Enset, also known as a false banana, is a plant grown in Africa and Asia for its large corm and stem, which can be eaten raw or cooked. The fermented pulp can be used to make bread-like food. Disease, drought, and lack of crop rotation have caused a decline in availability.
Enset is a type of plant that grows in Africa and Asia, and is particularly important in the Ethiopian highlands, where it has been grown for food for thousands of years. The plant is often referred to as a false banana, because the tree’s outward appearance resembles that of a banana tree, although the two are actually very different. The fruit of the bug tree isn’t edible, so the plant is largely grown for the meat inside its trunk and root, which is a large corm. The edible part of an enset tree is the pulp within the corm and stem of the tree, which tends to look and taste similar to the flesh of a potato and can be used to make stew, pudding or a fermented food similar to bread. Although the tree has long been a staple food in Ethiopia, several factors – including disease, overburden, drought and lack of crop rotation – have caused a dramatic decline in the insect root’s availability.
There are two edible parts of the enset tree. The first is the corm, or root, of the tree, which contains a large amount of white potato-like flesh. This substance can be eaten raw, cooked into a stew, or mashed into a nutritious porridge. The tree itself can sometimes grow over 10 meters tall, so the corm size can be incredibly large and provide a good deal of food from just one tree. Corm meat tends to taste like a potato, largely due to the starches it contains.
The second edible portion of the enset tree is the inside of the stem and stem. The stem meat tends to be white, like the corm, but it also contains a little more water and is often specially prepared at the time of harvest. The meat is cut from the tree, kneaded into a dough-like mass and wrapped in large green leaves. The wrapped dough is then buried in the ground, where the pulp will ferment over time to create a bread-like food that can be baked, dried into powder, made into porridge, or fried into cakes. The fermented pulp has a sour, bread-like taste.
Even though the enset tree has been cultivated as a food source for thousands of years, several problems have morphed to destroy a large portion of the trees. A disease quickly spread and killed many of the plants, followed by drought which further reduced the crop. This eventually led to several communities starting harvesting the trees before maturity, so they produced no seeds, which led to the inability to grow more trees, because it could take nearly five years for a single tree to mature. The tree remains an important staple food in Ethiopia, but is not as abundant in 2012 as it once was.
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