Sea Beet, Sugar Beet

My latest essay written for the new Dark Mountain issue: Dark Kitchen about the mythic bargain between the wild and arable lands, and the consequences of our forgetting it in a sugar-coated modern world.

Manos, Metate y Maiz Azul (Hands, Mortar and Blue Maize) by David Lauer

Black and white birds rising and calling over the flatlands. Above a field, lapwings flick and turn in a spiral; down an estuary, oystercatchers flash and chase the tide. A big cloudy sky, wind from the south, running through golden reeds. On the ground, two plants – one wild, one tamed – and the stories they tell us, should we go into the territory and listen.

The summer the visitors flock from the cities to the sandy lands: the children run shrieking down the beach, the swimmers bask in the sea, the wild sea beet holds the line between the sand and clay. Beyond the dunes lies the hinterland of East Anglia, where the sea beet’s domesticated cousin, sugar beet, dwells in its millions in thousands of identical acres. The wild ancestor plant lives in the shingle and river margins, distinguished by its thick shiny leaves that cook up well as a salty chard or spinach. The modern cultivar is distinguished by its root, which, when harvested in the bitterness of January, you see piled in great pale yellow mounds left by grinding machines that churn the soil and slash its leaves, or storming down the dark lane in trucks en route to the refinery at Cantley. 

You don’t want to look there, beyond the wild and sandy edge of light, at all that mud and mangel-wurzel. At all that desolation and winter. But at some point you have to look at this land. Because you know, whether you like it or not, that the summer holiday is over. 

I have lived in this double territory for 20 years, surrounded by beet and barley, and sometimes by oats, potatoes and peas, by the noise of the industrial agricultural machine. When I first came my gaze was focused entirely on its wild margins. One day, just as the year was turning, I caught sight of something crouched in the middle of an expanse of green spikes: two sleek forms facing the sun, observing me as I walked down the lane. Hares! The hare takes up position in the centre of the field so she can see everything around her. She knows she can outrun us all and so, in this moment I found myself regarded in that direct startling way wild creatures look at you.

As I returned the hares’ gaze I realised I was looking at something I had ignored: the great loneliness of the field which contained them. That was when I began to look at the agricultural fields no one notices, even when they provide our food every day, or we live right next to them.

East Anglia is not a romantic land. It lacks poetry and lakes and mountains. No one wants to live in George Crabbe’s Borough or sit in Arnold Wesker’s kitchen. But in times of adversity, you don’t need fairy castles or postcard views. What helps everyone thrive is an ability to see what is really there.

Afterwards, I went into these unglamourous fields in search of the crops and their stories, beyond their use as commodities or animal feed. I went to find out, as a storm of crises headed our way, how people could be more resilient, not just in the way we sourced our food, but how we could cherish it in our imaginations. I worked with a kitchen crew of community activists to create a neighbourhood food culture, deconstructing the food system across shared supper tables each month, cooking community meals (50 at one table), teaching each other to ferment, forage, press apple juice, bake bread, share storerooms, plant vegetables. 

I travelled with Josiah and Mark through Suffolk’s rain-washed back country and market towns, visiting smallholdings and growing projects, holding conversations with bakers and growers, orchard guardians, beekeepers and plant scientists. We were looking for the future in a kind of reverse archaeology – seeds for the future, people for the future – how the land and ourselves could be restored. 

Each year I walked through the searing yellow squares of rape in spring, through seas of barley rippling in the wind in high summer, gleaned the potatoes and onions that were left after harvest, greeted the jackdaws in their flypast at dusk, watched the sunrise beneath great Suffolk oaks that act as anchors in time, as the layers of green and gold and brown shift their positions within the land. As I walked the words came, my hands began to record what we saw from the centre of the field: poetry about wheat ears, photographs of rainbow-coloured quinoa, celebrations of the farmers who grow heritage landraces of wheat and peas. The beauties of the field you notice close up. 

