A bush food eaten for millennia by Aborigines in Australia’s tropical
north has won the accolade of richest known natural source of vitamin C.
According to research presented at the International Congress of Nutrition
in Adelaide this week, vitamin C makes up 5 per cent of the weight of the
billygoat plum, Terminalia ferdiandiana. This is 100 times the concentration
in oranges and five times that found in the Hawaiian cherry, the next richest
Jennie Brand Miller of the University of Sydney’s human nutrition unit
says trees that bear the drab, green fruit grow on the streets of Darwin.
The plum is a popular snack food among Aboriginal children and now appears
on restaurant menus in Darwin and in health food shops abroad. The fruit,
she says, tastes like lemon rind.
The billygoat plum is one entry in the first comprehensive nutritional
survey of the bush foods that have sustained Aborigines for 40 000 years*.
More than 500 wild foods – known as bush tucker to most Australians – are
analysed in the survey for fat, carbohydrate, fibre, protein, vitamins,
minerals and water content. They include the goanna lizard, grasshoppers,
green ants, bush raisins, yams that grow a metre underground, dozens of
acacia seed varieties, mangrove worms and toxic cycad palms.
The survey was compiled by researchers at the University of Sydney,
Curtin University of Technology near Perth and the government’s Defence
Science and Technology Organisation in Canberra. The defence department
is interested in bush tucker as an emergency food supply.
Many of the foods are unpalatable to Westerners. But others, such as
the quan-dong, an attractive fruit from central Australia, have commercial
potential. A research assistant recently left the project to set a company
to supply bush tucker.
Brand Miller says that knowing what Aboriginal people traditionally
ate could be important for treating diseases such as diabetes and heart
disease, which affect a high proportion of Aborigines who now have a Western
diet. The assumption that the traditional diet was predominantly vegetarian
is untrue, she adds, as it included a lot of animal food rich in fat. ‘The
bogong moth, which lives in the Snowy Mountains, was a sole source of food
for months on end,’ she says. More than 50 per cent of its calories come
in the form of fat.
*Tables of composition of Australian Aboriginal foods, Australian Institute
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.