Kew researchers begin unravelling the mysteries of enset, a remarkable banana relative that provides the staple food for 20 million people in Ethiopia.
Headline writer playing fast and loose with the word “tree” but ANYWAY this is really interesting!
If you’ve never heard of enset, then you’re certainly not alone. Whilst enset (Ensete ventricosum) grows wild in river valleys and gorges from Ethiopia all the way down to South Africa, it has only ever been domesticated in the Ethiopian Highlands. Here it’s said that 60 plants could feed a family of five for a year.
Enset is a close relative of the banana, in fact, it’s commonly known as the False Banana. Whilst it grows as tall as a house, and a meter across, it’s actually a giant herb, rather than a tree. Nevertheless, it looks like a banana with big paddle-shaped leaves and produces banana like fruits, though they are unfortunately full of huge black seeds so you wouldn’t want to try and eat one. Instead it’s the pseudostem (trunk) and a large underground corm that are the edible parts.
Enset has a number of unusual traits that make it such a useful food security crop, and have earned it the name ‘the Tree Against Hunger’. First, you can plant it or harvest it at any time of year. Once planted, it keeps growing for up to ten or twelve years, where, eventually, it will flower and die. As long as you harvest it before this point, you can collect several hundred kilograms of starchy vegetable-like tissue that you can turn into various foods.
It’s somewhat drought tolerant, and there are hundreds of different varieties (a bit like types of potato or apple) that we think are adapted to different conditions and have different flavours or uses. Lastly, it’s clonally propagated – that means that to get new plants, you cut the top off an old plant in a special way and hundreds of new shoots will emerge which you can plant out into the fields.
The versatility of enset means that it can provide a long-term sustainable food supply, helping to buffer seasonal gaps in other crops, or events like crop pest or disease outbreaks.