But sugar beet remained without a script. Outside my window, they wait on the field edges, small mountains of roots, dredged with frost. The ugly wurzel sisters, uninvited still.

At night I can hear them thump-thumping into the lorries, stealing away into the darkness.

SWEETS

‘Succoo,’ I said, and pointed to the sugar bowl. It was the first word I ever uttered. I am not sure how significant that is now, decades later, except that it feels I have spent most of my writing and cooking life discerning what kind of sweetness is core to our earthly lives, and what is an artificial substitute. How strange it feels, looking at those sugar beets, that it is easier now to recall the exact tastes and colours of my childhood sweetshop hoard – of sherbets, pastilles, gums and gobstoppers – than my mother’s cooking. 

But you need to know what you are up against from the start. Only the addict knows the value of sobriety.

The seat of sweetness in the five-element system in Chinese medicine is the discerning spleen, an organ few are aware of in their own bodies. Its element is earth and it belongs to the time of Indian summer, the ripeness of the harvest, the taste of sweetcorn and squash and the nourishment associated with the mother. Practitioners say you can hear the lack of Earth in people’s voices as a kind of whine, the plaintive sound a child makes when it is hungry for attention. The spleen, when it is out of balance, demands we fill ourselves with food. Our appetite becomes insatiable. But with a hunger that is not just physical. 

The function of the spleen is to discern what is good for the body, mind and soul, in the same way a mother might nourish her child – not as the ‘white milk’ mother but the ‘red blood’ mother who is in charge of the lymphatic system that transports nutrients around the body. The organiser that tells us what needs to be stored or what to let go of, and rejects what is detrimental to the whole being.

Sugar masks the unpalatable, it is a peerless preserver, and as such is the bedrock of the industrial food machine. There is hardly a product on the supermarket shelves that doesn’t contain sugar. But of itself, sugar nourishes no one, in body, heart or soul. It is one of the most addictive foodstuffs you can eat. As soon as you put it into your mouth, you want more of it. That false hunger skews the way we look at the world, which needs so many tastes to be alive: bitter, sour, pungent, plain. It makes us hunt for sweetness everywhere we go, pressuring people to give us their hearts, like ants milking honeydew from aphids; we look for sweetness in children, in pets, in music, in poetry. For smiles, for likes, for love, an aaah feel-good naughty-but-nice moment, before we return to the day’s hostilities. 

You think me harsh: surely we can have some treats, it can’t all be lentils and meaningful conversation! And it might seem that way, but not when you look at what sugar, like all addictive substances, is covering up. The sugar plum worlds it promises are not the real world, and do not love you back. Brimg only an absence that can never be filled.

Natural sweetness is stored sunlight in plants, most deliciously in fruit, and many are grown commercially for their sugar content – rice, maize, agave, coconut palm, sugar cane – but in England, sugar is made from beet, first planted during the Napoleonic Wars when sea trade routes were blocked, and after the abolition of slavery had increased the price of sugar.  It is commonly sold as white table sugar, the stuff we spoon into tea and coffee and use in our home-made cakes and jam. Not that we think about this sugar very much, or the thousands of processed foods we eat that contain it. We like to taste sugar, but we don’t like to look at it. Sugar beet fields are ugly, the factories at Cantley and Bury St Edmunds are ugly. The facts of sugar slavery are ugly. The epidemics of diabetes, a sugar imbalance suffered by thousands of children in the UK, by Indigenous nations evicted from their homelands, are ugly. 

We don’t look at our dependence on sugar because it makes our working existence bearable. Sugar rewards our industry, fuels its tea times and lunch breaks. In Ronald Blythe’s documentary of Suffolk rural life, Akenfield, everyone lives for cake. In a labourer’s diet of bread and turnips, the sweetness of cake appears like a fairy godmother. Still now in the bakeries and tea-rooms of the sea town, the visitors’ eyes flash as they view stacks of iced cakes, fruit slices, chocolate eclairs, scones, biscuits and buns. Oh, the treats that are in store!

