Polynesian Arrowroot

Tacca leontopetaloides is a flowering plant in the yam family, Dioscoreaceae, native to the islands of Southeast Asia. Austronesian peoples carried it as a canoe plant across the Indo-Pacific tropics in prehistoric times, and it is now naturalised in tropical Africa, South Asia, northern Australia and Oceania. Its common names include Polynesian arrowroot, Fiji arrowroot, East Indies arrowroot, pia and seashore bat lily. It was a minor staple, a secondary crop beside yams and taro, and an important food for people of low islands and atolls. The round, hard, potato-like tubers have a brown skin and white flesh. They are grated and soaked in fresh water, and the settled starch is rinsed repeatedly to remove the bitter, poisonous taccalin, then dried to a flour for puddings. In Hawaii the flour was the original base of haupia. The starch also stiffened fabrics. In traditional Hawaiian medicine the raw tubers were eaten for stomach ailments, and the plant mixed with water and red clay treated diarrhoea and dysentery and stopped bleeding.