When People Eat Carnivorous Plants

Mount Kinabalu is one of the richest biodiversity hotspots in the world. With the 4,095m-high altitude brings more cold than you might expect in the heart of the tropics. It is packed with life in varied forms, including some animals and plants that don’t live in the wild anywhere else such as several species of carnivorous pitcher plant. These plants use a variety of techniques ‒ such as nectar, smells and colours ‒ to lure insects, and their traps deploy sheer drops, smooth surfaces that cannot be scaled or blockades of bristles to prevent their prey from escaping.

Seemingly unfazed by the sticky humidity, market vendors in the city of Kota Kinabalu, from where most journeys up and down Mount Kinabalu start, sell a variety of local foods to hikers returning from the summit. Amid the sizzle and clatter of food stalls and the enticing aromas of buttered prawns and barbecued fish, pouches of sticky rice in dull, mottled wrappers aren’t the type of snack that catches attention.
But this modest bite is something quite extraordinary. Made from coconut-scented sticky rice wrapped in the traps of a carnivorous plant, the snack can be found in several countries in Southeast Asia. But in Malaysian Borneo, that consumption of nasi pelut (white rice) in periuk kera (pitcher plant), also known as lemang periuk kera, is thriving.
Dr Rachel Schwallier, lecturer at Grand Valley State University Department of Biology in Michigan, was in Borneo in 2012-2013 conducting research on the evolution and diversity of pitcher plants. On hearing about the use of pitcher plants in local cuisine, she expanded her work and returned to look at the culture and heritage of edible pitcher plants.
Lemang periuk kera is recognised as a Malaysian heritage food that differs from other methods of cooking sticky rice because of the way the pitcher plant is used. To make the snack, pitchers are cleaned and filled with rice, packed upright into a steamer, covered with coconut milk and then steamed for an hour. Cooked in this way, the naturally glutinous texture of local sticky rice is transformed into tidy coconut-flavoured packages.
Schwallier said, “I was lucky enough to cook the snack along with a tribal family in Borneo, too, and it seems that the rich flavour really comes from the coconut milk that the rice is steeped in, making it sweet and full of flavour,”.

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