drinks are named after the kola nut, a caffeine-rich seed of West African forest trees. The word comes from West African languages such as Temne (kola) and Mandinka (kolo), and kola nuts went into Coca-Cola in 1886.
Word
Shea (the word)
📍 Mali (Bambara lands)
Shea comes from si, the tree's name in Bambara, a language of Mali; the Scottish explorer Mungo Park spelled it 'shea' in his 1799 travel book. The wild trees grow across Africa's savanna belt, from Senegal to South Sudan.