Author: Reina Gattuso / Source: Atlas Obscura
When relatives visited Brighton Kaoma’s childhood home in the Copperbelt Province of central Zambia, they’d come bearing gifts: oblong brown chikanda, freshly dug from the earth of the family’s ancestral village.
The tubers weren’t from yams or potatoes. Instead, they were foraged from the wild orchids that dot the dambos, or grasslands, of northern Zambia, their ornate blossoms shocks of color in the marshy knollsKaoma’s family, who belong to the Bemba people of Zambia’s Northern and North-Western Provinces, would grind the tubers with peanuts and chiles, then boil them with water and soda to form a cake. Also called chikanda, this brown-speckled, earthy loaf—sometimes referred to as “African polony” for its bologna-like texture—bears the unique flavor of each wild tuber species used in its creation.
Chikanda was a traditional food for lean times, when Bemba women and girls combed the dambos for the tubers they considered a god-given resource. But for Bemba people like Kaoma, who grew up in cities, chikanda is a special occasion food, served at weddings and to honor guests. It’s so integral to Bemba tradition, new brides often make the dish for their husbands’ families to show respect—and to show off their cooking. When family members prepared chikanda for him growing up, Kaoma says, “I would feel highly respected.”
Today, though, vendors hawk slices of chikanda to hungry shoppers on the bustling streets of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, and to bleary beer-drinkers in bars. In the rapidly growing city’s glossy new supermarkets, chikanda is on the shelves. At large restaurants, it’s on the menu. In the past decade or so, says Kaoma, cofounder and executive director of the Lusaka-based youth nonprofit Agents of Change, this food of rural scarcity has become an urban trend.
“People are going back to the traditional food,” says Royd Vinya, Dean of the School of Natural Resources at Zambia’s Copperbelt University, who oversees the university’s chikanda sustainability project. At a time when indigenous diets across Africa are increasingly challenged by corporate agriculture and fast food chains, Vinya says, “Everybody wants to get connected back to where they came from.”
But there’s a catch. While the craving for chikanda may represent a yearning for rural roots, skyrocketing demand for the snack has depleted Zambia’s wild orchid population. Since the flowers are notoriously difficult to cultivate in captivity, conservationists fear the craze may wipe wild orchids off Zambia’s map.
Orchid overharvesting isn’t just a Zambian problem. A booming illegal orchid trade threatens many of the world’s more than 20,000 known orchid species. The growing popularity of tuber-based Turkish salep, a warm, wintertime drink, has decimated orchid populations in the Middle East. Meanwhile, increasing demand for chikanda in urban Zambia has led to the import of the tubers from nearby Tanzania, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—a trade that is exporting the risk of overharvesting abroad.
This isn’t just bad news for orchids. Rural women in Zambia’s northern regions rely on chikanda for subsistence and, increasingly, for income. Due to dwindling wild supply,…
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