My go-to week-day breakfast is a bowl of fresh fruits and dried nuts, topped with either yoghurt or a grapefruit. It is quick and easy, and I get my daily intake of plants and fibre. As today was a slow morning, I read the list of ingredients on the packet of the mixed nuts. And from there, it was to ponder where they came from, and if there was any connection to Black ecologies.
I am interested in everyday objects around me and the stories they can sometimes tell about my world. In the case of the dried nuts, it was the Black ecologies - the study of how race, nature and Black history intersect. And within this, I look for any connections to the Caribbean. My original part of the world is so often reduced to 'the islands' of the tourism imagination - the place of sand, sea, sex and sun.
Yet, the Caribbean was the crucible, the rehearsal space of what was to come in the rest of the Americas, from 1492.
My breakfast package of mixed-nuts contains peanuts, cashews and almonds. All three grow in the Caribbean, but almonds are not native to the region. The almond got there in what I call the Ark of Apocalypse of 1492. The fallout from that encounter changed the world. Its legacies still ripple across the Caribbean, and here I am interested in how that shows up in the nuts that grow there.
Due to the Grand Exchange, when the world became one in 1492, many plants were shuffled around the world in the four ships of empire and trade, slavery and genocide. Thus, what I think of as typical Caribbean plants often came from the otherside of the globe. They have been grown in the region for so long that they are taken for granted and seen as natural and neutral.
1. Almond. These trees grow wild in Jamaica though they are not native to the island. Almonds are from China and arrived in Jamaica via Spanish and British colonialism.
2. Breadnut. This arrived in the Caribbean from the Pacific Islands in the 1790s, along with the breadfruit. Breadnut is popular in Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, where the large seeds are boiled or roasted and used as a snack. Breadnut is less popular in Jamaica.
3. Cashew. This grows in the Caribbean and it is native to South America. The name is derived from the Indigenous Tupi nation word for the nut. The top producers today are the Ivory Coast, India, Vietnam, Burundi and the Philippines.
4. Coconut. Coconut palms swaying in the breeze is a bit of a cliche, but it's still lovely. Coconuts are native to Southeast Asia, and arrived in the Caribbean via Africa and the Spanish slave ships.
5. Jackfruit nut. We tend to eat the flesh of the jackfruit in Jamaica, and not so much the nuts which make a tasty snack when roasted. Jackfruit is native to India and arrived in Jamaica in the 1780s.
6. Kola nut. We are familiar with this in the popular Coca-Cola drink. The nut is native to West Africa where it's an important offerings at sacred and family gatherings. I was offered and chewed part of the bitter-to-me seed in Nigeria. The kola nut is a stimulant and that is why it was used in the fizzy drinks in the USA. The kola nut is a nice example of how an African crop changed the taste buds of the world.
7. Macadamia. I first had this nut in Zambia and assumed it was native to the continent. The nut in fact is native to Australia. It was planted in Hawaii by USA settler-colonials in Hawaii in the 1900s. Then the nut was taken to South Africa. Today the top producers are South Africa, Australia and the USA.
8. Palm nut. This is native to West and Central Africa where the nut is pressed to make a common cooking oil. The top producers are Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand and Colombia. The palm came out of Africa in the colonial ships of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Today the demand for palm oil as a biofuel in the west, is driving the destruction of the rainforests for the monoculture of palm oil plantations.
9. Peanut. Native to South America, peanuts have grown in the Caribbean for millenia. In Jamaica it's a popular roadside snack, served roasted and wrapped in a paper cone. Peanuts are a staple of Thai and Nigerian cooking; I can't imagine those foods without peanuts! The top peanut producers are China, India, Nigeria, USA and Sudan.
10. Walnut. One variety is native to North America, though the Persian and European varieties are common in commercial production. Walnuts supplemented the meagre slave diets in the USA. In his book Walden, Or Life in the Woods, Henry Thoreau mentions the ex-slaves living in the woods. Among them was Cato Ingraham who planted walnut trees, so that the nuts would provide food and an income in his old age.
© Jacqueline L. Scott. You can support the blog here.
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