Ginger: A Root to Connect You to Your World

“For what…are the principal conditions of earthly happiness? One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be severed, that is, that he shall be able to see the sky above him, and that he shall be able to enjoy the sunshine, the pure air, the fields with their verdure, their multitudinous life. Men have always regarded it as a great unhappiness to be deprived of all these things.” — Leo Tolstoy, My Religion “There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Michael’s note: I asked Drew to write a marketing article for ginger. It was all about wild things, wonder, and the good life. When we told him to try again he added a new beginning and the last paragraph. 🙄

Marketing is difficult. It is not my nature. I am a beekeeper. I’m only here because I took issue with a lack of meaningful, healthy innovation in consumer goods. The goal of marketing is to sell you something. Usually something you don’t need that distracts from truer sources of happiness. And aren’t we, as a people, kinda tired of BS in pursuit of your dollar?

To bring a common wellness industry sales pitch to you I’d have to forgo my values, my hopes for you, me, and this ol’ world. I would prefer not to. Excess consumerism will not remedy what is unsettled in us. You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want anyway.

I hope you try our Ginger Yowzers. Honey is best when contrasted with the best of worldly agriculture. Unlike our competitors, I can speak to the agriculture behind our products. I am there. I am there amid the bees’ industry. I am there during honey extraction, insisting upon a slower process with no heat or fine filtering. It results in a better honey more representative of southern New England ecology.

If you decide Ginger Yowzers ain’t for you I still hope we realize good things, together.

If you do want marketing above all and the value of you for your dollar plenty of companies are selling that. In the words of Bob Dylan, it ain’t me, babe.

Now, to ginger.

Few plants have connected the world’s kitchens and cultures more than ginger. As I wrote on our Ginger Yowzers label, “Ginger is the universal herb. Healers and chefs across continents, civilizations and time celebrate ginger. No other plant bridges so many barriers—cultural, historic, geographic, food and medicine, Western and Eastern, science and folk remedy…”

What I didn’t know when I wrote the above is ginger’s strange botanical tale.

Ginger cannot reproduce by itself. Now with italics–ginger cannot reproduce by itself!?! It produces flowers but they rarely or never produce fertile seeds.

This puts ginger, and the humans who love it, in a possible bind. Ginger has lost the ability to reproduce sexually–the way about 95% of animals, plants and fungi reproduce. Sexual reproduction is mighty good at shuffling genes. The offspring of sexual reproduction are new recombinations with more genetic variation. This leads to more varied bodies, physiology, and behavior. The environment selects what works best. Variation provides an evolutionary advantage, particularly when new threats emerge, be it climate change, pathogens, or predators.

The other 5% of species reproduce asexually. They basically clone themselves. Ginger doesn’t do this either. Ginger reproduces vegetatively. Humans propagate ginger by cutting off and planting a small piece of rhizome–a modified plant stem that grows underground. Each new plant is genetically identical to the parent. All ginger in the world today is part of a big clone family.

How did this come to be? We don’t know. We don’t even know the wild ancestor from which early humans domesticated ginger. Scientists have searched throughout southeast Asia. Some botanists speculate that ginger’s wild ancestor may have gone extinct as humans razed tropical forests.

Early humans domesticated an unidentified wild ancestor by selecting for the traits humans love–larger, less fibrous, more aromatic and tasty rhizomes. Genetic codes are complex. Sometimes other traits are woven into the genetic code of the traits we intend to select. Humans selecting for tasty rhizomes may have somehow disrupted the genes that govern sexual reproduction.

Gene sequencing shows that ginger has extremely low genetic diversity. This could be perilous. If a pathogen were to attack ginger, there would be little variation in the population and so less chance of a resistant variant. Pathogens can wipe out species with robust variation. There were once 4 billion American chestnut trees in North America. Their blooms provided a bounty to pollinators. Chestnuts were the base of forest food webs. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” was cherished enough to make it into the American songbook. A fungus native to Asia killed all but four known American chestnuts. Four. Without the diligent labors of scientists the American chestnut would go extinct.

