Yaw or yaw root is an oily tuber cultivated widely in the Middleland. It is the staple food of the Middlelanders, who domesticated it tens of thousands of years prior to the events of Goda’s Slave. Unlike most tubers, yaw root contains a significant amount of fat in its mature form, in which many of the plant’s defensive chemicals are suspended.
The cultivation and consumption of yaw root affects almost every aspect of Middlelander life, from their reproductive cycle to their sleep cycle. It makes up 70 – 90% of the diet of a typical Middlelander. Since it is nutritionally complete to Middlelanders, some Middlelanders can and do subsist virtually on yaw root alone, with the exception of the occasional sour fruit (for Vitamin C).
Resistant to spoilage due to its antimicrobial properties and easy to cultivate year-round, the tuber has served as security against famine and is partly responsible for the persistence of the Middlelander culture. Yaw was originally a highly toxic plant with many defense mechanisms against animal consumption (the plant is inedible to most animals and also contains chemicals that disrupt the reproduction processes of populations that prey upon it), but the Middlelanders developed special adaptations as they domesticated it.
Because yaw root is generally unpalatable, poorly digested, and even poison to the people of neighboring cultures, adapting to this highly secure food source has offered the Middlelanders a major competitive advantage that eventually led to their fast industrialization.
Plant Description
Yaw is a tuber with brown skin and a white-violet flesh. The longer the root is exposed to light and air, the more the inner flesh takes on a violet tint. This allows Middlelanders to tell whether the plant is still edible. Uncooked yaw can become toxic quickly upon exposure to sunlight, and can also turn bitter if the skin is removed prior to cooking and the naked flesh is exposed to fresh air for too long. The stems, leaves, and fruit of the plant are always inedible.
Outside of its native environment (Samma Valley), the yaw plant relies entirely on Middlelanders to cultivate it, as its natural pollinator (a beetle that thrives in the volcanic landscape of the region) is not present. The plant can also spread itself underground asexually.
If an individual yaw plant’s roots grow to touch that of another, they will intertwine their roots and trade nutrients or send chemical signals about the environment to each other, especially if they are related. A patch of yaw plants that are joined in this way are called a colony by Middlelanders. Being a member of a colony will change an individual plant’s behavior, as it is better capable of responding to the environment, and even realizing that it is being cultivated artificially.
To grow its large and inedible seeds, the yaw plant will use up much of its resources (such as its high fat stores), which is undesirable to Middlelanders, since this funnels nutrients away from the edible root system. Most gardeners in the Middleland therefore do not reproduce the plant sexually, but rather grow clones from cuttings of the root and cut off any stems that show signs of flowering.
Large-Scale Cultivation
Industrial farmers will also clone the plant, but cloning presents an unexpected problem at large scales: The yaw plant itself prefers sexual reproduction, since this improves the robustness of its gene pool. Since yaw plants that are placed closely together will tend to intertwine their root systems, the colony will notice if too many genetically identical clones are planted close to each other, and it will react by growing more slowly and resisting cultivation.
As a compromise, Middlelander farmers will allow a small portion of a farm plot to sprout flowers and will pollinate them by hand, then collect the fruit. If this is done, the yaw colony will accept the compromise and grow normally until final harvest; it is the only way to mitigate this effect, besides spacing out each plant so that the individual plants cannot “talk” to each other about what the farmer is doing–but this latter approach requires inefficient spacing, so it is not used outside of small garden plots.
When it is flowering, the yaw plant will release a special perfume (which is undetectable to people of other cultures) to signal to Middlelanders that they should approach the plant and begin collecting pollen. Members of Middlelander families that were traditionally farmers are more sensitive to the smell and may even be bothered by it during the spring season.
Cultivating yaw requires a significant amount of water during early stages, which is plentiful in the Southern Middleland, where it rains frequently in winter. Because of the drier conditions in the Northern Middleland, however, yaw must be manually irrigated there, which greatly increases the labor involved in farming. This difference in farming practices is partly responsible for the large wealth disparity between the Southern and Northern parts of the Middleland.
Harvest Cycle and Religious Norms
Yaw is harvested four times per year: three “minor” harvests (where the plant is not uprooted, but small pieces of the root are cut) and one “major” harvest (where the entire root is removed from the ground).
The cycles of darkness and light vary wildly throughout the year, as the Middlelanders’ planet has a pronounced tilt. Because yaw root traditionally had to be tended in darkness (the already toxic root becomes inedible if exposed to sunlight before curing or cooking), yaw is cultivated on a yearly cycle that begins in late winter, where special root cuttings are planted during the night hours. During this time, darkness can extend to as long as 18 hours per day.
In its early growing period in the winter, yaw is vulnerable to pests and fungi, so it is carefully tended in the dark until it is strong enough. The plant is then allowed to grow through the spring and dry period with reduced intervention to avoid light exposure, after which the year’s planting is collected in a major harvest at the end of the year.
In between this time, the Middlelanders perform three “minor harvests” at the end of each season that involve cutting pieces of the root off during the night, which both induces the plant to grow fatter roots for the final harvest and also traditionally served as a source of sustenance throughout the year. These cuttings are called “yaw trimmings” by the Middlelanders and, being less nutritious and less tasty, they are considered poverty food and are mostly eaten by the lower classes and government prisoners, made into stews with other ingredients to disguise the bad taste.
