Welcome to iMechanica

Teng Li — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:02:14 -0400

Hi, Peter,

Welcome to iMechanica. I hope you enjoy exploring iMechanica and interacting with other mechanicians, as thousands others do.

Your research interest reminds me some research projects in Prof. L. Mahadevan 's group at Harvard University. Check the plan physiology section in his biological research page. Hope you find something of your interest.

An ethnobotanist in the mechanical wilderness

Peter Matthews — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:42:51 -0400

Hi, I am just making an entry here to introduce myself.

I am an ethnobotanist studying the origin, domestication, and dispersal of taro, a semiaquatic herb (in nature). My role is historian to the crop, so I try to learn anything and everything I can about the plant, from all points of view.

The plant has quite an active life, with seeds that can be picked up and carried about by a great variety of animals, vegetative parts that can break off in floods and wash up in odd places to continue growing. Some clones of the plant may have been growing in gardens for thousands of years, radiating out across Asia and the Pacific, and forming what is essentially a very thin canopy with no trunk.

I often have thoughts related to the mechanics of all this.

There are many questions to be asked about how people scrape and cut and snap and mash the plant (it is a starchy rooot crop, with edible leaf stems and leaves). How do cooking times reflect the transfer of heat through a starchy mass that is simultaneously changing form as it cooks? How does the shape of the cut pieces affect cooking times? Why does taro taste better when cooked in ceramic pots rather than metal pots? When are the nutritional and culinary results good enough to justify the labour and energy costs of cooking? Why do snakes in Papua New Guinea eat the raw leaves as an aid to the ingestion/digestion of large food items?

iMechanica - An ethnobotanist in the mechanical wilderness - Comments

Welcome to iMechanica

An ethnobotanist in the mechanical wilderness