Cocoa and Chamomile
Flavor, Culture, and Intuition
Notice how, on impact, flavor can seem to inhabit vivid frames of life. That is to say, do you ever feel your body thrown into its own history by an exploratory sip? I began wielding flavor as a tool of personal exploration at an early age; adding a dash of this or that to the mix simply because I had this or that on hand. Recipes by that time had become, to me, mere suggestion, guiding documents; save the handwritten variety passed down in cluttered binders full of old-age penmanship.
Of course, there are entire academic fields of study related to flavor, cooking, fashion, style… Colors, textures, fabrics, scents; everything interplays. Taste is shaped over time by culture, by language, by environment, by history, by pleasure, by pain. On the global stage we begin to see how interwoven these concepts are with history, with freedom, with subjugation and genocide, with nature. In short, taste is introduced by nature and honed by nurture. Like nature, because the human is, too, part of nature, taste is ever-evolving.
It began, for me, as low-stakes play. The inclination to fill my time expanding the realm of “things I like” by deviating only slightly (sometimes too boldly) from what I know to experience something familiar but new. A pinch of salt in my coffee, something sweet and something spicy to tame the bitter scratch of wilted spinach. I found myself intuitively adept, though I will admit to having been very wrong at times; do not use cinnamon in a pasta sauce, it does not do the same thing nutmeg does. I was twelve, sue me.
I never put a name to it, this exploration. It never needed a name, it simply was. It was the formation of a life’s work, the work of understanding how flavors interplay and the unexpected lessons we can find within the act of tasting life.
Recent sickness coupled with successive deep-freeze scenes in DC has kept me homebound. Escaping into memory is useful but not entirely helpful when the world demands attention. I am slowly and deliberately working my way through W.E.B. DuBois’s “Black Reconstruction” as it is Black History Month and I am interested in enriching my knowledge of Black History. The flavors in its pages help me see the modern world with greater clarity, I fill my breaks with music and poetry, both new to me and familiar.
I revisit artists that have shaped swathes of my existence, songs that retain echoes of dramatic ages. I am, for a moment, visiting former selves, inhabited and uninhibitedly so. Harmonies and dissonance, a rapid-spinning flipbook of identities beneath direct mid-winter light, personal superposition in apricity. There are ever-deeper layers to be unearthed, in every moment and in every flavor.
I unearth a box of Egyptian Chamomile from my cupboard of curing and curious teas; it was hidden behind the Earl Gray, loose leaf and bagged. The box indicates that 100% of the proceeds are donated to education resources for orphans in Kenya. I don’t remember steering my dollars in that direction but I am happy to have done so.
The flavor combination of cocoa and chamomile has tickled me of late; the delicate nostalgia of that powdered mix brought into by the earthy floral warmth of chamomile. A quick clarification: Cocoa, in this case, is distinct from Cacao, the actual bean sourced from South and Central America which I have previously noted to brew a nice cup that I call Cacaofee. “Cocoa”, in this case, is Swiss Miss. Powdered mix, a tablespoon or so, I like the dark chocolate variety. Add a couple marshmallows, don’t overthink “junk food”.
When I use Earl Gray as the base, as I do in the hours that call for caffeine, I call it a London Smog or a London Fa*g, frothy cream optional. I have not yet come up with a clever name for the even-better-tasting chamomile variety which, in some ways, delivers a Rohypnol-esque effect. I’ll brew a cup and sip it on my front porch. The front porch, specifically, because I’ve taped the doors shut between my bedroom and the back as they are impossibly drafty, and I get direct sunlight between the hours of eleven and five provided I shift my seated position slightly. I also get to spend more time with the increasingly-less-feral cat to whom I channel all paternal instincts.
A writing professor would perhaps encourage me to focus on specific feelings in order to properly convey the message I wish to deliver. The tapdance tingle of a floral tea, the silly tickle of its rising heat. The secrets passed between glazed ceramic and the heat-sensitive bits of a winter-time palm and my attempts to dull the revelations only slightly by donning the mint-green mittens I purchased in Reykjavik. It’s hard to successfully illustrate such a wide variety with the reverence due to any given moment in a life.
Do not forget the complexity of the moment: the continued violence in Minnesota and the occupied West Bank, how quickly it has been normalized and the sprint to make it “legal”. Increasing siege on Gaza. Still. Narges Mohammadi’s extended detention in Iran in the wake of mass killings. Sudan, Flint, Ukraine, Puerto Rico,
(Sources: Jaspar Diamond Nathaniel, Mostafa Nili via AP, Scientific American, Mari Copeny)
I’ve been luxuriating in flavor and in nature because I am mournful of its mistreatment. A life can be a positive experience, and I regret that the unimaginative few are so deeply miserable that they have decided to drag the rest of the world towards misery with them. I regret, too, any time I spent willfully ignorant; content to be a piece of the killing machine so long as it could help me earn my keep. I allow myself to be changed in directions that feel constructive.
The mythologized (white) version of the United States, the proud and powerful melting pot, is what it is because of open borders, because of the intermingling of flavors over time. It is not a coincidence nor a surprise that the most exciting moments in pop culture are largely driven by Black, queer, and Latino artists.
The Internet is hastening a broader cultural homogenization. White supremacists realized that and began flooding it with conspiracy theory pipelines in an effort to drive that cultural shift towards fascism and it is an ongoing effort. These pipelines include the “gender critical” movement, anti-vaxxers, debate as entertainment, wealth worship, and simple pockets of blatant bigotry that have not yet been, or can never be, properly moderated. Meme culture/stan culture resulted as, apparently and for the most part, harmless byproducts that were then incorporated into marketing, industry, and eventually government. Meanwhile, apathetic disillusionment and effective mental disenfranchisement of the masses balloons to unsustainable levels while the wealthy ensure a future of constant climate catastrophe: an endless supply of either (a) cheap, desperate labor, or (b) death.
Source: Imani Barbarin
A worry into which I’ve just knocked a toe for the first time is that I come across as “performatively quirky”. I did not have that worry during my moustache-obsessed phase nor when reading “The Alchemist” out in the open in an airport on my way to Australia, freshly eighteen, barely legal. It seems I’ve only ever known how to do things with sincerity. And it’s taken a lot of work steering that sincerity in directions that don’t hurt me or those around me, or to know the cases when the “hurt” is a necessary part of being human.
Is it not the purpose of evolution? To become? To outgrow? To taste every flavor and abandon the inclination to taste that which does not bring either pleasure or new complexity? To elevate the base level of human experience?
I have been the American who frames joy as resistance and defines “joy” as a bag of goodies that is available on Amazon. I have been the American with no spice tolerance, who cannot stomach flavors with which he is unacquainted, or who is reticent to believe they could be enjoyable. I have been the American prepared to quietly accept the way things were because the color of my skin positioned me well to do so. I can no longer be that American because I have tasted enough of life to have been rendered unwilling to accept what those smallminded men demand of me.
The internet, at its best, is its own cluttered cupboard. Brimming with spice and serenity, the discovery-field of flavor. It is like the world in that sense. So, too, it is like the world in that it grants massive influence to those with wealth and institutional power. We can still fix it.
Intuition is deeply powerful and it is the mission of Power to subdue it. Because intuitively we understand the truths of equality and of beauty and of play, and these truths interfere with the financial system Power has created. It is that intuition that drives communities; the peace walks; Sumud. We are driven to help each other overcome impossible odds, to taste new flavors, to become.
“The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side [...]”