Sou’a – the mysterious red banana

Like any good explorer, I am working hard at and enjoying learning about the local food here in America Samoa. Here on this island there are a wide variety of fruit bearing trees. The most common of these are Esi or papaya, Coconut and Fai or Banana. Additionally Starfruit, passion fruit, limes and lemons are quite plentiful.

One of the most intestesting of these is the Sou’a. This banana stand apart in many ways. When I first saw these at the market, it was their red-orange skins that stood out to me. I had to know more!

In American Samoa, not everybody knows about this special fai. Many people whom I show this too are taken aback. There are two common bananas here on the island of Tutuila. The first is fai palagi or white banana. These are green bananas that you boil or cook in an umu (rock oven covered with leaves). The second is the yellow banana. Most people are likely to be familiar as these are the types most commonly found in grocery stores and are eastern right out of the skin. In the category of yellow two special types, Masuluki and Samoa are much sweeter varieties.

However nothing (in my opinion) beats the Sou’a!

First thing, the sou’a grow straight up from the banana tree, where most varieties dangle. When you harvest these, generally you have to cut the whole tree down. Not to worry, this signals the plant and it quickly grows again to produce another stalk of fruit!

These fai are considered a super food. The levels of nutritional quality were hard for me to link in this post but consumers more that the quantity from just a few dried chips will cause the color of their urea to change, showing a neon yellow of excess nutrients being discharged.

There are several ways to prepare this wonderful plantain. Many love it just as any other banana. It’s a wonderful year warmed in a hot car, left in the sun or microwaved and covered in honey and some lime juice. It can be sauteed and prepared with a wide variety of meals, andprepared like sweet potatoes with marshmallows. For the wise traveler, dried chips are a great nutritional snack by themselves or with your favorite ingredients for a trail mix.

Don’t let the color throw you off, if you ever have a chance, Sou’a are a great treat!

Pollution in American Samoa, a look at the Nu’uuli Mangroves

Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on a planning meeting between the Environmental Protection Agency of American Samoa, Department of Marine Wildlife and the American Samoa Power Authority. This meeting was to discuss the implementation and roll-out of a new mitigation program that would include data collection to help assist in evaluating the types and sources of pollution on the coastlines of American Samoa. Within 3 weeks, I found this article written in the local newspaper, the American Samoa News about a group of roughly 25 individuals who collected 160 bags of waste during a cleanup of the Pala Lagoon on the opposite side of the Nu’uuli Mangroves.

DCIM100GOPRO — A picturesque scene from the Nu’uuli mangroves. Unfortunately, everything isn’t a beautiful as it seems.

With this in mind, I accepted an invite to take a short tour of a section of the Mangroves, a section that stretches out into the Lagoon and is one of the areas proposed to be mitigated by the EPA. What we found was heartbreaking.

As I toured the mangroves, I had a conversation with Dennis Ahoia, a local business owner and family member tied to one of the pieces of land designated as part of the Nu’uuli Mangroves. This part of the island is uninhabited, yet the area is full of rubbish, and most of it is fairly new. After a short boat ride across the bay, Dennis lead me through the mangroves, most of which are completely undeveloped. He showed me sections where decades ago, walls and foundations were buried from when families used to live here.

As he used his machete to clear a pathway he explained to me his families involvement in cleaning up a portion of the land. His astonishment at the quantity of pollution was evident. “Several years ago we were cleaning up a portion of this land, and a small fire spread across the mangroves, it burned for several days and while it was unfortunate, it burned all the trash. So all of this, all of this is new.”

What amazed me the most is that there are significant barriers at the waters edge that should in theory capture and limit the spread of rubbish in this area. Large portions of debris can be found up to 50 feet inland from the shoreline. According to Ahoia, much of this pollution comes directly from the Village of Nu’uuli and the multiple streams that discharge into the bay. His disheartened amazement at the quantities of pollution is evident throughout our entire walk. “Where does all this come from?”, he asks shaking his head. “People don’t take care of their garbage and it ends up here.” It appears that this debris then floats with the currents until it comes to the shoreline where wind and varying tides carry it inland.

