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Collard greens are a kind of cabbage that grows as loose leaves rather than forming a tight head. They’re eaten widely in parts of Europe and in East Africa, but perhaps most strongly associated with the food of Black people in the southern United States. There are many mysteries surrounding collards, like how and why did they become so popular in the US South. To that can be added the recent discovery of collards in oasis gardens in Morocco, where again they are associated with enslaved people trafficked from West Africa. Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have done their best to unravel the mystery of collards in Morocco and how that may shine light on their place in Southern foodways.
Notes
- Collard Greens (Brassica oleracea var. viridis) in the Moroccan Oasis by Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi is published in Economic Botany. Fortunately, they also wrote about their work in The Conversation, which is where I first saw it.
- If you want to see how they prepare collards in Morocco, Bronwen made a video.
- While reading around the topic, I came across this lovely piece about food and belonging: Snow Falling on Collards.
- Here is the transcript.
- Banner photo of the Draa valley by Richard Allaway. Cover photo of collards by Jeff Wright.
“Food has long served as an instrument of statecraft,” write the authors of a new paper, and it isn’t hard to find examples of food weaponised in international relations and between factions in a single country. It can foment strife, through tariffs and blockades, as easily as it can promote peace through food aid. At the same time, conflict has an outsized influence on food and agriculture, from the mythical salting of a vanquished enemy’s fields to the very real genocidal famines today. 
Trevor Warmedahl worked in commercial cheese operations large and small in the USA for about 10 years, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the uniformity of the final products and their dependence on purchased starter cultures and rennets. So he set off to learn about “other, older ways to go about the fermentation of milk and the care of dairy livestock and the making of cheese”. 
In the previous episode, Carl Ipsen explained how the EU regulations for extra-virgin olive oil include tasting notes, and that if an oil has any of the forbidden flavours, it cannot be classified as extra virgin. So I was very surprised to read (in an issue of Edward Behr’s Art of Eating newsletter) about oils being produced in Provence that go out of their way to develop some — but not all — of the EU’s “defects”. Just as with modern extra virgin, these old-fashioned oils rely on up-to-date equipment and the skill of the miller.
