Ingredients

Cassava

Also Known As Manioc · Yuca

Citation Formats

General Reference

Food and Drink Atlas. "Cassava." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/cassava.

APA Style

Food and Drink Atlas. (n.d.). Cassava. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/cassava

BibTeX

@misc{foodanddrinkatlas-cassava,
  author = {Food and Drink Atlas},
  title = {Cassava},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/cassava},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Cassava, Manihot esculenta, also called manioc or yuca, is a starchy root crop domesticated in Brazil, though estimates for exactly when and where within Brazil vary by study. It was a staple of Amerindian communities such as the Tupinamba, encountered growing cassava by Portuguese arrivals in Bahia around 1500 and processed by them into meal and bread. The same Portuguese traders carried cassava to their West African coastal stations by the mid sixteenth century, provisioning slave ships bound for the Americas with it as farinha, and from those West African footholds cassava spread across the continent to become, after maize, one of Sub-Saharan Africa's most important staple foods, valued for tolerating poor soil and drought where other staples fail.

Facts

Disputed

Earliest Documented Use, From (Year)

3500 BCE to 2500 BCE 1

The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture hedges cassava domestication at maybe five thousand years ago; separate, more recent genomic studies of Brazilian germplasm propose a substantially older date, over ten thousand years, that this atlas does not adopt outright because that work remains a preprint rather than a peer reviewed publication. A wide range is given rather than a single year.

Origin Region

Brazil (a reference encyclopedia places domestication along Brazil's southern border; separate genetic studies instead point to west-central Brazil or the wider Amazon basin, so the exact locale within Brazil is not settled) 1

The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture places domestication somewhere in Central or South America, perhaps along the southern border of Brazil, itself a hedge; more recent comparative genomic studies of Brazilian germplasm instead centre wild populations in west-central Brazil. This atlas gives the published reference-work claim as its citable figure rather than an unreviewed preprint.

Cross-Tradition Connections