Pie Plant
Read this wonderful essay about rhubarb which is one of my favorite things to experiment with in my cooking. The writer, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz, is Lumbee, a director at the University of Iowa, and she opens in her grandfather's backyard in Cedar Rapids, crouching in the cool April dew to pull rhubarb stalks from the dirt, her mother handing them to her one by one.
From there, the essay traces the rhubarb from ancient China, where it was called dahuang, big yellow, prized for its root, to Persia, to Russia's elite, who valued one pound of Chinese rhubarb at something like 100,000 dollars in today's money, because diarrhea was then one of the leading causes of death. The czar's government eventually ended up prohibiting all private purchase and sale. From there the plant travels west, acquired the name rhu-barb somewhere along the Volga, where Greek and Roman traders called it the "uncivilized" drug because it came from east Asia and they didn't think much of east Asia. And then, eventually, it lands in Iowa. In a 600-square-foot house in the Time Check neighborhood of Cedar Rapids, where a Lumbee man from Pembroke, North Carolina, grows it in the corner of his small fenced yard.
The piece ends in the present day, with the writer doing her grocery shopping online and searching "rhubarb." She settles on a bottle of Siberian rhubarb capsules marketed to manage symptoms of perimenopause. In her early forties, she says, she's been inexplicably exhausted. She wants something that doesn't require much diagnostics because it is something she can connect back to its time in the soil.
Reading this got me wondering about the connecting thread between past and present, childhood and middle-age. For this writer it was the rhubharb but we all have a tie that binds the different stages of our life and it makes us comfortable in unsettling and confusing times as these are.
From there, the essay traces the rhubarb from ancient China, where it was called dahuang, big yellow, prized for its root, to Persia, to Russia's elite, who valued one pound of Chinese rhubarb at something like 100,000 dollars in today's money, because diarrhea was then one of the leading causes of death. The czar's government eventually ended up prohibiting all private purchase and sale. From there the plant travels west, acquired the name rhu-barb somewhere along the Volga, where Greek and Roman traders called it the "uncivilized" drug because it came from east Asia and they didn't think much of east Asia. And then, eventually, it lands in Iowa. In a 600-square-foot house in the Time Check neighborhood of Cedar Rapids, where a Lumbee man from Pembroke, North Carolina, grows it in the corner of his small fenced yard.
The piece ends in the present day, with the writer doing her grocery shopping online and searching "rhubarb." She settles on a bottle of Siberian rhubarb capsules marketed to manage symptoms of perimenopause. In her early forties, she says, she's been inexplicably exhausted. She wants something that doesn't require much diagnostics because it is something she can connect back to its time in the soil.
Reading this got me wondering about the connecting thread between past and present, childhood and middle-age. For this writer it was the rhubharb but we all have a tie that binds the different stages of our life and it makes us comfortable in unsettling and confusing times as these are.
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Food