Life of Spice: Pepper
By Dani, Apprentice 2020
Farm to table is an inspiring movement whose time has come. As anxiety about our environment and health increases, awareness is spreading about the impact our diet has on not just own well-being, but the well-being and future of the entire planet. Alarms are going off worldwide. Our eyes are opening. People everywhere are waking up. We’re waking up… and eating breakfast.
Eating Black Pepper
It’s a typical morning in the conscious kitchens of North America. Today’s special is one of my favorites, a spinach omelet with caramelized onions and a side of roasted potatoes. The eggs are from a permaculture farm’s weekly CSA box, the onions and potatoes from the local farmers’ market, and the spinach is from the garden in the backyard. The omelet slides off the skillet, smothered in rich butter from a small scale dairy farm nearby. The potatoes, piping hot from the oven, make a great companion on the plate. It’s a mouthwatering sight, dotted with black pepper for a little bit of spice.
Mmmmmm, pepper: king of the spices, maker of meals, creator of cuisine. The pepper in our breakfast today came from… somewhere. Somewhere local? Probably not. Spices are the sorcery of every meal, turning bland into brilliant, mediocre to magical. Most of us are blessed with a diet full of spice, but when we talk about eating local, the spice rack often gets overlooked. One way we can work towards restoring the health of our bodies, our minds, our society, and our home planet is to bring more awareness into our diets. Think local. Practice permaculture. Eat farm to table. We hear these terms all the time now, but while people talk about where the eggs on their breakfast table came from, what about the pepper on the eggs?
Black pepper is consumed more than all other spices put together. It sits next to salt on the tables in every diner in America and in most people’s homes. It is hard to imagine a kitchen without pepper, but it hasn’t always been this way. The globalization of food has been happening for so long, a lot of us are completely unaware of which foods are native to where. Chickens originally came from the jungle. Asia used to be without chilies, Italy without tomatoes. What does eating local mean, and how long has it been since people actually ate that way? We’re making big efforts to be conscious consumers, but how often do we stop and appreciate the spice in our lives?
Origins of Black Pepper
Pepper is native to India and is one of the spices that sparked the global spice trade and in turn the globalization of food. Pepper has been traded for thousands of years, and there are even references to pepper found in Egypt from 2600 B.C. For centuries, it spun the wheels of the trade world and brought wealth to many merchants, and it wasn’t only a way of making money. Pepper itself became money and served as hard currency throughout much of the middle ages. In some places, people’s wealth could actually be judged by their pepper assets. Imagine if they could see the casual way in which it is consumed today.
The Value of Black Pepper
Currently, the average price of pepper across the globe is $4.34 per kilogram. These days, Vietnam is the leading country in pepper production, producing about one-third of the world’s pepper. It’s followed by India. Vietnam is also the leading consumer of pepper at 166 thousand tons per year. Again, India follows at 88 thousand tons. That makes sense, right? The places producing pepper are consuming it, local eating. The third biggest consumer of pepper is the USA at 68 thousand tons per year. That is a lot of pepper for a place that doesn’t produce any. On Amazon, a kilogram of McCormick’s Whole Black Pepper costs about $30. The biggest cost in pepper production is labor, but the average price farmers collect for pepper is just $2-$4 per kilogram.
Farm to Table Spices
Understanding where things grow, how they are processed, and who grows them is one way to create a deeper appreciation and understanding of the food we eat and nourish our connection to the earth from which it grows. Trying to live a life embodying permaculture values at Rancho Mastatal has given me a wonderful opportunity to see how different foods are grown and processed. Until recently, I had definitely taken spices for granted. My experience with pepper here has led to reflection on the spice in my life and an appreciation for the sources behind the sorcery. So how does pepper get from the farm to our table?
That black pepper on our omelet and potatoes is from a fruit, often referred to as a berry or peppercorn. It grows on a tropical climbing bush, and the white pepper in so many well-loved curries comes from the same plant. The pepper plant is a vine grown best on a living post, from small bushes to massive trees. Here at the ranch, we grow pepper on Gliricidia sepium, (known as madero negro in Costa Rica) a nitrogen fixing tree. Pepper has its origins in forest ecosystems, so it is a fitting plant for a permaculture food forest in the tropics.
How to care for your Black Pepper plant
To maximize yields, pepper plants need to be pruned properly. Once the vine is at least 8 nodes tall, it can be pruned from 3-4 nodes up from the base of the vine, just above a node. After pruning, the plant will send up two new shoots, and the vine cutting can be propagated by placing the stem in soil where it will grow new roots. People have given pepper new roots all over the world. Global trade increased the demand for pepper and sparked efforts to grow it in tropical places across the globe. Now, pepper is grown in 26 different countries, including Costa Rica.
Red Pepper and Green Pepper
White Pepper and Black Pepper
How to Process Peppercorns
The first time I had pepper that was farm to table was here at Rancho Mastatal where we spent a day harvesting and processing pepper. Pepper is ready to harvest once one of the fruits in a bunch has turned red. First, the we collected the peppercorns in bunches and took them off the branches. We then separated the red berries from the green ones. The red berries become white pepper by soaking them in water for a day and peeling off the red flesh to reveal the white seeds. The seeds are then dried to make the white pepper on our spice racks.
The green berries we picked were destined to become black pepper. We blanched these for 1-2 minutes which starts an enzymatic reaction that turns the pepper black. Then we spread them on a drying rack. They can either be sun-dried, or you can use a dehydrator. Pepper dries to one-third of its weight.
Though the steps may seem simple, this was a very labor intensive process. It took seven of us 3 hours to harvest and process 4.5kg of pepper which dried down to 1.5 kg of pepper. This is about 40 dollars’ worth of pepper. It is truly a wonder that pepper is relatively inexpensive and so readily available. I wonder how many working hands and how many miles it has taken to bring pepper to my meals all these years.
Farm to Table Black Pepper
Farm to table has become a mainstream movement, and the growing awareness about the connection between our health and the well-being of our planet in relation to our diets is such a positive shift in our consciousness. But how would all those amazing farm fresh, local foods taste without spices? What would our omelet be without the king of spice itself?
Permaculture & Spices
While I don’t think people should go into their kitchens and empty their spice racks, I do think it’s important to appreciate all the resources and labor that go into every food we eat as well as understand the history of how it got from the forest to our table. Part of the word permaculture is culture, and it is incredible how pepper affected cultures everywhere and added to a permanent globalization of foods. It influenced the way people prepare, experience, and appreciate food. It changed people’s tastes. It changed cultures’ cuisines. Pepper was a powerful initiator in the transition away from eating local. With the globalization of our diets going back millenniums, what does it mean to truly eat local these days? As I continue to live my life of spice, I will keep asking these questions.
Hope you have a better understanding of the process of black pepper and how it gets from the vine to your grinder.
Speaking of spice… check out our past blog posts about vanilla!
And stay tuned for Dani’s next article on Life of Spice, featuring cinnamon!
Sources and Further Reading
Heinerman’s Encyclopedia of Healing Herbs and Spices by John Heinerman
Black Pepper- Piper Nigrum edited by P.N. Ravindran
Spices – A Global History by Fred Czarra