Hey there, glad you made it to this page. One of my favorite humans (Curtis) and I are hosting a celebration of collard greens and Potlikker this month (FEB 2022) and I wanted to take a moment to offer this short piece as some brief background and perspective on the types of things we will be discussing. 

I often refer to cooking as the ultimate form of alchemy 

Taking ingredients, made possible by the sun, moon, rain and soil

Carefully applying heat (fire) and techniques passed down from generation to generation

These spells, otherwise known as recipes are the keys to transforming sunlight and soil into human life.

Over the ages, our human ancestors, in community with our plant-cestors, have built relationships. Out of those relationships have come processes and agreements as to how we can best support each other. From that, we have learned to cook collard greens, low and slow, to release the nutrients from their dense fibrous leaves and a make them readily available for our bodies to absorb and digest.

Pork is an important part of that process too. Well, maybe, unless we’re specifically talking about black American faith ways and traditions around New Year’s Eve/Day, then pork it self isn’t particularly important, but listen

A fatty , bone in cut of meat to add protein and collagen to a pot of greens is a must. It might as well be a sweet, smokey piece of pork whose natural fat contains a healthy dose of vitamin D to help fight off those Winter SADS among other things.

The first time I ever intentionally wrote about Collard Greens was after being asked to edit a piece about culturally significant holiday recipes and the language being used to talk about our ancestral relationship with collard greens spent me into a rant. 

Begin rant:

Let me start by saying that ALL the food enslaved folks ate, was grown and prepared by them. Nobody was toiling on their behalf. The phrase ‘could grow and prepare for themselves’ for me, implies that the rest of their diet was made up of foods that they did not grow or prepare for themselves. While Collards are native to the eastern Mediterranean, I think its important to note specifically that they were popularized on this continent by Africans who already had a diet and food culture that was heavy on the leafy greens. They ate the leafy greens of both cultivated and wild foraged plants. I can’t think of a neat way to form a sentence about it, but unlike the way we grow and consume food now, where we pick the fruit and discard the rest of the plant, they ate the leaves too. Say like okra, most folks just pick the okra, but they would pick the leaves and cook and eat those too. Those Africans are responsible for the prominence of greens in American Southern food culture and they were growing and eating collards prior to their arrival in the ‘new world.’  Often, the rations given to enslaved africans consisted solely of a piece of smoked/cured pork and a grain (broken rice or corn meal). It was the gardens they grew for themselves that gave them access to the nutrition and medicinal benefits of produce that they needed to sustain themselves. These gardens were very important. As cotton became king and the lives of slaves became much more restrictive and violent, they were no longer afforded the opportunity to keep up gardens and many began to die from illnesses related to malnutrition.

I find myself rejecting the phrase ‘from the poorest ingredients.’ Whatever Mcnuggets are made out of is a poor ingredient. Collard greens are not a ‘poor’ ingredient. Maybe not as expensive as black truffles, but collard greens are a nutrient dense food and if health is wealth then collards are a recipe for lavish living. I’d also want to go on to say that the brilliance of the community isn’t in the ability to make something from NOTHING, but in their recognition that health and wellbeing are EVERYTHING, and their insistence on making that a priority even in most vile of circumstances that threatened to destroy everything about who they were/are. That greens remain a staple in American food culture to this day is not only a testament to African resilience, but the level of importance that achieving ultimate health and well being through diet has historically had in Black Culture. Post Emancipation these gardens remained a fixture at the homes of black folks and for generations what is now referred to as ‘farm to table’ and ‘slow food’ were dominant in black food culture, even though it was stigmatized as fast/processed/convenience foods became popular and served as signals of affluence and a civilized/modernized/assimilated household.

The practice of using smoked meat to flavor foods is an African tradition where smoked fish is used as a sort of seasoning in damn near everything. (as are peanuts/groundnuts which were also originally a traditional addition to collard preparation along with hot chiles) Smoked pork became the staple on this continent and is the traditional animal protein used in collard recipes today. Using smoked Turkey is a more recent practice that came as a result of modern medicine telling black folks that our health issues are (ironically) a result of our traditional foodways.

End rant