Maca: from traditional food crop to energy and libido stimulant.

T he 2 students looked at each other and the enviro nment around them in something approaching disbelief. Only a few weeks before, they had been in the v e rdant Amazonian rain forest, surrounded by tre e s m o re than 100 feet tall, bathed in warmth and copious rainfall. Now they had arrived in an area described as one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, in search of the ro o t s and tubers cultivated there by local farmers. They had trav e l e d for days by train, bus, and, finally, in the back of an ancient tru c k whose driver dropped them off on a dusty road and pointed t ow a rd the peak of a mountain with the admonition, “Walk along t h at trail, and you will find the village of Ninacaca; it is there yo u will find the plants you are interested in.” The year was 1982, and Harva rd PhD student Calvin Sperling and his assistant, Steven King, slowly followed the tra i l , measuring their steps carefully: the elevation was nearly 130 0 0 feet above sea level. Their cheeks were packed with c o c a l e av e s and lime, as is the local custom, to ward off s o ro c h e , or altitude sickness. This part of the world is cold and very windy, and the mountainous environment is barren, cov e red with rocks and low g rowing plants, most less than a foot tall. In Pe ru, this habitat is k n own as the p u n a , c h a racterized by fre ezing temperat u res and winds strong enough to knock people off their horses. Sperling and King had come to Ninacaca not in search of gold, as had the Spanish Conquistadors a half-c e n t u ry before, but to learn about some of the little-known root crops grown by the people of this region. Characterized by a re p o rt of the Nat i o n a l Re s e a rch Council as “among the world’s worst farmland” b e c a u s e of its climate and terrain, Ninacaca was home to one crop plant t h at had been cultivated with gre at success since precontact times. Maca, as it is called by the Quechua-speaking people of the area, is a low g rowing perennial plant, forming a mat of leaves that are close to the ground—an adaptation to the climate in which it thrives. Maca is in the mustard family (Cr u c i f e ra e) and is know n botanically as Lepidium meyenii, first described by the botanist Wilhelm Gerhard Walpers (1816 -1853). In its cultivated habitat , 12 to 20 leaves arise from a maro o n -b rown root that looks somew h at like a radish. The roots can be up to 8 cm in diameter, and when cut open are white. After harvest, roots are dried in the fre ezing climate, turning gre y -black and shrinking in size to take on the shape of a small fig. This crop is only cultivated in the centra l Pe ruvian highlands, but its wild forms are found in Pe ru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Sperling and King finally reached Ninacaca and began their s e a rch for a farmer to teach them about local agriculture and ro o t c rops. King recalls that day in a conversation in December 2001 :