Blackberry Pie and Decolonizing Food
Most likely, due to my upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, I am obsessed with blackberry season. Almost every summer, in August, I take a trip up to see my grandparents and my sister who live right on the Columbia River (Washington side). When I lived in a suburb of Seattle in junior high and high school, blackberry bushes grew wild on every street corner and created an impossible thicket of brambles to climb through in our backyard. Growing up, I though of blackberry picking as a chore as I was sent off to do with a chipped metal bowl to fill. We made hundreds of blackberry pies over the years and blackberry jam and froze the rest of the berries to use throughout the year. As an adult, I look forward to blackberry picking season all year.
This summer is my first teaching sociology as an assistant professor at Sac State. A few weeks ago I was teaching my students about the concept of “decolonizing food.” From my studies, I have learned that to decolonize food is to unmask, acknowledge, and attempt to repair the foodways damaged through colonization. Due to the taking of land, relocation, and genocide of native peoples in the United States, not to mention the boarding schools native children were forced into in which their hair was cut, their language, and their food was taken from them, indigenous foodways have been severely damaged. Contemporarily, this means that knowledge about food, foraging, and cooking has not been passed down orally through generations. Displacement onto reservations has left native peoples reliant on commodity foods such as flour and sugar. Additionally, 1 in 4 American Indian is food insecure and the price of groceries on reservations is often higher than in neighboring towns. For Indigenous people decolonizing food might mean relearning plant medicine, traditional recipes and cooking methods and continuing to pass this knowledge down.
For white people it might be learning about how the food you eat has indigenous roots. Blackberries have an earthy flavor that is less tart and alarming than a raspberry. After a bit of digging I learned that the blackberries that grow wild in the pacific northwest are the Himalayan Blackberry, introduced to the United States via Europe. However, there are other kinds of blackberries native to the United States. These berries were heartily utilized by indigenous tribes including the Cherokee, Chippewa, Ojibwa, Menominee, Delaware, Iroquois, and Kiowa-Apache tribes. There are many traditional plant uses for blackberries including making tea from the leaves, using the juice as a natural cloth dye, drying the berries to preserve them, and using the root for medicinal purposes.
Part of decolonizing food might also mean to truly acknowledge the wisdom and intricate knowledge of the land and the environment that belongs to indigenous peoples. And through this acknowledging, the violence that took place and continues to take place, severing native peoples from their home lands.
I hope maybe this post inspires you to do some research on your food and indigenous wisdom related to foods. Here are some further sources for reading and watching:
Recipes by Sean Sherman in NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/dining/indigenous-people-food-cookbook.html
Bodirksy and Johnson. 2008. Decolonizing Diet: Healing by Reclaiming Traditional Indigenous Foodways. Cuizine. 1(1).
Calvo, L. and C.R. Esquibel. 2017. Tortilleras, testimonios, y recetas: Decolonial Foodways from the Mexico-US Borderlands. Chapter 7 in Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements edited by Pena, D., L. Calvo, P. McFarland, G. Valle. (4/5)
Wild Blackberry Pie
Crust:
2 sticks butter (1 cup), cut into small cubes and frozen for 10 minutes
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 to 1/2 cup ice water
Filling:
6 cups of fresh or frozen blackberries
2/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons flour
pinch of salt
Instruction:
For the crust, combine flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Using a fork or pastry cutter, cut in the frozen butter chunks until pea sized. Slowly add the ice water a little at a time, moistening the flour until you can squeeze the flour/butter/ water mixture into a ball that loosely holds together.
Separate the dough into two discs, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for an hour or freeze for half an hour.
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine blackberries, sugar, corn starch, salt, and flour in a separate mixing bowl.
Roll out one of the dough discs and place in pie pan. Add filling. Roll out second disk and place over top, crimp edges, and cut some holes in the top so air can escape.
If you want your pie real pretty, combine on egg and a splash of water and brush this egg wash mixture on top of your pie.
Bake at 425 for 20 minutes then reduce oven to 375 and bake for another 30 to 40 minutes, until crust is brown and filling is bubbling. Wait for pie to cool to serve (it will be easier to cut this way).
