The much sought after paku.
WOULD you like some red ants for dinner?
A few weeks into the Movement Control Order MCO), a niece rang up to ask if I was interested in having some.
Her husband, an oil palm estate worker, had found a red ant nest in the jungle while foraging for wild fruits and vegetables on his day off.
As his fresh food rations had dwindled, he might have had to compete with the estate workers for frozen chicken wings and sausages from the estate canteen. But he would rather forage for fresh jungle vegetables.
Red ants are a rare delicacy for the Ibans. They can be fried or cooked in bamboo and usually everyone from the longhouse or nearby would share this special jungle treat.
Pineapple hearts are white and clean wild vegetables.
Sharing is caring
The foragers will share whatever jungle produce they have collected without expecting anything in return.
According an Iban lawyer in Miri, in the past their elders would never think of selling anything to friends and relatives. Whatever they collected in the jungle, they shared.
Sometimes, when an elderly person could not walk to their house, they would even send him or her a plate of food through a little boy.
“Thus, we actually shared what nature gave us in the olden days. That was real providence and communal love,” the lawyer said.
Moringa can easily be found in Miri.
Sustainable living
Retired Sarawak administrative officer George Gaun and his wife are always delighted to pick up fresh sustenance, especially when they go to their farm.
They and even those who live in towns try to have a sustainable lifestyle. On the way to their padi farm early in the morning, they might pick some mushrooms or find a sprouting bamboo shoot.
The jungle produce foraged would sustain them for two or three days.
Gaun and other ‘town Ibans’ try to keep a small farm nearby for their weekend farming.
Iban farmers have been growing bamboo from the days of their great-grandparents. Apart from delineating their farmland, bamboo also provides the farmers with food, essential building materials, and even cooking receptacles.
For them, pansuh, or cooking meat and vegetables in bamboo stems over a fire, is a way of life.
The kemuntin fruit is a snack and its stalk is said to be a cure for stomachaches.
Social distancing
Throughout the MCO from March 18, these urban farmers have been practising social distancing which shows they care for others.
Although they don’t visit, they call their neighbours whenever they have fresh vegetables, fruits, and fish.
One young Iban man has even started a delivery service via a WhatsApp group, selling fresh coconuts, paku, midin, and fresh palm shoots harvested from his family farm not far from Miri.
During the MCO, two farmers — usually husband and wife — could go to their farm together. The oil palm gardeners have permits to transport their harvests to the mills. Furthermore, they can drive from their Miri homes to their oil palm plantations.
The women who accompany their husbands help with the plantation work, at the same time foraging for mushrooms, fern tops, and other edibles.
This yellow plant is known as the Foochow wild gang chow.
Foraging for food
Humans have been foraging for food since the dawn of time. By definition, foragers rely on food provided by nature through the gathering of plants and small animals, birds, and insects.
The word foraging can be used interchangeably with hunting and gathering. And Sarawak still has plenty of jungle vegetables and edible plants for the foragers.
According to the Sarawak Agriculture Department, there are over 150 edible plants and herbs in the state. It’s no wonder that even when farmers till their land, grow fruit trees, plant rice, and even oil palm, they still find the joy in foraging for edible plants.
A Medamit woman said she could easily find bunga kechala (wild ginger flower) and banana flowers (lengki) quite near her longhouse.
Cooked with some of her treasured dried fish from Lawas called Tahai, the wild flowers have been sustaining her family throughout the lockdown.
She said in a phone interview, “We’ve plenty of fresh jungle vegetables and are thankful the government had sent some rice and cooking oil at the start of MCO.”
She is happy to stay home — with a wide variety of jungle vegetables within the stipulated 10km radius.
A woman from Kanowit, now residing in Tudan, drives to her farm in Kuala Baram to pluck paku and midin to share with her relatives.
She also sets up her husband’s bubu (trap) in a stream near her farm hut and once managed to snare two fairly big ikan tioman. On other days, she has caught smaller fish and even small keli (cat fish).
“If we work hard and with some luck, we can get free food from the nearby jungles,” she said.
The wild passion fruit flower.
Urban vegetation
Indeed, edible wild plants are found all over Miri — on back lanes, along footpaths (near SK South), and around Bulatan Park and Taman Awam.
The kemunting, for example, is a purple fruit which has long been eaten by school children on their way home. It’s a delicious afternoon snack with chewable stalks said to ease stomachaches.
