Soppu Benefits

You’d best eat all your greens, by hook or by crook.

René Redzepi, the Danish chef and co-owner of the three-Michelin-star restaurant Noma, might have elevated “foraging” into a buzzword in the fine-dining circles. But Chasing Soppu, a handy, downloadable guidebook compiled by Dhruthi Somesh, Rohit Rao, Ranjini Murali, Seema Mundoli, and Harini Nagendra, a faculty team of ecologists, researchers, and an illustrator from Azim Premji University, show that it has been common practice in Bengaluru for ages. The city’s lakes and parks, the crevices in our pavements, unused and disturbed lands, gutterways, and the remaining patches of urban forests are rich and bursting with a wonderful diversity of soppu, or edible green leafy vegetables.

Lean, green fighting machines

The authors of Chasing Soppu compiled this introduction to over fifty-odd forageable species of wild edible greens in the city, guided by the knowing eyes, hands, and taste buds of Puttamma, Chowdamma, Revamma, Swathi, Lakshmi, Anniamma, Muniamma, Padmavati, Narayanamma, Ammu, Manjula, and Nagamma, who passed on their knowledge of how to identify these plants. They also shared hearty, healthy recipes from their kitchens and a few emergency home remedies.

This guidebook on edible plants in Bengaluru was a happy by-product of the authorial team’s work on urban commons, the shrinking spaces in our increasingly disconnected city where the rich and the poor still bump into each other — think the city’s parks, playgrounds, lakes, and streets. Over five years ago, while pursuing this project and studying community practices around the edges of the city’s lakes, one of them noticed a local woman juggling tasks. She was keeping a sharp eye on her cattle while using broken shards of clam shells to harvest and cut the leaves from a flat-leaf creeper growing out of the lake bed. They approached her, curious, and she revealed that she was gathering honagonne soppu to add to her saaru, a Kannadiga variant of rasam. The scientific name for this edible plant is Althernanthera sessilis; its common name is joy weed.

This wasn’t the first time that the members of the team had seen wild edibles being foraged, but it was this continuation of traditional consumption practices within an urban context that piqued their interest. Through interviews with these long-time women foragers, they came to see that while urban foraging has grown into a movement among the middle and upper classes of society, working-class women have always foraged for wild edible plants and weeds; it is a way of life, and not merely a response to contemporary trends. Instead, the authors found that continued unplanned urban development and the unthinking fencing of our urban commons are the biggest barriers to these women, hindering their access to additional sources of nutrition.

Lettuce not go crazy now

Let’s be clear: Chasing Soppu is a handy guidebook, but foraging for these wild edible plants on your own needs the eye of an on-ground expert. The distance between deliciousness and death might just be the length of a leaf. These local women are experts, with the knowledge to distinguish the edible from the poisonous passed down from grandmothers to mothers and aunts.

Rather, this guidebook hopes to coax us into becoming more aware of the bounty of nature nourishing us at all times, even in our maze of glass high-rises. We might begin to see that the plants pushing through our pavements, creeping over fences, and hanging off our walls aren’t to be disregarded but to be understood. And some of these eventually find themselves in our home, balcony, and terrace gardens over time, like the aloe vera and tulsi, once wild but now staples, considered the “first doctors” at home. Then there’s basale soppu, or Malabar spinach, a roof creeper that’s now available within ten minutes on a delivery app. This guidebook is simply the tip of the iceberg of the many ways women across the country forage for wild edibles to supplement their daily diet with nutritious benefits.

The details: Download your free PDF copy of Chasing Soppu here.