Ang Malunggay! Bow!
farmeric November 6th, 2009
This is a story as told by Dr. Vivencio Mamaril, a member of the Bureau of Plant Industry Biotech Core Team.
Among the vegetables we eat, malunggay has already earned various tags- healthiest vegetable, a miracle tree, lowly but high in nutrition, and many others. It’s now even tagged as the most healthiest food and miracle food as well.
Malunggay Vitamins and Minerals
There must be something and someone in malunggay that made it as the most popular vegetable in the country today.
Here comes the story, as it happened and is happening before Dr. Vivencio Mamaril very own eyes.
The basic, malunggay has seven times in amount of vitamin C as compared with orange fruit, four times the calcium in milk, four times the vitamin A in carrot and three times the potassium in banana.
According to Dr. Mamaril, it has been so long time that we were not aware of the vitamins and other nutrients malunggay can provide not until the Department of Agriculture (DA) made some noise about malunggay.
The Department of Agriculture (DA), through its Biotechnology Program Implementation Unit, were surprised to learned that there is a business enterprise that is much interested to buy malunggay foliage and seeds. The demand for foliage and seeds is so huge that no single grower or an aggregate of growers can fill the demand.
The truth is, there are no malunggay growers who can produce seeds and foliage in great quantity, and there is no existing technology for it as well. Due to this challenge, the Department of Agriculture was encouraged to address the needs of an emerging industry- malunggay production and utilization as well.
The Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) lead the way when a research program that aims to develop a package of technology was started.
Two major projects in this program are foliage and seed production.
In the foliage project, the Nicaraguan technology of planting malunggay was implemented. Seedlings were planted at a distance of 10 cm x 10 cm.
In the same manner, a field study on producing seeds from seedlings and cuttings was also established but the BPI have encountered technical problems but miraculously their research experience gave them a lot data and findings. Imagine 2-3 days continuous rain that defoliated the malunggay foliage and after 3-5 days of sunny days that followed, the plants have recovered! Truly, malunggay is a miracle plant.
The next challenge that BPI undertook was to produce processed products. Taking cue from the reports that the Philippines is importing malunggay powder from India, BPI was able to develop a very simple technology on how to produced powdered malunggay leaves. The end product can be used as ingredients for malunggay noodles, malunggay pulvoron, malunggay pandesal or muffins, malunggay coated peanut and more. The malunggay is a very healthy ingredients.
“Our quest for more wonderful malunggay breakthroughs has just begun and we will unceasingly work to discover more about malunggay”, Dr. Mamaril concluded.
source:Biolife September 2008 Issue