Due to religious laws, priestesses can help perform the three minor harvests, but cannot perform the final fourth harvest of the year, as this involves entirely uprooting (and therefore killing) the plant. Because of this, priestesses are reliant on a temple gardener to grow their food properly, or else they would be forced to subsist on trimmings. Novice priestesses who are performing a penance for breaking minor precepts may also eat the boiled yaw trimmings for a certain period of time to show their remorse.
In a handful of sacred gardens where yaw is allowed to grow naturally without intervention, priestesses will collect ripe yaw seeds and dry them out, then hide them in special silos. This preserves different generations of seed with varying genetics in case of emergencies, such as if the current generation of yaw clones turns out to be too susceptible to a specific pest or disease. Along with the identity of the High Priestess, the existence and location of these granaries are among the most viciously guarded secrets of the Middleland government.
Connection With Middlelander Reproductive Cycle
Having evolved a symbiotic relationship over the eons, both the yaw plant and the Middlelanders rely on each other in order to reproduce.
Domesticated yaw outside of Samma Valley cannot bear new seeds without hand pollination by Middlelanders, and Middlelanders cannot bear children without the hormone mimics provided by the root of the plant. After millennia of adaptation and tolerance, Middlelanders cannot derive adequate sex hormone levels from their own body processes alone and they must eat yaw to stay healthy.
This relationship had profound ripple effects on society and on the biological evolution of the Middlelanders. Ultimately because of their adaptation to yaw’s reproductive side-effects, Middlelanders have a vastly different mating strategy than that of other cultures, have a higher incidence of multiple birth, an unusual dimorphism among the genders (the women are larger and more aggressive than the men), and an unusual conception of gender designation altogether.
Poison to Foreigners
Though Middlelanders are very adapted to yaw, the root tastes bitter to most foreigners and is not easily digestible by non-Middlelanders. Uncooked yaw can keep for years in the right conditions, in part because its flesh has antimicrobial properties that deter bacteria and yeasts from propagating, but this same antibiotic chemical is mildly toxic to non-Middlelanders. (It also prevents yaw from easily fermenting into alcohol.)
In addition, large amounts of yaw (especially not fully cooked) can cause severe digestion problems in foreigners because it will act as an antibiotic against their natural gut bacteria, and so a foreigner who is fed nothing but yaw can starve to death over months or years. Middlelanders have gut bacteria that is highly resistant to the antibiotics in yaw.
Another long-term issue is that yaw will interrupt the reproductive processes of non-Middlelanders due to the hormones in the plant. Yaw root is actually used in traditional Outerlander folk medicine as a birth control method, though its side-effects can be unpredictable and it is not generally well-tolerated by Outerlanders.
Effect on Middlelander Sleep Cycle
Middlelanders have a polyphasic sleep cycle because of the special needs of the yaw plant. The edible root is light-sensitive and must be harvested and stored in the dark (or in artificial light) because sun (UV) rays will cause a chemical reaction that greatly increases the plant’s toxicity.
As a result, the external parts of the plant are tended during the day, while the roots must be tended at night. Yaw also has a day/night fertility cycle, where the female parts of the plant are only open at night, and so labor-intensive hand pollination must occur during this time.
Until recent history and the advent of the Middlelander industrial revolution, most Middlelander families were farming households, and so they evolved a sleep-wake cycle to accommodate these features of the yaw plant. While Outerlanders and Upperlanders sleep in one long stretch at night, Middlelanders traditionally sleep for two-hour stretches—a pair of stretches (four total hours) at night with one waking hour in between, then another stretch (two more hours) of sleep at midday, for a total of about six hours per day. These stretches are called “blocks” or “sleeps.”
The start of the waking hour that happens between the two nightly “sleeps” is called “midnight” on Middlelander clocks, though it is actually three hours before sunrise and not literally the middle of the night. This hour is often used for socializing and sexual activity.
Middlelanders traditionally do not go to bed until roughly 5 hours before daybreak, and are thus awake throughout most of the night. Though most Middlelanders are no longer farmers, this artifact of their cultural roots remains both in their behavior and in their time-keeping.
Effect on Middlelander Relationship to Non-Human Animals
Meat does not make up a significant part of the Middlelander diet. This is not only because yaw is nutritionally complete to them (and so eating meat is unnecessary), but because there are no large non-human animals that naturally exist in their native territories.
Even outside their native lands, Middlelanders do not traditionally farm animals on a large scale, since great care must be taken to separate them from yaw. An animal who is intolerant to yaw (most animals) will have problems breeding upon regular ingestion. They will also tend to bio-accumulate the toxins, affecting the quality of the meat.
Thus, when Middlelanders do eat meat, it is usually bushmeat or imported farm meat bought from foreigners, and it is seen as a small luxury that one serves to guests. Some of those who live close to the border of the Outerland will also eat dairy products (where goat’s milk is readily available), though a large percentage of Middlelanders are lactose intolerant, especially to cow milk. More often, Middlelanders will trade for non-edible parts of the animal, especially hide in the form of leather, since it is water-resistant.
Most farm work is performed by human labor rather than beasts of burden for similar reasons. The keeping of pets, with the exception of water fowl, is also not a major part of the culture. A minority of Middlelanders even view the domestication of animals by foreigners to be barbaric and a form of slavery, ironically enough (as Middlelanders do enslave humans whom they deem undesirable).
In Goda’s Slave
Kanna Rava tastes yaw root for the first time in Chapter 6 of Goda’s Slave, when Jaya Hadd offers it to her for dinner—and she promptly spits it out. Jaya, a Middlelander, is ignorant of its bad taste and toxicity to foreigners, in part because her own foreign wife pretended to like her cooking.