|
Today's newsletter is the third in a series of four by Jasmine Michel exploring the voyages and history of bananas in the Caribbean and West Indian trade route (catch up on part 1 and part 2). Michel is a farm-to-table chef and writer who dedicates her work to the marginalized. An alumni of The French Culinary Institute and the Eco Practicum School of Ecological Justice, Jasmine's newest project, Dreamboat Cafe, is a small food platform of pop-up dinners and underground food journalism rooted in the effects of societal stigma and standards on minority mental health and liberation.
OVER THE LAST FEW WEEKS...
we’ve been discussing the colonial trade of tropical fruits from the Caribbean and West Indies to North America. In looking further into the history of how our food pyramid was built we can connect most of our pantry staples to a land across the routes of fruit trade in the Americas.
Chocolate for instance has come up against the institution of production with the interference of humans to the point of complete separation of fruit and its by-product. We know chocolate to exist on a spectrum of quality. At any given moment we can experience a bean to bar, molded by hand, and made into a beverage for ceremony. Or we can experience chocolate at a lower value in higher quantities for a cheaper price. But, when do we experience the raw fruit and when did we realize that it’s by product made for better sales?
Amongst other major crops like sugarcane, rum, and coffee, cacao became a business in the Caribbean shortly after European colonization. Christopher Columbus is said to be the first settler to make contact with cacao beans, when he seized an Indigenous canoe that held them as cargo during his fourth trip to the Americas, in what we know as Honduras. In Europe the plant gained notoriety once they discovered its confectionary transformation to chocolate. A plant that was first recorded thousands of years ago in the Amazon with holy meaning to the Olmec people of southern Mexico grew into a trade and form of currency amongst European settlers, intersecting the domestication of native plants and human labor through enslaved Africans and indentured servants, and deeply equating the economic success of a people to their production and speed of servitude.
The West Indies breeds the core varieties of cacao’s diverse structure. There are three main varieties of the cacao: Forastero, Criollo, and Trinitario. All having their own distinguishable flavor profile.
Before being harvested or roasted as beans, cacao needs to grow hidden from the wind in high humidity; hence why some of the best cacao comes from the dense jungles of Ecuador, Guyana, Trinidad and Hawai’i. Other tropical environments that aid the growth of such an ancient plant can be seen having the same effect on other explorers of the ‘new world’.
From the building of import and export to the slow factorization of product, we can’t help but to live in the nudge that our appetite for consumerism be rooted in a similar cycle of exploitation.
Understanding the history of Cacao as an intersection within our food ways can deepen the impact of our work in reclamation. Processing the evolution of a native plant once used in indigenous ways, then colonized and capitalized on might give us insight on the sources to look toward for sustainable rules of preservation. It might even give us insight on how to preserve what our human purpose once looked like.
Before domestication and exploitation became necessary for survival, how wild did we allow ourselves to grow? In what ways have we become a by product?
For this reason, cacao is one of my favorite tropical fruits to harvest and watch grow. Every stage it is capable of moving through has asked me to get there first and the chocolate will follow.
Stay tuned for the last in this four-part series, out next Tuesday.
. . .
For more from Michel in the meantime, check out these past instagram posts: Decolonize the Food Industry, Sustaining vs. Highlighting, Stopping our racist patterns..., and Understanding Colonization in the Food Economy.
We are thrilled and grateful to be in collaboration with Jasmine through the Share Your Voice initiative, an ongoing effort inspired by the #sharethemicnow movement.
In food, justice, and food justice,
Tay + Dor
photo by Jasmine Michel
|
