Taro
Taro has a wide variety of names, including talo, kalo, gabi, arvi, jimbi, kókó, inhame, cocoyam, and malanga. It might have first come from Southeast Asia or India, but spread widely across the globe early in the history of civilization and became widely naturalized.
#Human usage
Taro might have become one of the first vegetables domesticated by humans. People eat taro's starchy corms, most often boiled, as well as young leaves and stems (boiled twice). While its raw form contains painful calcium oxalate crystals, cooking breaks these crystals down. Once cooked, taro provides many important nutrients (including fiber; vitamins A, B, and C; potassium; magnesium; calcium; and iron) and proves so easy to digest that one can feed it to an infant.
#Taro People
A community that specializes in relationship with taro will invariably tend towards horticulture, and therefore live in settled villages at least part of the year. Often these communities practice swidden cultivation, growing different guilds of plants at different stages and moving around the jungle in a regular cycle. While not necessarily unsustainable, this technique can easily fall out of balance in a disastrous way. Communities in the Fifth World who use swidden cultivation often have a number of ways in which they strictly control reproduction, including a variety of methods of birth control. These communities place special emphasis on monitoring the health of the forest and ensuring that it properly regenerates.
While communities may intercrop taro with coconut, coffee, cocoa, or breadfruit, it also grows well in "banana circles" with banana, cassava, lemongrass, and sweet potato. These circles make excellent use of compost. Cultivating these banana circles often becomes a central metaphor for such a community. The use of compost illustrates a larger principle that nothing goes to waste, while the cooperation and relationships between the plants in the guild often provide a rubric for social relationship. Some communities may even form sodalities around each member of the guild. Members of the banana society usually pride themselves on their ability to endure hardship in order to protect or shelter the rest of the community. Members of the taro society may focus on caregiving, particularly childrearing, since taro serves as a nutritious staple crop digestible enough for even infants to eat. Members of the society built around the plant that repels insects (usually lemongrass) sometimes take on a magical or apotropaic mission of warding off bad luck, too.
Because taro holds so much importance in native Hawaiian culture, a community specializing in relationship with taro (or kalo, in Hawaiian) may trace their descent from Hawaiians -- whether they still live on one of those islands or descend from Hawaiian climate refugees who settled elsewhere. Such a community may keep up the tradition of growing taro in wetlands or ponds, which dovetails nicely with freshwater fishing. Maintaining coastal wetlands in particular helps protect the land against damage caused by hurricanes. Such a community will certainly continue to make poi, a traditional staple dish of mashed taro mixed with water and sometimes fermented.