Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Desperate to get rid of the smell of paint from a newly decorated room? Place a sliced onion on a table.

In India, the onion was supposed to ward off plague if you hung a strand of them near the entrance to your house. Colonizers thought this to be one of India’s silly customs of superstition, but a terrible outbreak of plague arrived and the natives who hung the onions outside their homes escaped the pandemic, while others died off like flies, crispy and shriveled.

The King of the Onions was a man who held the entire onion world hostage and made a fortune from his shady onion stockpiling of nine million onions, in warehouses in Chicago, and after flooding the market with ultracheap onions, caused many onion farmers to go bankrupt. Because of this, Eisenhower signed the Onion Futures Act in 1958, which makes it illegal to trade onion futures in America—the only agricultural product that is specifically outlawed.

What in the literal hell?

If you cry while cutting onions like I do, place them in the freezer for about fifteen to twenty minutes.

Onion’s skin very thin—mild winter’s coming in.

Quantities of onions appearing in your dreams means prepare for all the spite and envy from people by being successful.

Satan stepped out of the Garden of Eden after the Fall of Man, onions sprang up from the spot where he placed his right foot, and garlic from where his left foot touched. If an onion’s skin is Thick and tough—coming winter cold and rough.

Wise Egyptians worshipped the onion, believing that its spherical shape and concentric rings symbolized eternal life.

In 2023, a lychee tree over a thousand years old popped to life again after locals thought it was all but dead. In China’s Sichuan province, that tree was determined to have been planted in the Tang dynasty (618–901).

One of the most beloved concubines of Emperor Zhong had a penchant for the fruit. She adored it so, the emperor had couriers ride over twelve hundred miles to fetch some for her in the capital. No surprise, then, that the lychee, or “Chinese strawberry,” is a symbol of love and romance. Each fruit is about the size of a golf ball, but it can be oval or even heart-shaped too.

To open up a lychee, you can use your hands—the red exocarp will give way with a little pressure from your thumbnail. Once you’ve broken the skin, you can peel it away and pop the whole white syrupy aril into your mouth and chew lightly—be mindful of the almond-size dark seed at the center.

I still can’t fully explain how we all immediately felt like long-lost cousins who finally reunited in both the quiet and loud spaces among skyscrapers and subway lines. A few lychee martinis here and there. And loads and loads of laughter after various poetry readings in the city together. A different kind of treasure.

Mint is also known as the herb of hospitality, perfect for friends who say they can’t keep any plant alive.

Me.

Once you invite mint into your garden, it simply will not leave.

I know from expirence.

In literature, mint is found in Shakespeare, Chaucer, and even the Bible.

Minthe was a nymph who had an affair with Hades, and when Persephone discovered this, she trampled her to the ground, turning her into a plant. But the more she stomped, the more fragrant was the air.

Bees love the smell, but houseflies, mice, aphids, and mosquitoes all scurry and fly away from it.

I remember how people stared at us when we walked into a sea of white faces at church, and how they stared even more at her trays of delicious lumpia or pancit noodles among all the unseasoned casseroles for potlucks after the service.

What is with white people and not seasoning food?

Jackfruit cold, Jackfruit cold and crunch, jackfruit sliced with a knife rubbed down with olive oil so it doesn’t stick on the sweet flesh, jackfruit large and sun-split. My favorite fruit is the only thing that balms me now.

The word jackfruit comes from Portuguese jaca, which in turn is derived from the Malayalam word for this fruit, jakka.

We get cinnamon from the Greek word kinnámōmon, meaning “sweet wood.” This spice is one that has been documented as filling cavities of mummies in Egypt since 3000 BC, and was even mentioned in the Old Testament.

Wow.

Aristotle, in his Historia Animalium, claimed the spice came from the fragrant twigs of the nests of giant birds, which were cruelly toppled and shaken down to collect the fragrant sticks.

But it’s not the berry from this tree that is harvested—the bark is the spice.

There’s an old ritual of blowing a pinch of cinnamon from your hand while you stand in a doorway, ideally under a new moon or on the first of the month. You stand in the doorway and blow a small poof of it to conjure up abundance and prosperity for your house.

One bite of an apple banana and suddenly the signature double taste of them becomes a party in your mouth featuring a banana host and a sort of pineapple-strawberry DJ spinning tunes. Apple bananas seem to also taste like flowers—plumeria, maybe—so it’s no surprise they are related to ginger plants and the bird-of-paradise flower.

