Leafy Love Letter
Dear Brassica oleracea var. viridis,
Something happens when you’re popular.
People make up stories about you. Your origin story gets confused and mixed up. Everyone knows who you are, but not really. You become the mythical version of yourself. Your identity and journey become shrouded in the stories people think they know and the things they want to hear.
Collards, I’m talking about you. You’re like a mild winter, but you’re not necessarily subtropical. On that note, you’re not African, but Eurasian. Thanks to a few historical twists and turns, you’re a bigger star in Africa and her diaspora than the steppes where you were born or the Mediterranean where you later landed.
You aren’t just one color or one variety like the Georgia collards found at all the stands and supermarkets. Bacon isn’t always your best friend. You are green and blue and yellow and purple, and you take an array of food stars with you to the feast.
You are a big part of my African-Atlantic extended family and my Southern family. In East Africa, you are gomen, in Ethiopia, sukuma wiki, in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and their neighbors. In West Africa, you greeted me in Sierra Leone and coastal Ghana (thanks to the Portuguese), where you sat along dozens of other varieties of cultivated and wild greens. In Brazil, you appear on the table at a feijoada feast complete with barbecue meat, the cassava grit meal farofa, rice and beans, hot sauce and other goodies. In the South and wherever Southerners have gone, you remain a marker of our identity: the leaf in Thelonius Monk’s lapel; a featured food at festivals, Sunday dinners and family reunions; and fried with onions smashed down with Lumbee corn cakes for an incredible sandwich.
You are a great example of how an ingredient can tell different stories and still have clear origins. If my people, the African Americans, were to have a coat of arms, you might just be on it. When we arrived across the water from Senegal and Angola to the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry, there were no cocoyam or cassava leaves, so you stepped in. You marched with us across the South in the domestic slave trade. Later, you would go with us to the North, Midwest and West to help define something we called soul food.
You are more than an ingredient. You are memory. You are truck patches near the cabins of the enslaved and the first thriving acres of freedpeople. Collards, you are the bringer of the spring, the closer of winter, a marker of seasons from those of the sun, to the seasons of our lives. You represent memories of washing leaves in sinks and big cast iron pots and hot steamy air that smells like survival, and health and joy and resistance. You give life, calcium, vitamins A and C, and protein. You recall the rites of leaves curled and cut, the passing of stories with recipes. Notes about our ancestors are written gently on your ribs and veins. You collards are our familiar, our sojourner, our past and our future.
Love,
Michael Twitty
About Crop Stories
“Crop Stories” is a program of The Utopian Seed Project, a crop-trialing, non-profit working to celebrate food and farming in the Southeast.
“Crop Stories” is a concept that takes a deep dive into specific crops. “We believe we can create deeper connections and understanding within our food system by focusing our outreach on crops, cultures and cuisines. We are excited to celebrate food, flavor and diversity with stories, art and community,” said Executive Director Chris Smith.
“We are planning to publish one crop specific edition each year, and with any luck create accompanying audio and video content on the same crop. We are already working on the next edition, which will be on Southern Peas. We aim to have at least one or two broader regional voices and an international voice or two,” Smith said.
This excerpt is from the story of collards.
Smith’s book, “The Whole Okra,” won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2020, and he is the co-host of The Okra Pod Cast.
This excerpt features a recipe from Ashleigh Shanti, the chef and owner of Good Hot Fish in Asheville, North Carolina, and a Utopian Seed Project board member. Shanti was named one of “16 Black Chefs Changing Food in America” by The New York Times.
Michael W. Twitty, who has written for SML, offers an essay here about collards.
Twitty is a noted writer and culinary historian who focuses on the foodways of the Afro-Atlantic and Jewish diasporas. He is author of “The Cooking Gene,” which won two James Beard Awards, “Rice,” and most, recently “Kosher Soul.”