the spicy stuff

yet another thing that I know nothing about but why this is ok

Have you ever wondered about spices? Like really wondered about what they are and where they come from?

Take cinnamon, which my kids love in fluffy buns and on top of their sliced banana on toast (which can only be white toast, not wholegrain, multigrain or dark rye, which annoys me intensely as I want my kids to like dark rye as much as I do!).

The other morning one of my cinnamon loving kids confused the spice with another, cumin (which does look and feel very similar however has a completely different taste and, as her screams confirmed. does not, in any way, match with banana. Her breakfast as ruined - as was the whole morning for the rest of us as she moaned and groaned about the fact that there were no more bananas so she could not have a do-over.

Once cumin gate had been contained and everyone (including the dog who, despite her best efforts, was not getting that cumin covered banana) had calmed down, it seemed only natural that our attention shifted to wanting to know exactly what is cinnamon anyway (and cumin and all the other spices in the spice drawer).

I had a hunch that it comes from the bark of a particular kind of tree however we all agreed that that sounded very weird.

Do we really eat bark?

Yes. We really do. Cinnamon, for those of you who don’t already know, is the dried inner bark of the cinnamon verum tree, a bushy evergreen tree native to Sri Lanka, India and Myanmar.

Amazing right?

I could go on here to talk about loads of other spices like thyme, which I have recently become obsessed with. I find thyme surprising because of how it can be (and is) used across a huge variety of cuisines that span geographies. I’ve been adding it to meals that I would never have thought to; while I have been very, very sceptical about the call for thyme in some recipes, I have, repeatedly, found myself to be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

There is a fantastic book by Amitav Ghosh that is, ostensibly about nutmeg, but it, really is a story about geopolitics and climate change.

In ‘The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis’, Ghosh tells us about the conquest of the Banda Islands, now part of the Maluku Islands governed by Indonesia, by the Dutch East India Company. Ghosh uses the horrors of what happened in Banda (and the control of the nutmeg)as an analogy to discuss climate change today.

While it’s a fairly recent book (published in 2021) it is, already, one of my all time favourite books both because of how it is written and the relevance of the subject matter - control over resources by any means possible.

The book opens your eyes up to the complex web we exist in. And, because of that, the book also serves as a warning of sorts - we must all be endlessly curious about where our stuff comes from and the impact that producing it has had and continues to have.

My question then is how to make sure that we are endlessly curious and not complacent?

I think one way to be curious is to be exposed to radically different ways of being - be it through books, social situations, social media and travelling. Some of these things seem hard because of algorithms and cost and decreasing attention spans that seek out comfort and familiarity as opposed to challenging one’s reality.

But then there are some things that are relatively easy and which can have some surprising unintended consequences. Like changing where you get your food from.

I think the recent interest shown by my kids in the origins of cinnamon - and all our food - is because we’ve been ordering our fruit and veg from a local farmers cooperative (a collective of farms from across the Canberra region) for the past six months. Every Thursday, a box of goodies arrives at our doorsteps and it is full of produce, a lot of which we would not normally buy.

Because it is new - to us - we’re on a constant journey of discovery. One which involves identifying what the produce is and how the produce can be cooked. We’re also getting to understand what grows in what season.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I love it. Well, I can. I love it a lot.

Yes, it takes a bit more thought and a little bit of research to work out what can be made but, along with sparking a whole lot of new conversations in our house, we’ve discovered some new produce that have now become favourites. Hot tip: if you ever come across Warrigal Greens, buy them. Paired with macadamias they make the most incredible pesto.

I wonder how the same approach could be taken with what we wear?

Last week, my eldest bought a jacket from a popular, and very cheap, store. We didn’t have the same conversation about it as we had done with Warrigal Greens: we did not investigate where the fibre used to make the jacket had been grown, what it could be made into, how we would like to use it and what we could do with it once it had served its purpose.

This different conversation, or, really, this lack of conversation, results in a very different outcome: one of disconnection.

And this disconnection is dangerous.

I’m still working on a book about where our clothes come from (which now has a different first chapter, a confusing middle section and an outline of a conclusion)

As of last week, the book now has a chapter on the Solomon Islands, where I investigate the Melanesian and Polynesian tradition of making lava lavas, a dyed fabric cloth used as a form of dress. Incredibly, the fabric was traditionally made by beating the bark of a mulberry tree.

I’m glad I know this. I wish I had known this earlier. Like when I lived in the Sols and my middle child needed her lava lava (referred to as ‘Lovely’) in order to sleep.

The history and the context of the lava lava (and of cinnamon) provides a deeper sense of meaning and the deeper sense of meaning provides connection and the connection helps us to, I think, be a little more content about what we have. Happy even.

And that leads to me to this week’s song, ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams.

the soundtrack for this newsletter

One day, I would love to interview Pharrell.

I am perplexed by him for a whole range of reasons, which include his crocodile leather bag design for Louis Vuitton, his “eco-friendly” house (that I think he has since sold) and his music.

I was living in Korea when Happy was released. It was played at every school event that year (and the next few years also) and was only rivalled in the noraebang (karaoke) bars by Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’ and Bruno Mars ‘Just the Way You Are’). Yet, unlike ‘Let it Go’,, which I really did want to let go of, I never bored - and have never bored - of clapping to Happy.

Pharrell, obviously, has been interviewed a stack of times about his mega hit. I’ve read/listened to many of these interviews and I’ve taken away two messages:

1. If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Happy was his 10th attempt!

2. Pharrell seems to genuinely believe that happiness - and the power of happiness that can be derived from music - can change the world because it succeeds in bringing people together.

I’m going to skip over the first point, not because it is not important but because the second point - happiness from music - is more relevant for this story.

This quote sums up how Pharrell thinks about the effect of music:

It’s easy to forget how the power of music can prove how similar we are as human beings by taking us all to a common place, a shared feeling, an emotion or an understanding of something that is often inexplicable. It can make us all smile — and few things on this earth are as beautiful.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/pharrell-williams-on-the-happy-phenomenon.html

I really love this and I think it is why I seem to always want to include music at the end of these newsletters - the feelings that a song gives someone is probably way more powerful than the words.

So what if we could take this philosophy outside of music? What if we could bring that sense of emotion - that happy vibe - to the spices we eat and the clothes we wear? I think that could only be a good thing because, in my opinion, happiness breeds both contentedness (so we slow down with crazy consumption) and curiosity - the two personality traits which our world desperately needs more of.

So yes, it might sound crazy what I’m about to say, but it’s my responsibility to repeat it. Go ahead, feel like a room without a roof. No boundaries, no limits, no restrictions. Dance like no one’s watching, smile like love and believe that happiness can change the world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/pharrell-williams-on-the-happy-phenomenon.html

Curiosity. Contendness. Happy.

jb