The Moroccan Food Forest That Inspired an Agricultural Revolution

These ancient forest gardens may be more relevant than ever.

By Eric J. Wallace
Atlas Obscura
April 01, 2019

Excerpt:

It’s unlikely indigenous farmers referred to such gardens as food forests. In fact, the term didn’t exist until the early 1980s, when it was coined by English horticulturalist Robert Hart.

In a book titled Forests and Food: Addressing Hunger and Nutrition Across Sustainable Landscapes, Bhaskar Vira, who directs the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, identifies a variety of historical appellations. Translated, the names range from simply “home gardens” in Zambia, Nepal, and Kerala, India, to “forest gardens” in Sri Lanka, “the gardens of complete design” in Java, and Mexico’s “family orchards.”

According to Vira, it wasn’t until Western anthropologists began studying indigenous agricultural practices in the early 20th century that scholars took note of the gardens. Even then, reports remained largely obscure.

“In all but the most rural and isolated places, forest gardens were eradicated in favor of commercial, monocultural production techniques,” says Munsell. Before Europeans colonized the Caribbean, for example, food forests were likely the primary method of agriculture. Sugarcane production would have wiped them out entirely, “but a few plantation owners noted the systems’ ability to cheaply feed their workforce and allotted resources to maintain them.”

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