Sugar seeps into everything, into our dreams, fuelling our cravings and desires, eating the enamel on our teeth, adulterating our blood, diverting us from looking at the hardship and difficulty before us.

Sometimes however, we have no option.

SUGAR CANE

In 1999 I sit in the Water Lily House of the Oxford Botanical gardens, alongside rice and papyrus plants. Outside it is chill December, but in here warm and damp, as if you had just arrived in the tropics. You can learn almost everything about civilisation by looking at the grass family, as they have provisioned the entire globe: from our first writing paper to our present food staples. I am sitting here as part of a practice to work with the dreaming of plants. Next door in the Palm House grows the greatest artificial sweetener of our lives, sugar cane. Most of the plants I’ve worked with are wild or medicine plants. This is the first time I’ve focused on a food plant. For some reason, even though it is warm in here, I shiver. Later, I make a Christmas cake with thick white icing and a holly sprig from Holywell Churchyard. It sits on the table, covered in a cloth from the Amazon, looking faintly malevolent. There’s something not quite right about that cake, says Mark.

There is a map that shows the bitterest truth about the sugar trade. Over two minutes, it depicts 20,000 voyages charted by European countries over 300 years, tiny dots whizzing from Africa to the Americas, each one representing a ship carrying hundreds of manacled slaves. If you pause the cursor on a dot, it will list how many arrived at their final destination, what percentage were children, what was their price, how long the middle passage, who was the captain of the ship, what its place of origin: London, Amsterdam, the ports of Portugal, Spain, France, Denmark. You see that though slavery is commonly viewed through the lens of cotton plantations in the US Deep South, it represents less than 4% of the trade. 

History books focus on celebrating the Slavery Abolition Act; they do not place attention on the numbers of people transported to the colonial holdings of European ‘civilised’ nations (out of sight in Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean) over the course of three centuries. Their reveal comes as a shock. How an unchecked desire for sweetness had powered an industry that captured millions of people (over three million by Britain alone), who were then worked to their deaths. How the lucrative profit from sugarcane built the grand houses and cultural institutions of England that hold us in thrall – including the one I live next to, and all its agricultural land.

It is not easy to comprehend its scale without the mind getting stuck in the horror of it. But the dreaming of a plant takes you beyond numbers into the world’s imagination, where you can perceive the non-linear workings of things. Where you can see that our manufactured desires still indenture people from Africa in the tomato glasshouses of Italy or the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast; that we still gloss over the violence and brutal labour that underpins the food we take for granted, including the dispossessed East Anglian fieldworkers documented in Akenfield.

When I speak with the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe about his metaphysical work on the transatlantic slave trade, he tells me to consider sugar cane and its metabolism within human white European bodies as part of an assemblage of ingredients that made slavery possible:

‘It helps to ask: if sugar was an active non-human agent in the proliferation of that economy, that arrangement of master and slave, then what kind of moves can we make today to make sure that doesn’t happen? Then we talk beyond just active legislation, or healing people of their evil. We talk about meeting sugar cane, the idea that we are framed in unmasterable fields and forces that go beyond the liberal humanist project. Framing it as something that is more than human.’ 

I am walking over the winter fields, remembering sugar, its exotic origin, how it enslaves the human body, wondering how we can wean ourselves from this toxic inheritance. What moves can make it right. These fields were once celebrated in praise song and ceremony, but I’m looking for something that is deeper and more transformative than a culture that has become mostly folklore. 

That’s when the myth comes to me: the one where a young  girl falls into the dark earth, captured by the Lord of the Land of the Dead. The myth tells us that her mother, the barley goddess Demeter, wept when her daughter disappeared, and rejoiced when she returned for the spring and summer months. I have known this story (maybe we all have) since the time of my sweet-loving childhood. There is something about that story that doesn’t feel right any more.