The leaves can be pounded and used as an antiseptic poultice to heal open wounds. The flowers also spruce up the otherwise dull roadsides.
An easily identified creeper is the wild passion fruit, which grows on trees, walls, and anything where it can find support.
As children, we enjoyed plucking these fruits, protected by a mesh. The ripe fruits (orange in colour) are nice to eat while the leaves and the still green fruits make an excellent stir-fry.
Many foragers can actually get a whole basketful of the vines, cut them neatly, and sell them at the tamu. The green fruits are sold separately in small plates for RM2.
Stir-fried with ikan bilis (anchovies), they are as good as imported peas.
A woman from Kampung Lusut and her son forage two or three times a week around their house where there are many patches of empty land belonging to absentee landowners.
According to her, even by around 11am, she can still pick some midin at Luak Bay areas. She has seen many women, and even men, harvesting midin there.
A few women have also cut down the nipah palms as the young nipah leaves were in demand during the fasting month.
On one plot near the former Merdeka Mall, Mosjaya, many of the foragers have been able to go home with a few plastic bags of paku uban, the white furry fern tops, which make a very delectable soup, especially to help new mothers lactate.
Noni or mengkudu is seen almost everywhere in Miri. The leaves make a good stir-fry with ikan bilis. The older leaves are used to wrap slices of fish for steaming and they turn black in the process.
It’s a delicacy for the village Malays with a special liking for mengkudu leaves. Sibu Malays looked forward to having this dish during past Raya.
The wild torch ginger flower.
Used as a stopper
Tapioca leaves are used as a stopper for bamboo stem or Iban pansuh cooking over an open fire. They can be pounded to make an excellent stir-fry, a dish now popular at fast food stalls.
Boiled tapioca leaves are also favoured by the Malay and Indonesian communities in Sarawak, usually offered as a side dish with nasi lemak, lelapan, and various curries.
Tapioca is usually grown in the kampungs and longhouses, and once in a while can even be found in the wild on the empty lots, probably abandoned by cultivators about 10 years ago.
The tapioca leaves can be found on the banks of Sungai Adong and even at Padan Kerbau in Miri.
Tapioca plants are still grown on Canada Hill, long after the squatters have moved out. Hikers and trekkers continue to forage in the area for precious Ubi leaves and some other edible plants.
Moringa is a healthy food purportedly with medicinal properties to lower of high blood pressure.
Many have also learnt to cook the leaves like cangkuk manis or make omelettes. Moringa leaves make good tea said to benefit those with diabetes and high blood pressure.
Cape gooseberries, known as letup-letup among the locals, can make good soup with ikan bilis or be stir fried like kang kong.
Many also claim these berries, much sought after around kampungs, help to lower their blood cholesterol. Around many housing areas where soils are turned over for landscape maintenance, cape gooseberries can easily be found.
Cape gooseberry grows wild by the roadside.
Growing pineapples
Most people grow pineapples outside their homes along drains. Young suckers have to be plucked out to enable the mother plant to grow well and fruit better.
The peeled young suckers can also be bought at the tamus, fetching quite a good price. Cooked with pork bones or pork or fried with ikan bilis, they make for a very nice dish, which many farmers serve up when trimming their pineapple gardens.
Some Foochows cook a special weed found growing wild in Miri — the liver plant with yellow flowers. Called gang chow, the roots are boiled to detox the liver and the leaves are sweet when made into soup.
Many people dry the roots and keep them for future herbal brewing.
Singkil or buas buas is a wild vegetable, easily found in the secondary jungles of Miri. It can be cooked together with pumpkin and ikan bilis and served when families make Ramadan bubur pedas, a Sarawak Malay signature dish, now enjoyed by the rich and famous.
Banana plants must be cleared every now and then to let the best plants grow tall and flower. If the plants are clustered together with too many suckers, the bananas will not fruit well.
So it’s better to take out the young suckers, plant them elsewhere — or just prepare them for soup — to allow the tallest and strongest plants to flourish and fruit.
The smaller plants can be taken down, leaving one or two for the next generation of bananas. Sometimes the stems are just left on the ground to act as fertilisers and help to control weeds.
The list of edible plants is long. And the lockdown has opened a window to a food source. Now, city foragers can do a rethink on fresh food, which may well come from back alleys, sidewalks, and the vast empty lands around the city.
Indeed, if you know where to look for, weeds and shrubs can be just as delicious as cauliflower and imported mushrooms.