Every bite is a story

You might not think much about the sticky bottle of vanilla sitting in the back of your pantry. But that flavor – one of the most common in the world – has a fascinating history, involving a fickle orchid and a 12-year-old enslaved boy who made the discovery of a lifetime.

That’s the sort of tale that attracts poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. From peacock feathers to the sounds of garden insects, her work is known for magnifying the wonders of the natural world. Her latest book of essays, “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” explores the unexpected connections between food, memory, and community.

So take a seat and pour yourself an aperitif, as Aimee Nezhukumatathil shares a few of these miniature morsels with Outside/In host Nate Hegyi: a three-course meal of grape jelly, sweet nostalgia, and just a hint of vanilla bean.

Featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Photos, from left to right, by Forest and Kim Starr, Paul Oberle, and ckubber (CC BY 2.0)

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Nate Hegyi

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, Felix Poon and Catherine Hurley

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. It is the middle of summer. Where I am in Montana this the best time of year. Hot, clear skies, rivers flowing. But down in the South… in Mississippi… summer is a whole ‘nother story.

It is sweltering.

Oppressive.

Which is why poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil is so excited for the state’s annual watermelon carnival.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: That comes in in August when, you know the entire South is at its hottest, you know, most humid part. And then when you get that first chilled slice of watermelon, there's just that is summer

Nate Hegyi: For Aimee, food isn’t just calories. In every bite is a story. Take that watermelon slice.

It helped get the small town of Water Valley, Mississippi out of the Great depression. It started the watermelon carnival way back in 1931… after the local bank had failed and the railroad had skipped town.

Nowadays, upwards of 20,000 people go to the carnival every year.

Because what brings more people together - and in different ways - than food?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: In a world that wants us to be fast and get food instantly. I think people are. Are longing for that, that moment in time when like, oh, look what we could do with our kitchen garden. Look what we could do with the bounty shared to us from neighbors.

MUX

Nate Hegyi: Today on the show, a conversation with poet and author Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Her work has a way of re-injecting wonder into the things in nature we often take for granted…the intricate tail of a peacock, or the sounds of insects that inhabit her garden. .

In her new collection of essays, “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” she’s directed that infectious curiosity towards food - from flavors that seem so universal they’re thought of as mundane…

…to more exotic dishes tied to very particular moments and places in her life.

So for this interview, we asked her to prepare a three-course meal… three stories that reveal how food connects us in unusual ways.

I Hope you brought your appetite - and stay tuned.

Pop quiz.

What is the world’s favorite smell?

I’ll give you a second.

Okay, a hint. It’s the main scent that realtors use when hosting an open house.

It is the most consumed flavor of ice cream in the world.

You probably have a bottle of it in your pantry?

That’s right. Vanilla.

The first of Aimee’s three-course meal.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Vanilla is one of those quiet, homier smells that that just feels soothing or it smells soothing. I think to people it doesn't jar us awake or anything like that.

Nate Hegyi: Now, a lot of QUOTE UNQUOTE vanilla that flavors your ice cream or sits in the back of your kitchen shelf… It isn’t real vanilla.

It’s an artificial flavor. Sometimes it comes from weird places.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: One of the sources is actually from the, you know, the glands of a beaver. Beaver glands are one of the only things on this planet that come close – to the smell of vanilla, which does not, um, appeal to many people. Of course. but it's still considered a natural flavor because it comes from nature, you know. So that was something that kind of took my breath away a little bit like, oh, some of the, some of the imitation vanilla's out there have a base of Beaver gland.

Nate Hegyi: The beaver goo is known as castoreum. They use it in combination with their pee to mark territory.

And while it was a very popular artificial vanilla flavor back at the turn of the century… you can take a deep sigh of relief because it is rarely used now.

Instead, companies use a much more vegan-friendly synthetic chemical compound called vanillin.

Because, while real vanilla might be the world’s favorite smell… It's actually really tough to grow. Making it the second most expensive spice in the world… just behind saffron.

The vanilla bean is the fruit of the vanilla orchid. A soft white flower that blooms only once. And after it blooms, there’s about a six hour window to pollinate.

In its native Mexico, that work falls to a genus of stingless bee called the melipona bee.

But when colonists brought vanilla plants from Mexico back to Europe and beyond… they found that the local insects weren’t up to the task.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: So unless there was, like, heavy rains that pushed the blossom closed, um, you know, bees, insects, they didn't. They don't pollinate like that. You actually have to hand pollinate them, it turns out.

So outside of its native range… vanilla was nearly impossible to propagate. That is, until 1841. When a new method was discovered on the African island of Reunion, near Madagascar. At the time it was a French colony.

