Our love of food is an ecosystem
Exploring the forests and tidepools of our senses and on our plates
Inspired by my conversation with Sophie Strand and her writing on love and ecology, I wrote this essay after it came to me in a dream during my recent culinary residency at the Hambidge Center. It's a bit different in style than my usual writing voice, but it's also one I found very pleasurable to write and one that I hope you'll enjoy reading.
Our love of food is ecological, and I do not mean simply that what we eat comes from the earth, or that we have a responsibility to the earth in how we choose our food, though both are true.
Rather, the love itself is an ecosystem, simultaneously traversing the vast forests of experience while cradling a specific memory: like a tidepool that simultaneously shelters and shifts.
Our love of food might highlight a specific memory, a person, a lost taste: bringing its preciousness to the center as the earth does with tidepools: each being or memory therein a precious, unique and irreplaceable gem worthy of our wonder and our love. The beings that live in tidepools are drawn there because it offers them safe harbor but also put them in conversation with symbiotic beings.
We might say the same about our love of food, because in choosing what we cook and what culinary rabbit holes we explore, we are choosing different trajectories of culinary evolution in conversation. In other words, we are creating an ecological niche, of sorts, of our own design, borne out of years of collective wisdom and experimentation alongside our own.
Our love of food is an ecosystem: It crosses mountains and deserts to tie the flavors of once-foreign tongues together. It throws deep roots in the places it knows, creating culinary memories that become our most precious heirlooms alongside our stories, and which are passed down, trickling into future ecosystems we perhaps never could or would imagine.
Our love of food is an ecosystem: Like the wind in the trees, its whispers are felt in stories, in songs, in our very beings, though the force of love itself is not directly visible.
Our love of food is an ecosystem: ever evolving, shaping our physical bodies; a tangible reminder of the give and take, as well as the profound nourishment we receive, when we envision love as expansive, curious, and developing.
Our culinary ecologies are interwoven with myriad histories, just as our landscapes are: of those no longer present, those currently in bloom, and even those who have not yet arrived. Our culinary ecologies include stories of tipping power balances and asking questions, and tangled briars comprised of different techniques, motivations, and desires.
It is an ecology of loss: of the stories we perhaps no longer have access to, or memories that are fuzzy around the edges. Or of ways of cooking or even ingredients that our modern world has obliterated, or just decided are obsolete.
But our love of food is an ecology of hope, too: of connections made or renewed, of techniques and family recipes brought back to life, of forging bonds between the old and the new.
Like a physical ecosystem, our love of food is sensual: it asks us to connect with it using all the different ways in which we connect to the world. Not only taste, but every sense, often all at once.
Our love of food is an ecosystem: It build ecosystems inside of us, on us, around us, ecosystems that shape us as profoundly as we shape them. It is interconnected, messy, beautiful, powerful, disempowered, a remembrance, a forgetting, a gift, ever-changing yet ever-constant, but most of all it is an ecosystem of love.
To read
I love Adrian Miller's book, Black Smoke, and he's also just an all-around great person too. Here is an interview where he talks a bit about his background and his work.
This video on Ukrainian traditional fermentation, with Olia Hercules, is a great way to learn about Ukrainian culinary traditions. The entire video series covers a range of topics and geographic locations and is a great way to spend an afternoon (Olia Hercules has also done a ton for raising awareness and funds for Ukraine--you can learn more on her Instagram).
I wrote this piece for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on springtime recipes that help you reduce food waste. I hope you give one, or all, of them a try!
My literary agent, The Ekus Group, has recently launched a course on How to Write a Cookbook. They have been instrumental in helping me develop my craft as a writer, and in helping me navigate book proposals and the publishing world writ large!
The Grief Deck, shared with my by my friend Sarah, is a fascinating art collection on grief and loss.
This piece discusses the history of women in sake brewing in the Middle Ages, shared with me by Ken Fornataro, whose website is a treasure trove of fermentation information.
This piece explores food and the Underground Railroad.
If you haven't yet seen the Legacy Quilt as part of the African American food exhibit at MOFAD, here is a bit of information about it.
And finally, a family heirloom pickle that's been around for over 100 years.
Root news
My next book, Our Fermented Lives, is available for preorder.
I've received my advance copies and it looks even better than I imagined!
I'm currently planning my book launch party in July, plus tour stops, and am very open to your suggestions.
If you have an idea for someplace you'd like to see a book event, let me know!
Speaking of book events:
I'll be speaking at the Greensboro Bound literary festival this year, which takes place May 19-22. If you're in the area, please join us (it's free!)
This year, I’m inviting readers to join me in brief vision journaling exercises each month to help us intentionally craft a meaningful and hopefully joyful 2022. You can learn more and see the year’s prompts here.
This month’s journaling prompt is:
What does my life look like when I choose to radically accept love and healing? What happens when I decide to let go of past hurts and appreciate all the goodness that’s here, now?
To make: Daffodil Pie
In early March, I suddenly felt compelled to write a poem about daffodils as I watched the news and searched for some semblance of grounding or hope. This led to an exploration of daffodils in the Carpathian mountains and finally to a conversation with my dad about daffodils.
He recalled daffodil pie, which my great grandmother Inez used to make and which is essentially a lemon meringue pie, but which sometimes includes orange as well.
So, in honor of daffodils, and springtime, and family, and also just in honor of pie, here are a few recipes from old cookbooks if you'd like to try it yourself.
First up is the 1923 Sarah Daft cookbook (Utah), which I found especially interesting because unlike most church and community cookbooks, this one was filled with recipes from residents in the Sarah Daft Home for the Aged. This particular recipe uses only lemon, rather than lemon and orange:
Flash forward about 40 years to the American Daffodil Society's Daffodil Journal, which helpfully supplies a daffodil pie that includes mandarin orange pieces along with several other daffodil-inspired recipes:
And finally, this recipe from The American Agriculturalist in 1973:
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