Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words + Photography - Lune Ames

Every October, I look forward to eating persimmons at my family’s farm in Cato, Indiana. I like that I don’t have to hunt; the soft, orange-purplish fruits are just there, on the corner of the driveway amongst the crunchy autumn leaves. Surrounded by corn and soybean fields, two pop-up campers are parked where my grandmother’s childhood home once stood. Now, we only visit the farm. Over half of the 475 acres are industrially-farmed, but meadows and forests grow, too. Last fall, my Granmom wanted to preserve the pulp of persimmons for baking bread like her mother used to, so my Grandad and dad set out to collect them. Only then did I realize that they never invited me to forage with them before. They were in the know and I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. 

On that Saturday afternoon, I set out to find the cherry-sized fruits on a four-wheeler with my spouse, Josh. About a quarter mile away from the campers, I noticed a grove of persimmon trees on the forest's edge off the dirt road. We gathered dozens and dozens, leaving thousands still for the deer, wild turkey, and other woodland creatures. When we returned to show my family, they were astonished. I felt proud. My Grandad and dad spent that evening sieving pulp through a colander to remove seeds and skins. The next morning, Josh and I drove thirteen hours back home to Montclair, New Jersey with a bag of fresh persimmons and a Tupperware of pulp. I froze the pulp right away and shared some persimmons with my neighbors. The rest of the bounty remained in the fridge. I felt anxious every time I opened the fridge door to find the bag of muddied, squished fruits. I hadn’t a clue what to do with them—I had just wanted to get them. After a few weeks, mold took over, so I threw them out.

American persimmons, Diospyros virginiana, are too soft for widespread distribution, unlike the popular Chinese and Japanese varieties sold in grocery stores. Still, they are treasured in Midwestern and Southern cuisines. They were a staple for colonists and enslaved Africans on southern plantations, and before European colonists arrived, Native Americans incorporated the fruit in breads, pudding, and beer, and understood its medicinal properties. The word “persimmon” stems from Algonquin putchamin which may come from the Cree word pasiminan, meaning “dried fruit.” Since the persimmon is not grown in orchards, it is not included in almanacs or gardening calendars. The persimmon blurs the boundaries of “agriculture” and “nature.” Picked from a branch, a ripe persimmon is inedible. It is only palatable when overripened, after the first frost, when it falls to the ground and rots for a few days in a blanket of autumn leaves. This process is known as bletting. Decaying transforms bitter into sweet. 

Persimmon trees grow on the farm among pesticides and fertilizers and who-knows-what-else from over a century of coal mining. We don’t eat the corn and soybean crops from the land, for they are leased to local farmers. Only on the edges of the fields and forests, where the persimmon trees flourish, do we take food. I have been eating these rotted persimmons for decades, and my gut has begun to digest the truths of this land’s complex histories.

Lore says that the shape of a persimmon seed predicts winter, but I think its guidance disrupts our very relationship with time. In early March, before the coronavirus quarantine, I baked my first persimmon bread with the frozen pulp from October. It felt like my second chance at honoring the fruit, after letting it completely rot the first time. Afterward, I walked a mile from my apartment in downtown Montclair to Van Vleck Gardens. Surrounded by newly budding branches, I noticed a sign under a small, willow-like tree: “Weeping American Persimmon - Diospyros virginiana.” I gasped and thought, “This tree looks nothing like an American persimmon.” I wondered if it was a hybrid, and I planned to ask the gardener on my next visit, not realizing that next time didn’t exist, or would be in a different, inconceivable era. I touched the young tree’s petite branches and thought of its uses: nutritional, medicinal, spiritual. As with the persimmon, food, science, and spirituality need not be disparate. The pandemic stirred a sense of urgency and possibility for redesigning social systems. I felt as if the persimmons had been preparing me for this, as a model for rotting well—generating sweetness from the decay—in this new season.

The next month I strolled to the gardens to visit the persimmon tree again. I needed its company. Tens of thousands had died in the region, people I knew. Perhaps this collective grief could rest in the shade of its branches. Before I left, I defrosted a slice of persimmon bread I had saved. I ate it as some kind of offering, not sure to who or for what, perhaps just to the persimmon’s process of bletting itself. The public garden gates were closed, as to be expected. I walked along the perimeter from the outside. As I stood at the corner, I noticed it was shorter than I remembered, still just a sapling only a little bit taller than me. Its buds weren’t yet visible, but this dormancy offered some kind of deferred hope. Through the iron fence, the naked weeping tree mirrored the posture of my heart.