The importance of being bitter—a qualitative study on cassava cultivar preference in Malawi

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We conducted qualitative interviews in Nkhata‐Bay district in Malawi to elucidate why farmers preferentially grow cassava cultivars providing bitter roots. Cassava was mainly grown to produce flour for making the staple food, kondowole. Plants were identified as belonging to one of the 54 mentioned cultivars with local names. All the farmers stated that bitter taste of roots predicted toxicity and necessity for processing. Cultivars were grouped into “cool” or “bitter” based on whether the roots could be eaten fresh, or required processing before consumption as kondowole. Farmers strongly preferred cultivars grown for flour production to have bitter roots since this protected against theft, destruction by animals and deterred household members from unplanned harvest. Since processing is done by women bitterness empowers women to control the families staple crop. Bitter cultivars reportedly yielded more and roots produced an easier to mould kondowole. Bitterness and toxicity were not perceived as a problem.