Managing this pollution is a multi step process that begins with personal responsibility. Putting trash in its place and not littering are the first solutions to preventing this type of pollution to occur. Secondary measures are to avoid purchasing items that are common pollutants like Styrofoam take out containers. Requesting your local business purchase environmentally responsible packaging and traveling with personal beverage containers are additional measures to preventing the problem.

Additionally, active mitigation – or cleaning up these type of areas is also important. Forming a group of friends and family members, faith based community, or other group that gathers regularly is a great way to make an impact on pollution in your local area. By taking people out to clean up existing trash, we spread awareness and educate people about the impact litter makes. This blog on tips to running a successful community cleanup can be a great place to start you on starting your own cleanup group. If you are interested in helping clean up American Samoa please contact the EPA by email :info@epa.as.gov or call them directly at 684.633.2304

How to make Coco Samoa – fresh hot chocolate from tree to cup

There are many wonderful things to be learned when you live on this planet. As a farm to table person, cooking and preparing fresh foods and beverages is one of them. Today we are going to look at a drink common to the Samoan Islands, Coco Samoa. In this easy 7 step process you will learn how to make this delicious beverage.

First you need some coca fruit. Ripe fruit is red or orange in color. These are picked from a tree. The part of the fruit we will be using are the seeds.

2) After scooping the seeds out of the fruit you can enjoy the milky coating of the seeds by sucking on them and then spitting the seeds out into a bowl. This is the traditional way of preparing them. This is a tasty step, but it is optional.

3) After you have separated your seeds from the fruit and any internal membrane. You may rinse them. This step is also optional and most likely only used if you have sucked on the seeds themselves. This is not a traditional step in the process.

4) Place your seeds on a baking tray or in a pan for toasting. We use a gas flame and a pan to brown them. Seeds are ready when the hulls have turned solid. For a bolder, more coffee like flavor, you can burn the husks. This step will require your pan to be cleaned so make sure you use an old pan that you don’t mind boiling off for cleaning. Teflon or other similar surface is not recommended.

DCIM100GOPRO

Roast seeds until the skins are hardened and blackened.

5) After seeds are roasted to a hard outside coat, let them cool for several minutes and then husk the shells, separating the beans. These beans should be a nice dark brown color. Beans that have been blackened will have a more robust, coffee like flavor.

6) The next step is to grind the beans. Using a coffee grinder or other food processing machine makes quick and easy work of this step.

7) After your beans are sufficiently ground you can brew them in a variety of ways. Adding them to boiling water, using a french press or simply putting the grounds in a cup and adding hot water. Add sugar to taste and enjoy!

Diabetes and High Blood Pressure from drinking bottled water?

Plastic pollution is a big deal. Our oceans, green spaces and city streets are full of it. Beaches around the world find plastics upon their shore, including ones where no humans live. There are hundreds, if not thousands of species who are directly impacted by plastic in their diets on a daily basis. Ironically, humans are one of those species.

If you are like most people you have heard of bisphenol A most commonly called BPA. . Many people know it’s bad but they don’t understand exactly how and they make efforts to shop for plastics that are BPA free. That’s a good thing, but not all plastics are labeled effectively and BPA isn’t just found in plastic. It’s also found in the lining of Aluminum cans and many major water supplies throughout the United States.

Fighting effective labeling of products is something corporations have been doing for decades. One primary example of this is the cigarette industry. While there has been a change over the last 100 years from Doctors and Actors actively supporting this “healthy habit” to education and understanding of the toxicity of manufactured nicotine to labels stating that cigarettes can cause cancer, birth deformities and more.

This is no different in today’s manufacturing industries. According to the International Bottled Water Association, a conglomerate of corporations who profit from the privatization of water; BPA is a safe chemical for adults to consume. They even provide links to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) papers and website while painting a rosy picture of the chemical, which has been regulated out of packaging and uses for infants while being allowed in the adult human supply chain.