Nate: How did we discover that hand pollination?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:it was a boy. It was an enslaved 12 year old boy, um, named Edmond Albius, who was, um, a gardener at this estate. And, you know, um, through his careful observation and just noticing what was going on, he learned that if he pressed the two pieces of the flower together or used a little, like, kind of a, like a bamboo stick, kind of to touch them together. Um, those flowers then bloomed and produced, you know, the beautiful silky, um, vanilla pods.

Now, the thing that was so unusual about this, um, is that the enslaved boy told the person who owned him, and that enslaver's best friend was a very famous botanist back in Europe. And that botanist was like, haha, I am the one who discovered this, you know, uh, pollination.

And the enslaver in one of the rare instances of justice during that time, actually said basically the equivalent of step off. You are not going to take credit for this. This is my gardener's work. And he was so adamant. Where this enslaver disavowed his best friend, white scientist, and actually put it in his will that forever the the art of pollinating vanilla orchids was discovered by his, uh, gardener, Edmond Albius, and he went so far as to even say if anybody specifically my friend tries to claim it, it is false, and he doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh, so he actually liked it very, uh, it kind of rocked the botany world because this best friend was a very prominent botanist. And it makes you wonder what other things did he try to kind of usurp or steal, you know, but and again, the bar is so low.

I mean, also, the other dark part is the enslaver never set him free. So, uh, if he truly wanted to, you know, do something great. Right? // but I will say that that was one of the few things in, in food history where the enslaver actually gave credit to their, um, to the origins of, of a food development.

Nate Hegyi: And it's interesting because, you know, vanilla has this very poignant back story, you know, but nowadays it's everywhere. I mean, the word vanilla means boring.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Yes. That's the irony of it.

Nate Hegyi: What happened? What do you think happened?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: That is such a good question. Um, and that is the irony. I kept thinking of all of this. Like to call someone vanilla is like an insult. You know, instead of saying, this is a rich and beautiful flower, and it's one of the most poignant. If you ever have sliced open a vanilla bean and gotten some of the seeds on your hand, your hands will still stay fragrant for days, you know? I've never kind of understood that, that description of someone being vanilla because I've always I've always kind of been a vanilla, vanilla fan. I know I can remember very clearly in middle school, you know, um, I don't know, getting ice cream with my, my, my girlfriends and, you know, people would pick all the wildest flavors because the parents weren't around. Like, I'll have, like, double caramel fudge. And I remember getting vanilla and people would be like, what? That's so plain, but I truly love it. I mean, I truly love vanilla, and I don't think it's… I don't think it's plain, you know, um, and to me, like the gooey caramel, the like, whatever pieces of bubblegum in some cases like that is hideous to me. So but I would, you know, I mean, I would never say that to my friends, uh, you know, indirectly like, to each their own, but I think vanilla is just such a gorgeous, gorgeous flavoring for ice cream.

Nate Hegyi: That’s the irony of vanilla. It’s a stand-in for plainness, but the flavor is deceptively complex. It’s absolutely everywhere and in everything. But the vanilla bean is exotic, specific and hard to grow.

And despite needing to be native to Mexico and grown in Madagascar, it seems somehow weirdly American? Or maybe, it just transports people back to their childhood.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: If I'm in a, in a bakery of a of another country where I've never been before, vanilla is one of those smells that it's like, oh, everything else might be foreign to me, you know, but that's one tether home, you know, in some ways. And when I say home, it's also unusual as well, because I'm Asian American, I'm the daughter of immigrants. And yet my parents, you know, my mom made cookies with vanilla. So there was a scent of coming home and having vanilla fill the air was very homey to me. That's not an Asian American thing. That's just a home thing to me.

Nate Hegyi: Two more courses still to go - when Outside/In continues.

You’re listening to Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi.

Vanilla is one of those enduring flavors that feel like it’ll always be popular. But then… there are the one hit wonders. The food fads that seem forever associated with a particular moment in time.

In the 1960’s, it was space age foods like Tang… the orange drink substitute.

Ad: Have a blast, have some tang!

Nate Hegyi: In the 1980’s, it was wine coolers.

Ad: Seagrams, wine coolers!

Nate Hegyi: In the early 2000’s, there was a brief fascination with something called the miracle berry.

Nate Hegyi: You remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when Willy Wonka gives one of the kids a special piece of chewing gum?

Clip: It’s the most amazing, fabulous, sensational gum in the whole world.

Clip: What’s so fab about it?

This little piece of gum is a three-course dinner.

Bull!

No roast beef but I haven’t gotten it quite right yet.

Nate Hegyi: This is what a bunch of media outlets have compared the miracle berry to.

Which, by the way, is our second course.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:It’s a little berry, it’s about the size of a jelly bean.

