Plant Planet Plate

Green Shoots Foundation

Our project is to create an online database and living library of wildfoods/ medicinal foods within Khmer culture that play a vital role in diet diversity, nutrition and biodiversity preservation. The living library will be established at our AgriTech Centre. A 0.5 Ha award winning permaculture/ demonstration site in North West Cambodia. Cambodia, with its lush tropical flora, is considered one of the biodiversity hotspots of the Southeast Asia region. Sadly, with the ongoing effects of climate change, up to 40 percent of this flora is set to be extinct by the end of this century. These wild indigenous plants play many roles in Cambodian life: as food and as medicine. Despite their extensive importance, documentation of these plants is limited because of the destructive aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, where botanists were killed, and entire library collections were burned. This project will collect and consolidate existing information about how indigenous Cambodian flora is used within both Khmer cuisine as well as traditional and folk medicine practices. Initial research carried out thorough a National Geographic Explorer grant showed 125 wild plants from forest and wild areas that rural families rely on for food. Our database prototype is here https://juncture-digital.org/athaodam/plant-planet-plate/