7,000 years and still going strong!
Forget Quinoa, forget gluten free we think the next craze food craze will be Mongongo nuts. Because they are tasty and a time saver! And you’ll have more leisure time and work less compared to a farmer, that is.
Mongongo nuts are very popular with the San bushmen of northern Botswana and Namibia. Archaeological evidence has shown that they have been consumed for over 7,000 years. They taste great, store well, and remain edible for much of the year. And they are easy to cook. But there are two ways to prepare them.
Method one)
Steam the dry fruit to soften the skins. Peel them and boil them until the maroon-coloured flesh separates from the hard inner nuts. The pulp is eaten, and the nuts are saved to be roasted later.
Method two)
Collect the nuts from elephant dung and wash carefully. Evidently the hard nut survives intact through the digestive process and the elephant does the hard work of collecting the nuts.
The oil from the nuts has also been traditionally used as a body rub in the dry winter months, to clean and moisten the skin, while the hard, outer nut-shells are popular as divining “bones”. The wood, being both strong and light, makes excellent fishing floats, toys, insulating material and drawing boards. More recently, it has been used to make dart-boards and packing cases.
It turns out that real pay off is that San Bushmen have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”
via: (Diamond 1987:65)
