Eryngium foetidum: Culantro

Eryngium foetidum is culantro, a annual herb that grows in any tropical climate but originated from South America.

Culantro’s medical benefits are flatulence, flu, vomiting, palpitations and tiredness, and fever.
The chemical breakdown of culantro is “flavonoids, saponins, sterols, triterpenoids, taninos; essential oil consists mainly of: Dodec-2-trans-en-1-al (59%) and derivatives, 2,4,5-trimethyl benzaldehyde (37%) and derivatives, 2-methyl-crotonic, formyl-trimethyl-ciclohexadienol, Cymenol, ferurol.”

There have not been any major scientific studies done on culantro rather the medical use of this plant is based heavily on traditional methods of the Caribbean people and polls indicating effectiveness.

This value of traditional plant knowledge being implemented in modern day Haiti brings to mind the wide gap compared to the United States, where home remedies are on the backseat and drugs are the modern day medicine. In Antonio Benitez Rojo’s article, “The Repeating Island,” he states, “The Caribbean basis, although it includes the first American islands to be explored, conquered, and colonized by Europe, is still, especially in the discourse of the social sciences, one of the least known regions of the modern world” (19). The Caribbean is still seen as the exotic and foreign, thus even the medical remedies that are studied and proven by Haitian scientists that some plants work more effectively than drugs are not acknowledged or taken seriously just due to the source.