Paper short abstract:

The paper explores narratives of "forgotten foods" in farming diversification in Jamaica. How discussions on climate resilience and food security can include the stories of the Taino and Maroon peoples whose ethnobotanical knowledge and perseverance enabled plant varieties' survival and maintenance.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we describe and interrogate the engagement strategies used for a recent ESRC-funded project, 'Teaching Climate Justice through Ancestral Plant Heritage in Jamaica' (June 2022 - Feb 2023). Activities for this project were organised through the lens of official narratives of 'forgotten foods', which were a starting point for encouraging participants to revalue and potentially redeploy (Coulthard 2014) Jamaican Taíno and Maroon foodways for climate just adaptation. The participants (N = 42) were mostly educators from Jamaica's National School Gardening Program, a state-sponsored initiative that has recently utilised discourses of forgotten foods from the Food and Agriculture Organisation to encourage 4-H Youth Clubs to plant neglected crop varieties such as corn, cassava, and purslane in school and community gardens. Yet, as we highlighted in the workshop, terms such as forgotten foods beg the question of the forgotten people whose knowledge and perseverance have enabled the maintenance and survival of neglected plant varieties in Jamaica since the era of slavery. Through activities such as Indigenous storytelling, Indigenous-led cooking and eating, 'world café' methodology (see: https://theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/), and hands-on planting in the garden, the workshops encouraged participants to develop a place-based awareness of the importance of Jamaican Taíno and Maroon foodways for climate just futures. At the end of the paper, we provide an overview of 'lessons learned' that foregrounds the perspectives of our Indigenous partners and co-authors, the Jamaican Hummingbird Taíno and Maroon People, whose journey towards 'self-recognition' (ibid.) in Jamaica has only just begun.