Strangeness as opportunity, not threat
Pickling foraged creosote flower buds
I can’t remember the first creosote bush I saw because it was so long ago it fades in my memory. In our first meeting, I didn’t know it as anything. Perhaps I smelled it in the air first, as a perfume reminiscent of rain. But when I did learn what it was it was never a nameless bush again, it would always be a creosote.
On Sunday, I stared closely at the creosote in my parents’ yard. I had read recently that the flower buds are eaten pickled, like capers. I’ve long known that capers – the briny green spheres I could eat by the handful – are the pickled flower buds of the caper bush, and was excited to discover this link between my established tastes and the land where I live. My idea was late, though, there were some flowers but many more fuzzy seed pods. I searched all over the shrub and only came away with six flower buds.
In my kitchen, I found the smallest jar I own and put the buds inside. I added equal parts boiling water and vinegar, some salt and a few black peppercorns. Then into the fridge the jar went and I waited to see what they would taste like, if this strange food would become a friend.
I’m reading Mythologies by Roland Barthes, and in a chapter on criticism, he writes, “To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism (for as it happens, it is these two philosophies particularly that one confesses to be unable to understand) is to elevate one's blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: I don't understand, therefore you are idiots.”
Barthes is writing about purposely obtuse critics, and I’m writing about plants. But the critic he writes about could be a person, standing in front of a creosote bush ignoring its value: “I don’t understand, therefore this plant is inedible.”
I recently re-read Alicia Kennedy’s essay in Lux Magazine about Jumana Manna’s 2022 film Foragers, which documents how “Israel has criminalized traditional Palestinian foraging practices, and turned once freely available plants into commodified crops.” I can pick creosote flower buds on a whim, but it isn’t as easy or without risk for everyone. Alicia writes, “While the Western world has been reconsidering and re-contextualizing foraging as an act of bourgeois ecological stewardship, there’s a reason it had to be resurrected: Foraging has often been criminalized in ways that cut off marginalized groups from their own ancestral knowledge.”
Done at a larger volume or more frequently, foraging could sustain life. I could never purchase a caper again. This was the way indigenous communities ate, at least partially, for much longer than the land I live on has been part of the U.S. It is no accident that foraging was smothered in favor of a commodified way of eating.
When I was researching foraging in Arizona, I came across blogs written by primarily enthusiastic white women. In all of the posts I read, the author went to great lengths to explain that while it may not seem like there is much to forage in the desert, there are, in fact, many edible and medicinal plants that have been used throughout history. I’ve heard and read so many different versions of this gratuitous language: “Spoiler alert – the desert isn’t a wasteland!” I remember, when I moved to Arizona from Pennsylvania as a 11-year-old, feeling affronted by the lack of trees or verdant meadows. The Sonoran landscape was unknown to me and felt threatening, as anything unknown is threatening to an immature person. But I began to learn the names of the plants and the animals. The unknown landscape became the one where I feel most at home. It’s not shameful to not know something, but it becomes a shame if there’s no effort put toward learning.
This line of thinking made me recall a part in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. She wrote that before she started paying attention to birds, birdsong was an overbearing cacophony. But as she got to know what birds made what calls, she could hear individual songs, rather than a generic wall of unidentified bird noise. If I remember correctly, it was a surprising effect of birdwatching to her – that she suddenly felt that she had birds that she knew flying about and she recognized and rejoiced in their songs.
There’s a world of difference between saying foraging “fell out of fashion” and saying it was almost eradicated to serve capitalistic ends. Perhaps one of the reasons foraging isn’t something regularly practiced is that Arizona agriculture is a $23.3 billion industry. Why would that industry want anyone getting any food for free? At the same time people are making so much money from food, the USDA reports that 12.8% of households (17 million households) struggled to get enough food in 2022, up from 10.2%, (13.5 million households), in 2021. How did we become so disconnected from the land that we don’t know the wild food around us? Who and what does this lack of knowledge serve?
I ate one of my six pickled creosote flower buds yesterday and it tasted different. It was not a standard “caper,” but a new-to-me variation, a flavor I haven’t experienced. So many Indigenous peoples across the Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts have eaten this before me, that’s why even though it’s new to me–it isn’t new. In my desire to move from vagueness into naming the politics that swirl around this particular food, eating creosote flower buds only feels novel because wild and native foods were considered suspect or dangerous to the U.S. project of a certain (white) type of identity. White supremacy was and is carried out through what foods are considered “American,” without notice to the irony that the Americas are much bigger than the U.S.
There is violence in coming from a place of committed lack of understanding. Assuming the unintelligibility of a person, plant, or idea divides us. What if the gap between understanding isn’t as large as I assume? It’s not always within my control to understand something, but I can try. Transforming a strange green plant into the creosote bush that I know and love, and parts of which are edible, wasn’t so hard. It just took some effort and my desire to understand. I don’t believe it’s necessary to begin all stories about this process with the original mistaken assumption that the desert is a wasteland or that creosote flower buds are such a strange thing to eat. I proved it untrue to myself, why perpetuate the lie?
I enjoyed the singular pickled flower bud more, as well, because there were only five left–not a packed jarful. Each one matters in a way that can’t be grasped with a store bought jar of commodity capers. This experience, beyond the taste, also challenges the way I eat, think, and write. My first drafts often include me ranting about what I think is dangerous or morally bankrupt. I have to remind myself to expand my narrative and imagination – to not go straight to the language of violence even as I am calling it out. I'm indebted to people who have encountered me as a stranger and decided to get to know me rather than rejecting me. Looking at a strange plant or person and seeing opportunity, rather than threat, is a gift to the project of liberation.
Reading - Just what I mentioned above.
Writing Talking - My friend Michelle interviewed me for
Cooking - I made a red lentil and tomato stew, flavored with preserved lemon and fennel. We ate it sprinkled with parmesan and with toasted sourdough from Noble Bread that I bought at Monsoon Market. It’s an example of a pantry meal that hit all the marks for me: Filling, cozy, and flexible (leftovers could be turned into a soup or fried up with eggs.)
These lines got me:
“The Sonoran landscape was unknown to me and felt threatening, as anything unknown is threatening to an immature person.”
“It’s not shameful to not know something, but it becomes a shame if there’s no effort put toward learning.”
Beautifully written.
I loved reading this! It reminded me of a conversation about foraging that I heard on the Poor Proles Almanac podcast, where they discussed the strategic designation of large swaths of land into US national parks to discourage foraging, to put up a sense of a barrier between human and nature, and to ultimately push people into a system of industrialized, and most importantly, privatized, food