That’s poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:it's bright red when it's fully ripe. And, uh. Yeah, it's called the “miracle berry.” It has the protein, um, miraculin in it.

Nate Hegyi: Miraculin?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Yeah, it's actually called miraculin. And I know, clever name. And what Miraculin does is that it alters your taste buds.

So for a moment, about maybe 30 minutes maximum, maybe a little bit longer if you're lucky, if you chew a miracle berry everything you eat after that becomes sweet.

Nate Hegyi: Miraculin works by essentially rewiring our sweet taste buds to identify acids – like a lemon or the carbon dioxide in your beer – as sweet instead.

It’s actually used in hospitals, to help people who’ve lost their appetite.

But In the early 2000’s, in New York City, miracle berries became a full-blown fad. Aimee was living upstate at the time… working her first job as a professor… when one of her friends invited her to a bar in the city for a… “flavor tripping” party".

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: So we were all in this room in the back of a bar, So, um, we had each of us were given a, like, a small glass and a small ceramic bowl, and I had about maybe, like, I don't know, five miracle berries in each one. the host would say, okay, first serving and want everybody to take one, one miracle Berry chew it, you know, kind of like really finely. Get they said to get all the juices as possible. Like covering your tongue like so it was like a slow chew. It's a little TMI, I know. But that's how they made sure they wanted to make sure that we had the full effect covered.

The things they were serving were ridiculous. It was not meals. It was like a tray of saltine crackers or a tray of olives. Some lemon slices. These are not meals. But they would say like, first course, second course, third course like that. Yeah.

And you could see just like at first nothing. People are like, this doesn't work. What a wrap, you know. And then before you know it, you just see everybody's face, just start softening into a smile, like, almost disbelief. Like what? You know, I mean, I remember when we were served the lemons and that was such a shock, it was like it was like one of the, like a mandarin orange. It was so, so juicy, sweet.

Nate Hegyi: So it still tastes like when you were eating the lemon, it still had, like, a lemon flavor, but just like extra sweet.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:you know what it was? We could smell the lemon, but. The taste was all orange.

the final course, the dessert, the piece de resistance was the, uh, the Guinness, the pint of Guinness I could smell like this smells like beer. but then when you drink it, I mean, I had to slow down because I was like, this tastes like a chocolate milkshake. I could just down this whole thing, and then that would not be great.

Nate Hegyi: Aimee told me that the reason she remembered the night so well… wasn’t actually the miracle berry. Sure, that was cool.

But it was the people. The experience.

She was with a special group of friends – mostly from college – the kind of friends that, when you are single and in your early twenties, you are hanging out with all the time.

Your crew.

And after that night, slowly… one got married. Others moved away. They drifted apart.

And miracle berries, they kind of drifted away too. You don’t see them going viral on TikTok these days.

But the memory of that night – it holds steady for Aimee.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: None of us had phones. I think there was a track phone?

We had to be in the same room together. And I think because of that and knowing how precious it was I mean oh my gosh I'm only speaking for myself. But that's why I can imagine almost what we were wearing, what our facial expressions were because there was no oh, let me take a picture of this.

you know, if you wanted to spend time with friends or loved ones, you had to be present, like physically, literally present.

Nate Hegyi: I’ve got nothing against snapping a picture of a meal. Good food, by itself, can be more than just appetizing - it can be beautiful. But think about your all-time favorite meals. Do you picture it on the plate, perfectly in frame? Or do you picture the table, the restaurant, and the people you shared it with? To me, it’s the company that makes the meal worth remembering.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: I tell this to my kids all the time, you know, like back in my day, I think they look at me with pity. But we didn't need to record every meal or we didn't need to, you know, um, take pictures while we had, like, a dessert in front of us, like, we just remembered it, and they're like, oh, mom, you know? But it's true. That's it. I think you really hit upon something there.

Wonka Clip: What’s it taste like? Madness! It’s tomato soup, it’s hot, it's creamy, I can actually feel it running down my throat!

[mux swell and fade]

Nate Hegyi: So many community food events are characterized by a good spread.

Holiday meals, pot-lucks, backyard BBQ’s - where you load up a plate like a painter’s easel, with different colors and textures. but sometimes a whole community comes together to gather around a SINGLE food.

In Mississippi… It's the watermelon.

Where I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, it was brats.

And in Western New York… it’s the concord grape.

The area is known, affectionately, as the grape belt. It’s the oldest and largest concord grape growing region in the world…

When Aimee was working her first post-college job there as a professor, she says some days it smelled literally like grape juice.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Driving in these country roads, I had never wanted to have my windows open because it just smelled like grape Kool-Aid, is what I called it, you know, um, or grape bubblegum. All the synthetic forms of grape. You smell the real deal. And that's the Concord grapes just really just ripening in the sun.