Six-Row Barley by Anne Campbell, grown by Col Gordon, Highlands, Scotland

RESTORATION

In Japan a 60-year-old farmer decided to write a book about farming and food. It was called The One Straw Revolution. Contrary to all modern Japanese agricultural practices after the war, the ex-scientist Masanobu Fukuoka tended his small fields of rice and wheat and orchards of tangerines without any pesticides or technology. He did not till or weed the soil and his fields yielded as much grain as the monoculture that surrounded his traditional hillside farm. When pests swept through the land his crops survived. He wrote that a healthy body came out of a healthy environment. To keep sane and sound you needed to eat from the territory in which you lived and listen to your own body as a guide, rather than your desire and ‘discriminating mind’.

To restore the body required a re-adaptation to nature. To renovate soil rendered sterile with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertiliser required perseverance. It takes time for the body, revved up by a sugary, highly processed Western diet, to recover its natural appetite and absorb the kind of food Fukuoka (and several contemporary Western food writers) advocate: plenty of plants, not much meat, not much. To break habits and the emotional reactions caused by an unnatural way of eating. 

Given time, the body can self-organise its own recovery and will no longer suffer the cravings of a snack-and-go culture, or the hostility and restlessness that come as a consequence of eating unnaturally grown plants and caged animals. However, this transformative process is rarely discussed. Our present Western diet, with its glamour, its comforts and sugary temptations, fully backed by a corporate food industry, is the elephant in the room. And no one wants to go there. 

Except that we have to go there, because it’s killing us and everything else in the room. 

THE POMEGRANATE GIRLS

I stole it for you, she says, and tells me it was in the second drawer. Wrapped in a paper napkin, a square of plain cake, slightly stale and unappealing.

Feeling obliged, I eat the cake as she watches me, but doesn’t touch it herself. She is under six stone with arms like matchsticks. At night, I hear her bed creak as she does bicycle exercises to keep her weight down. Hundreds of them. I am 15. We are in an  institution, where most of my friends, like Carol, are unhappily kept in dormitories and classrooms. Like battery hens. 

You could recognise the too-thin girls, once they started running everywhere, working too hard, hugging the radiators, hands hidden in sleeves, their faces turning orange from eating raw carrots. The way they would suddenly leave the dining hall one day, and never return. Later in the fashion studios, I knew them by the downy hair on their backs, their shivering bodies as they changed costumes, or in the restaurant where my sister waitresses disappeared one by one into the toilet to throw up. Because all of them wore black, as if in perpetual mourning. As if some part of them had vanished.

If I had known the myth as a map then, I would know why the pale girls had disappeared, that their souls were trapped down in the basement, in the corridors of the lost. Their floury-fingered cake-loving mothers had forgotten to tell them how to get out, or were content to leave them there. To give them instruction would mean they would have to face their own abduction by the lords of Empire, admit they have bequeathed the trauma of families and nations to their shadowy daughters. The mothers keep the Underworld winter at bay, preferring to live in an endless Upperworld summer, chocolate box and romantic novel beneath the sofa. Sugar-coating their lives so they don’t look at the violence we inherit by virtue of being born into history.

How can we get ourselves back? The myth would tell us how, if we took it seriously enough, but we don’t. We entertain the story of eating the six pomegranate seeds that keep us in the Underworld as an idea we can toy with, rather than a map of female initiation. We forget that embodying Persephone’s mythic rise and fall is the key to all our liberations. That Rhea, her titan grandmother, had sent her there to rebalance the civilised world of Demeter’s grains with the wild Earth; that her arms were not bound by a dark father, but entwined around the dancing god of crushed grapes and ivy leaves. To remember life demands an obligation, a transformation, but not a sacrifice.

I cross the river, rowed by the ferry girl at Blackshore, go collecting leaves of mallow and sea beet. The samphire is red in the salty ditches, the sea asters fluffy with seed. Geese are coming in, the holidaymakers have departed. The tide is turning, and the wind shifts to the East, sharp across the sea. 

