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 relations
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 will 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 think of themselves as tough and guarded (because of the calcium oxalate crystals) but containing many gifts. 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.
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 would dovetail nicely with freshwater fishing. Maintaining coastal wetlands in particular helps protect the land against damage caused by hurricanes and floods. Such a community will certainly continue to make poi, a traditional staple dish of mashed taro mixed with water and sometimes fermented.
If the community grows taro in wetlands, that puts them in danger of malaria. To protect them from malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses, they may also specialize in relationship with lemongrass or the spotted gum tree, and use those oils to try to repel mosquitos. They may cover themselves in thick, citronella-scented body paint while cultivating taro, and drape their beds in woven mosquito netting at night. But no matter the precautions taken, if a community makes a home in wetlands, eventually someone will get malaria. This may also require a special relationship with the cinchona tree, whose bark effectively treats malaria. The community would also by necessity develop a system of medicine most adapted to treating malaria. They would, for instance, probably practice a form of oral rehydration therapy, possibly using a mix of bone broth and fruit juice in place of water mixed with salt and sugar. While communities farther afield may not have to worry about malaria, they might call upon the experienced healers of a taro community for help with other illnesses.
Taro cultivation often serves as the basis for Big Man economies, with social entrepreneurs offering favors, gifts, and help freely, then collecting on them all at once to gather together a store of taro that no one person could ever assemble on one’s own and using it to throw an enormous party. The size and scale of these parties become the arena in which these entrepreneurs compete for status. This tendency could grow into a full-blown chiefdom, or the community could keep it in check with a seasonal hierarchy, i.e., a chiefdom or even kingdom for part of the year (during taro season), transitioning to a more egalitarian tribe during a different part of the year (when they focus on, for instance, hunting).