Nate Hegyi: Just a note here - the town where these grapes got their name is called Concord, Massachusetts but just about everywhere else, including New York’s grape belt - a lot of people say con-CHORD.

Like the supersonic jet.

Anywaaaay…

Aimee moved there in the 2000s… and moving can feel isolating. It takes time to meet new people, to feel like you belong in a place.

But then she found out about this legendary grape festival about 30 minutes from her house. And one weekend, she just decided - what the heck. You gotta do something for the weekend.

What did it look like when you, when you got there?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Utter madness. I mean, first of all, there was music. There was the beer tent, but like, grape flavored beer and, um, the, like the pie and dessert tent. That was the happening place there.

Nate Hegyi: This is the longest running grape festival in the United States. A three-day party in a small town tucked along the coast of Lake Eerie. It has an amateur wine-tasting contest, a grape queen contest, grape parades. And the centerpiece - a wine stomping contest.

I have looked this up… and this is not a quaint wine-stomping tradition - this is crowd cheering, classic rock blaring grape smashing fest.

Audio clip from festival: Alright stompers, 1, 2, 3, STOMP!

Nate Hegyi: And so you were by yourself. And I can imagine if I was by myself, I'd be like, oh, I don't want to like, you know, put myself too much out there. But you, you actually did do some grape stomping.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil:Yeah, I did.

[mux]

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: You get in and, you know, I had all these questions like, is this sanitary? What's going on? I mean, you know, but also there was a part of me that was just uninhibited because it's like everybody, not one person, ever looked like they were in a bad mood. Everybody was just so joyful. I, like, I just had to join in.

I quickly learned you had to do a stomp, stomp, stomp, pivot… stomp, stomp, stomp, pivot…

The people who won or placed are the ones who stomped in multiple places. The ones like me who were just like, oh la la la, I'm going to stomp in one place like a quick jog. Yeah, that produced almost nothing, you know?

it was just I'm smiling ear to ear because it was just such a kind of almost over the top, ridiculously joyful event. And it happens once a year in this small little town.

[mux fade]

For months, Aimee had felt like a stranger in Western New York. She was new to the area, new to her job, a person of color in a very white part of the country.

And so she was expecting the Festival of Grapes to go a lot differently than it actually did.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: I've been to festivals where it's more like people just stare and little kids come up and say, what are you? You know, things like that? Um, you know, so I was bracing myself for that. I don't know why it didn't happen at this festival, but it was so such a relief. Nobody was asking me, what are you. Excuse me? Are you Portuguese? Um. You have very good English. You know, I have to tell you, like, that's kind of a bummer when you, you know, you're at some festival or minding your business at a grocery store and then someone taps you on the shoulder. It's just a bummer, you know? So I think what was notable about this festival in particular is that, um, people were just genuinely, like, amused, bemused that I was a new faculty member, you know, at the local college they really seemed to really want me to feel at ease. And they did that by food, um, all these different versions of grape pie and grape cobblers and, which they would not let me pay for. to do that for strangers. I know it sounds so quaint, and maybe the bar was so low, but they truly like that they did make me feel welcome and gave me these really unusual things. Unusual offerings, um, involving grapes

Nate Hegyi: There are hundreds of food festivals like this in the United States. The lone star chili cookoff in Texas. The West Side Nut Club Fall Festival in Indiana. I mean, Iowa alone has a sweet corn fest, a bacon fest, and a sauerkraut fest. All foods by the way that you can find these days in grocery stores from Portland Maine to Portland Oregon.

Nate Hegyi: And, you know, there are festivals like this all over the place, and they can be super cheesy. Um, what do you think they accomplish in a world where the same food is available everywhere?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: What it does, these festivals celebrate, is community, you know? I mean, again, every, every food festival I've been to, even the ones where they, they kind of, you know, hone in on, on my skin color or something. There is still palpably a sense of community there. And especially, I think today when we sometimes see a lack of generosity or a lack of sharing, it's all like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps or this is take care of you and yours, you know, and that's it. I think these food festivals are a nice antidote away from that, um, that we're all stronger and happier when we share these things together. And also it's easier to dehumanize each other when we don't share in that, you know? So anything we can do to not dehumanize each other, I think, is a win.

Aimee Nazukamatathil is a poet and author of the new book, Bite by Bite. We’ll have a link to it in the show notes.

This episode was reported and produced by me, Nate Hegyi.

It was edited by Outside/In’s head chef, Taylor Quimby.

Sous chefs include Justine Paradis and Felix Poon. A special thanks to our intern Catherine Hurley for dicing the onions and mincing the garlic on this one.

Our head of podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie.

Outside/In is a production of NHPR.