EATING THE WILD BEET

I was in search of a connection between my feet that walked the paths and my hands that stirred the pot and wrote in praise of living things. I wanted to find that part of us that had been silenced and derailed, the red blood mother, and put her back in charge of a system that has gone haywire. Somehow my body knew that if I became kin, reached out and touched the territory, immersed myself back into Demeter’s land, something might go back into balance. So I went looking for a way to bring the wild margins and the field together, the wild alexanders and dandelion leaves, the grains and the pulses. As I walked, I ate from the hedgerows, by the tracks, on the edges of fields, tossed daisy leaves and spring beauty into salads, cooked up barley risotto and fava bean stew, and came to know the times of the year as much by the field harvests as I did by the gathering of damsons and sweet chestnuts. And sometimes both found a way into my heart.

This is a recipe from the salt marshes around the river Blyth.  

Wild Suffolk Leaves

A delicious fish-shaped snack (especially for those who no longer eat fish and chips). The pea flour and rapeseed oil are from organic East Anglian farms.

Serves 2–3 people

Several beet leaves

3 tablespoons yellow pea flour (can be mixed 3:1 with rice flour for a lighter touch)

1 tablespoon rapeseed oil

Pinch of baking powder (optional)

Pinch of salt

Grind of black pepper

Squeeze of lemon

Water

Pick fresh beet leaves in spring or early autumn. Medium sizes are best. Wash and dry. Make a batter with the yellow pea flour, seasonings and water. It needs to be sloppy but thickish as in a pancake mix. Heat the pan, and add the oil. Dip your ‘fish’  into the batter and shallow fry in the pan, turning when one side is golden, until both sides are fried well. You might need a couple of try outs to perfect their shape and feel, but they will all taste delicious. Serve hot, with (home-made) chilli jam, ketchup or chutney. 

This batter works for fritters of all kinds of wild leaves and flowers through the growing season. The common mallow leaves are also very good.

HOLDING EVERYTHING DEAR

In the end, you remember the sweetness, the douceur of life, that comes unexpectedly. Not the cakes and desserts, or the grand restaurants or parties, but the ingredients that you placed, like honey, in the storehouse of your heart, to keep you and your sisters through the hard times: all those lands and colours, the fragrance of life. A life spent in markets and kitchens, among cooking pots, standing at the stove, at the chopping board, a table laid, the fire lit. 

When I ask you: what treasured dishes come back to you in time, you say huitlacoche, the mushroom ears that grow on maize after an errant storm. You ate it once on an extraordinary night in Mexico City. I realise the ones I hold in my own hands are all rooted in the companionship of the road, in times of hospitality, in places that made us feel welcome. How grateful I am now to have climbed a cherry tree one hot afternoon in Paris, for the taste of the fruit, knowing the abundance of cherries. For those bowls of soup in Granada, in the Sierra Madre, on a cold night, the first sharp taste of rocket on a spring morning in Italy. The feeling of freedom. The receiving of kindness, of warmth, of generosity, the sweet roots of earth; the gifts of a perfumed quince, a salt-smoky herring, a way of cooking spinach leaves, of the people singing Georgian songs and toasting in a barn on a snowy evening, an ensemble of storytellers and players, a happiness among people. How we all gather and disperse, meet over tables, over these dishes, and how fleeting these moments are, and yet how they tell us everything about being here together, each one like a key, unlocking time. What the memories held in these hands tell me about visiting the Earth, what our engagements with life discern. 

These hands remind me of what I once held: the slippery feel of a trout, the heaviness of a hare’s body, the sphere of an egg, the soft feathers of the bird we found on the road, its glittering plumage; how when you feel everything is lost, your hands reach out and place in your mouth the surprising taste of marsh flowers, and how you hear in that moment the cry of a curlew, that brings you back, brings everything back. The light, the land, the sky.

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