Unveiling Ecologies: Cassava Stories

Sitting together in a circle with graters, a basket full of this tuberous brown root in the middle, each participant will learn about this staple food indigenous to South America, the Caribbean and Africa, including its present day extraction to make tapioca pearls in bubble tea or the recycling of the pulp to make paper, bioplastics, and Cardbond (a sustainable, low-energy material used in homeware). The communal ritual activity of scraping, grating, washing the root, fermenting the paste for several days and finally baking it will be experienced either hands-on or through pre-recorded video. During which the participants will learn about the complex ritual of detoxify the root of hydrogen cyanide, gained through centuries of accumulated knowledge passed down through ancestral lines. This workshop repositions cassava as valuable on multiple levels, in its climate resilience, its nutritional value worldwide, community culture and sustainable material design. Our cassava stories will be complied into a zine for publication by an Edinburgh based press. Each participant will receive one copy of our zine.