What does all this mean? I do not know. Maybe that is our clue–to move humbly and reverently alongside all we do not know yet upon which we rely.

Ginger offers us an opportunity to connect with nature. Ginger, like a lot of tasty things we love to eat, is a fruit of tropical agriculture. It requires a longer growing season than we have in southern New England. To grow ginger here, you begin indoors in winter.

Growing tropical plants in New England isn’t profitable, so why do it? Do it because nature is good for the soul.

Americans are struggling. A lot of statistics of mental wellbeing are trending the wrong way. I feel it in me. Rates of psychiatric medication use and talk therapy are rising. Treatment for anxiety in adolescents has surged to unprecedented levels. For many this is enormously helpful, even life-saving. But we commonly overlook another source of healing–time in nature. It costs little, is pleasurable and the side effects are positive.

When Roger Ulrich toured a Philadelphia hospital wing with patients recovering from gallbladder surgery, he noticed an ongoing natural experiment. Half of the ward’s beds had a modest window view of some trees and shrubs. The other half of the ward’s beds had a window facing a brick wall of another hospital wing. Ulrich wondered whether exposure to nature–modest as it was–might affect healing. He found that patients with a modest view of nature recovered about a day earlier. The patients reported less pain and took less pain medication. Ulrich theorized that exposure to nature measurably reduces stress, which speeds recovery.^[1]

Nature is more than just bodily healing. Nature can make you think better. A team of researchers led by Marc Berman gave participants a difficult memory recall task called the backwards digit span task. You hear numbers in sequence–3,8,4. You then repeat them backwards–4,8,3. Then they add a fourth digit. It gets hard. After the baseline testing each group was given a map they followed on one of two routes. One route went through busy downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. The other went through the Ann Arbor Arboretum. When people returned from their walk they were tested again.

The performance of participants who walked through downtown Ann Arbor did not change. The participants that walked through nature improved their ability on the backward digit recall by 20%.^[2] And that ain’t the kicker! There was little correlation between how much people liked the walk and their improved performance. Researchers sent people out in below freezing temps in the Michigan winter. The participants on the nature walk reported being cold and generally disliking their walk. But they showed the same improvement as people who walked on a beautiful late-May day. You don’t have to enjoy nature to benefit from time in nature! To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau in Walking, “in wildness is the preservation of the mind.”

A large review of many studies found that indoor plants can reduce blood pressure, lower stress hormones in the blood and even benefit academic achievement.^[3]

Before we lived in boxes nature was everpresent. There was no door for nature to be outside of. We are a deeply naturalistic species. Humans that could derive more meaning and useful materials from nature outcompeted humans with lesser naturalistic inclination and ability. We are the heirs of this inclination and aptitude.

Bring nature to you. Grow the plants you love, be it chocolate, vanilla, coffee, or ginger. Cultivation is a moment to slow, to be here, with this living thing. Don’t fret about the particulars. Focus on three variables- 1) sunlight, 2) growing medium, 3) temp and humidity. Do your best. Even in failure you learn and are with wild things. Observe what your plant friend tells you. We know plant health even if we know nothing about plants. It is our nature.

The sights, the smells, the touch of life sprouting from rich tropical earth is delightful, especially amid a long, dark winter. Intent observation is not only cognitively pleasurable, you can mark days in your plant’s triumphs. Last Monday, my vanilla plants, Gwyneth 2-13, sent out new epiphytic shoots. As I ate breakfast beside Gwyn 2-13, we both reveled in our triumph.

Hold up! The wonderful team at DHB reminded me that I am supposed to be selling you things. Consumerism!–the highest of the human virtues! If ever you think your ginger foodstuff lacks a ginger punch, go with the team who, when deciding “how gingery?” settled on, “Yowzers.”

¹ Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420-421. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402

² Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207-1212. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02225.x

³ Han, K.-T., Ruan, L.-W., & Liao, L.-S. (2022). Effects of indoor plants on human functions: A systematic review with meta-analyses. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(12), 7454. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19127454