Why is this an issue, consuming BPA? According to a report in Reuters, researchers, “using government health data, they found that the 25 percent of people with the highest levels of bisphenol A in their bodies were more than twice as likely to have heart disease and, or diabetes compared to the 25 percent of with the lowest levels.” One study that links it to diabetes also indicates; “People ingest BPA that leaches from containers into foods and drinks. Studies in the United States showed that BPA appeared in the blood and urine of 95% of people tested.”

In a 2016 study, researchers found,”The present study showed that BPA could lead to chromosomal aberrations in both ER-dependent and independent pathways at some concentrations or in cell types yet not reported. Also, BPA could probably be considered as a facilitator for some predisposed cells to be cancerous by raising the chromosome instability levels. Finally, estrogen receptor seems to have a different role in cytotoxicity and genotoxicity effects” http://www.ijmcmed.org/browse.php?a_id=335&slc_lang=en&sid=1&ftxt=1

Plastics have a history of being this great invention that has turned out to have many negative effects. Pollution litters our planet and we now know it pollutes our body. What is can be found as astonishing is that it takes very little plastic in your life to be put at risk for health issues. One of the major carriers of “sick plastic” is water and soda bottles. It’s a hot day and you want a cold beverage, so you stop in to a convenience store and grab a plastic bottle of water or some carbonated beverage. After a few swigs and a few miles down the road, you head into a business for work, shopping or other reason. But its a sunny day and that beverage you purchased in warming up, and so is the plastic that it comes in. Maybe you drink some more when you get back in your car, maybe you put it in the fridge and drink it when it gets cold again – either way, you could be consuming toxic chemicals that have leached out of the bottle and into your drink. No harm in that right? Wrong.

Researchers indicate that, “Rate of growth and sexual maturation, hormone levels in blood, reproductive organ function, fertility, immune function, enzyme activity, brain structure, brain chemistry, and behavior are all affected by exposure to low doses of BPA. Many of these effects are due to exposure during early development (gestation and/or lactation), but effects due to postweaning-through-adult exposure have also been reported.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280330/

This means that drinking plastic beverages can increase the age of puberty, impact the function of your brain, impact one’s fertility and more. While these factors are scary, many people would believe that the solution is to avoid drinking these beverages after they have become warm. While this is a nice idea, the truth is that many of these chemical impacts can occur to the beverage before we purchase them. Most of the shipping containers and semis hauling these manufactured goods from the factory to local distributors do not use cooling units, so the risk of exposure begins at the initial transport to market.

The same study also indicates one unfortunate fact – the government and businesses that use BPA don’t research it’s impacts. From the same medical report we see this chart showing the lack of studies by corporations and government entities on the impacts of BPA.

Government /Corporate Studies on BPA

Biased outcome due to source of funding in low-dose in vivo BPA research as of December 2004.

	All studies		CD-SD rat studies		All studies except CD-SD rats
Source of funding	Harm	No harm	Harm	No harm	Harm	No harm
Government	94 (90.4)	10 (9.6)	0 (0%)	6 (100)	94 (96)	4 (4)
Chemical corporations	0 (0)	11 (100)	0 (0%)	3 (100)	0 (0)	8 (100)

Values shown are no. (%). (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280330/) To back up this stance, one simply needs to look at the Coca Cola FAQ page.

What’s the solution? There are two basic solutions to avoiding BPA in your life. Avoid single use plastics like water and soda bottles. In addition to protecting yourself, you will have a positive impact on the world around you. To travel with beverages on a regular basis, purchase a Stainless Steele insulated beverage container. Insulated containers last a lifetime and help keep your beverages cold for long periods of time. This will eliminate any concerns about being forced to warm beverages on a hot day. Also, you can take your insulated container and purchase fountain soda from many chain and convenience stores.

While direct links establishing the permanence of impacts from BPA in our bodies are needed, it’s clear that corporations will not notify us the general public when they provide chemicals in our environment that have negative effects on the human body. While Diabetes and Heart Disease are just the tip of the iceberg in the potential for permanent damage to our bodies, issues like breast cancer and advanced puberty onset are known. For these reasons alone it’s best to eliminate single use plastic water bottles from your diet, but not fresh clean water. For more information on types of plastics and the ways they pollute our body, check out page 2 of this printable PDF from the Ecology Center in Berkley, CA.

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