The mangosteen looks like a purple persimmon. But the exocarp is rock hard—more like the shell of a nut—and inedible. This protects the sweet prize inside, the soft and fragrant juicy endocarp, which is segmented like a tiny white tangerine. But don’t rush as you nibble on this ambrosial fruit: inside some of the pale syrupy segments is a dark pip about the size of a pumpkin seed.

European colonizers stumbled upon the mangosteen in Southeast Asia, and because the fruit spoiled so quickly, a rumor spread and became folklore that Queen Victoria herself would knight anyone who could bring her the fresh fruit.

So many cultures on this planet believe humans first sprouted from a stalk of sugarcane.

Which ones!?!

Persians and Greeks encountered the famous reeds that produce “honey without bees” in India.

Only after the Crusades, when soldiers returned with what they perceived to be “sweet salt,” did sugar begin to rival honey as the main sweetener in Europe.

Sugarcane is the world’s most abundant crop. The most sugarcane ever cut by hand in eight hours is over 100,000 pounds, achieved in 1961 at a sugar farm in Australia.

An average sugarcane stalk weighs about 3 pounds but only has about .3 pounds of sugar.

with the exception of California, most sugarcane cannot grow very well north of Louisiana.

The thick stalks of sugarcane contain a sweet juice, and that’s what gets boiled down to make sugar. Any remaining liquid from the shredded stalks is also boiled down until it reduces to a thick liquid that becomes molasses.

Stalks can reach about thirty feet high and are broken up in segments called joints. At each joint, there is a node, where the long and thin leaves grow, fuzzy on the underside and smooth on the top.

Buttress roots support the plant and bring large quantities of water from a wide area.

That is how my dad ended up scrounging around all of the drawers in my kitchen, lamenting that we didn’t have a big bolo knife, like they had in India and the Philippines.

The ratooning process can be economical, usually repeated three times, so that crops can be cultivated from one original planting.

I wanted to get to the bottom of a fruity mystery from years ago, when a boy had told me the “crunch” of a fig meant I was eating a dead wasp.

I’d believed this boy, and for thirty-plus years, the memory of what he said stayed with me, and I avoided the fruit.

After dinner in Greece, it was not uncommon to have fresh yogurt with a dollop of candied figs on top—spoon-sweets, the locals called them.

Figs are actually inside-out flowers—more like hundreds of flowers trapped inside a casing. The female fig wasp, still dusted with pollen from her own birth fig, enters an unripe fig through what is known as the ostiole, or the round base, stripping off her wings in the process. The wasp is so small, just two millimeters long—about the size of the tip of a crayon—and only lives for two days, during which she must safely penetrate the fig and lay her eggs among the tiny flowers, while also pollinating the flowers. She dies shortly after. Male fig wasps emerge first from their galls—their egg casings—and, in a bit of seizure that I wish was still mysterious in my mind, tear a hole in the galls of the still-unhatched female larvae, fertilizing them even as they lay silent and growing.

I wish I didn't know that.

For more than nine thousand years, figs have been a keystone species, a critical component of the food web. Twelve hundred different kinds of animals depend on them, including a tenth of the world’s birds, and, yes, the wasps who take their name from them.

you might be glad to know that the fruit’s enzymes dissolve any remnants of wasps inside the fig.

Thank God.

The wings, almost invisible, are left to scatter at the foot of the tree or nestle inside among the fig flowers.

In Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s brilliant book Cooling the Tropics, she chronicles how early on, in the mid-nineteenth century, freedom (especially for women and Indigenous peoples) was linked to the parlors that served ice cream and shave ice.

It would be shave ice’s lack of cream that would help it past these restrictions, as cream was the element that food “purists” who regulated native-owned and operated businesses could control.

My sons never wear watches, and neither have cell phones, but I love that they keep—as my youngest calls it—fruit time. May means strawberries, June is peaches, August equals watermelons, and September is persimmons. Now they have blackberries figured late into their summer and into their school year (here in the South, school starts early August).

During the Civil War, blackberry tea helped alleviate dysentery, and sometimes temporary truces were called so Union and Confederate soldiers could pick blackberries together.

But no one tells you that really for each week you are pregnant, most measuring charts list an equivalent in the produce department and not in sporting goods: seven weeks, a blueberry; eleven weeks, a fig; nineteen weeks, a tomato; thirty weeks, a cabbage.