Northern Ethiopia: what’s on the menu?

Abstract

Drought has been such a common occurrence in Ethiopia in the last 200 years that not only have wild foods become a significant part of the daily diet, but they have also impacted on local culture – people are insulted because of the plants they consume. In some of the remotest parts of Ethiopia the author investigated how the people of northern Ethiopia are coping when their livelihoods are threatened by drought. Having been awarded a Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship for 2000, the author put together a small team, Ethiopian Venture, to carry out this work. The results of this project will go towards a “famine foods” database being set up in Ethiopia by the United Nations Development Programme. It is hoped that with further research some of these wild foods, that are ideally suited to the Ethiopian climate, could be domesticated and so bridge a food gap between harvests.