Wild bush tomatoes! An interview with a botanical exploration team
I speak with Dr. Chris Martine, Dr. Tanisha Williams, Amy Wrobleski & Dr. Rebecca Bird about a fascinating wild food found in the Australian outback.
This week on the Foodie Pharmacology podcast, we go wild for bush tomatoes! I speak with an incredible crew of botanists and an anthropologist who share their work in studying a sweet relative of the tomato that grows in the Western Desert of Australia in lands managed by the Martu People with controlled burns. We cover topics of flavor, population genetics, and tales from the field! You can learn more about this project in a new film featured on the “Plants are cool, too!” YouTube Channel.
About my guests
Dr. Chris Martine is the David Burpee Professor in Plant Genetics and Research at Bucknell University, where he is also the Chair of the Department of Biology and Director of the Manning Herbarium. He has won numerous awards, published more than 40 journal articles and two field guides, and has mentored more than 80 undergraduate and Master's students in research. Chris is the creator and host of the YouTube video series "Plants are Cool, Too!" and he was recently elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Dr. Tanisha M. Williams is the Richard E. and Yvonne Smith Postdoctoral Fellow in Botany at Bucknell University. Her dissertation research examined the impacts of climate change on plant species throughout South Africa. Her postdoctoral research elucidates the role Aboriginal Peoples have on the movement and maintenance of plant species and understanding how biogeographic barriers impact species distributions in Australia. She also uses genomics methods to update the conservation status of rare plants. Dr. Williams has extensive science communication and policy experience and is the founder of Black Botanists Week, a campaign to amplify diverse voices in botany. Dr. Williams completed her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut in 2019.
Amy Wrobleski is an Ecology PhD Candidate at Penn State, working on questions surrounding food sovereignty with foraged foods- both plants and fungi.
Dr. Rebecca Bird has written extensively on a wide range of topics, from costly signaling theory to women's hunting, to fire ecology, but my most recent projects center on dynamic relationships between people, species, and landscapes. I'm particularly interested in the important ecological functions that place based societies can supply within ecosystems, and how this can translate into greater sovereignty for indigenous peoples over land and food systems. I work with an aboriginal community of Martu people in a remote part of Western Australia. We’ve been living and working in the community for the past 20 years, learning about and documenting traditional hunting, gathering and landscape use. We've been studying how the use of fire creates plant diversity at the landscape scale, and how this diversity of vegetation types influences animals, and in turn, how this affects the productivity and sustainability of Martu hunting. What's particularly interesting is that these processes of hunting and burning also influence the distribution of important food plants like Wamula, the bush tomato.
Listen to the interview
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Watch the full video version on YouTube
Available exclusively on the Teach Ethnobotany YouTube Channel, you can catch the full video version of this episode and others! Enjoy!
Yours in health, Dr. Quave
Cassandra L. Quave, Ph.D. is a scientist, author, speaker, podcast host, wife, mother, explorer, and professor at Emory University School of Medicine. She teaches college courses and leads a group of research scientists studying medicinal plants to find new life-saving drugs from nature. She hosts the Foodie Pharmacology podcast and writes the Nature’s Pharmacy newsletter to share the science behind natural medicines. To support her effort, consider a paid or founding subscription, with founding members receiving an autographed 1st edition hardcover copy of her book, The Plant Hunter.