This letter was originally penned for members of Broom and Brine’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Broom and Brine operates a small organic market garden in lutruwita/Tasmania and CSA is an experimental farming methodology, pioneered by Booker T. Whatley in Alabama during the 1970s. Whatley, a horticulturist, professor and civil rights activist, encouraged farmers to grow a diversity of crops for a clientele membership club. His approach strengthened the relationship between farmers and their communities and offered an alternative to conventional practices of large-scale industrial agriculture, which prioritises monocultures and distant supply chains.
Today, using ingredients from this week’s vegetable box, we are cooking kuku sabzi, a Persian dish made with herbs and eggs. Throughout the Mediterranean and West Asia, we find sisters of kuku sabzi such as the Arabic eggah, Italian frittata, Spanish tortilla and the Slovinian fitajan. These dishes have wide and extensive histories, having been prepared over centuries using a diverse array of herbs and greens, including wild greens, alliums, radishes and asparagus, in combination with eggs.
This week’s bunches of erba stella can be likened to a bridge between wild foraged greens and their cultivated relatives. Foraged for thousands of years across the Mediterranean, this coastal ribwort green grows in lutruwita on mudstone cliffs, albeit as an introduced species. The variety we’ve planted, with seeds imported from Italy, has been cultivated to grow more upright. Erba stella remains close to its wild cousin, although it has been bred to reduce its bitterness and spiky furry leaves.
Unlike a plant such as rocket, erba stella is no global salad crop. Rocket has been cultivated in Southern Asia, Central Europe and throughout the Mediterranean and West Asia for centuries. Once a regionally cultivated plant, it is now a worldwide staple. As recently as the 1990s, rocket became a leading global crop, thanks to Portuguese and Italian research centres developing and marketing desirable varieties.[1] When we think of plant breeding in the industrial food system, the image that immediately comes to mind might be people in white coats producing plants in sterile test tubes under fluorescent lighting. While some vegetables introduced to the market are bred in this way, others, like rocket, are commercialised from diverse populations of regional cultivars, which have been developed by generations of communities over thousands of years. The variations in these cultivars not only adapt to different growing conditions but also reflect the cultural practices and ecological knowledge of the communities that developed them. Some plants were cultivated for their resilience, others for flavour, medicinal properties or their social resonance.
Peoples have moved fluidly between modes of subsistence, sometimes cultivating crops and at other times returning to foraging practices, with their decisions informed by the demands and the evolving needs of their communities.[2] Agriculture hasn’t therefore been a straightforward intervention but an ongoing dialogue between people, plants and ecosystems. The data shows us that peoples have been tending and domesticating cultivated plants, later rejecting the practice entirely, and then returning to foraging traditions.[3] And the data also suggests that many groups of peoples across Amazonia, Mexico, China and the Fertile Crescent did this again and again, over tens of thousands of years, back and forth.[4] This practice — back and forth between cultivation and foraging — can be understood as an active practice and an approach people chose to adopt or, importantly, not, according to their principles of self-determination.
Today some wild-plant foraging traditions occur within cultivated environments too — similar to those of the past, outside the binary of cultivated and foraged. I’m thinking of the Terrazzani peoples of Italy, who collect agghijtone (wild amaranth) and cicuriedde (wild chicories) growing in the almond orchards of Gargano. I’m thinking of the Wakhi folks in Northern Pakistan, who collect lanturk (wild allium) and lag (fox lily) to accompany their bean crops. And I’m thinking of the Palestinian people who collect khubeizeh (mallow) and akkoub (gundelia) in olive groves. Perhaps we’ll see erba stella become the next big global super crop, perhaps not. In our market garden we grow cultivated erba stella as a domesticated crop, distinct from its wild counterparts. Thistles, dock and dandelions in our garden are labelled as weeds, and the practices of foraging and cultivation can feel miles apart. Yet, as we examine global traditions of foraging and wild-plant harvesting for food and medicine, the distance between both practices appears less pronounced — and we may go as far as to claim that they are intricately intertwined. Although in some ways appearing to be opposites, wild vs cultivated, we engage with both from the same impulse. We do it because we all need to eat, and we all need to love one another.
[1]Matthew Hall, Jenny Jobling & Gordon Rogers, ‘Some Perspectives on Rocket as a Vegetable Crop: A Review’, Vegetable Crops Research Bulletin, vol. 76, 2012, pp. 21–41, https://doi.org/10.2478/v10032-012-0002-5.v (accessed 24 July 2024).
[2] Andrea Pieroni, ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Evolutionary Ethnobotany, and Food Sovereignty: Ingredients for a Better Future?’, in G. G. Martino, M. Pardo de Santayana, A. Pieroni, & R. K. Puri (eds.), Ethnobotany in the New Europe: People, Health and Wild Plant Resources, Berghahn Books, Oxford and New York, 2010, n.p.
[3] David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2021, pp. 257–75.
[4]Anna Roosevelt, ‘The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 Years of Human Influence in a Tropical Rainforest’, Anthropocene, vol. 4, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2014.05.001 (accessed 24 September 2024) ; Anthony Ranere, D.R. Piperno, Irene Holst, Ruth Dickau & Jose Iriarte, ‘The Cultural and Chronological Context of Early Holocene Maize and Squash Domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, 2009, pp. 5014–18; Dorian Fuller, ‘Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World’, Annals of Botany, vol. 100, 2007, pp. 903–24.; B. D. Smith, ‘Low-level Food Production’, Journal of Archaeological Research, vol. 9, 2001, pp. 1–43, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009436110049 (accessed 24 July 2024); The Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shaped region in the West Asia, encompasses modern-day Iraq, Palestine, israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, northern Kuwait, southeastern Turkiye and Western Iran.