Weeds are Herbs: Botanic Arts of Foraging, Classifying, and Cooking

As a continuation of our attempt to use our cover images to stimulate STS to reach out toward interdisciplinary dialogue, as we did with “Dialogue across Borders: Angela Su’s Chimeric Antibodies” (14.4), in this issue we are delighted to present a brief yet meaningful exchange between Zo Lin, one member of the boundary-crossing artist/activist duo “Weed Day”, and our cover team member En-Chieh Chao, an anthropologist and STSer based in Southern Taiwan. Taken shortly before the opening of the Taipei Biennial 2020, which we featured in Issue 15.1, the images chosen for the present issue are timely and, echoing the cover and theme of nature/culture on the development of Southeast Asian urban landscapes (15.2), amazingly appropriate as visual threads for readers to think along.

—EASTS Editorial Office

As environmentalists, artists, and foragers, Zo Lin and Tiffany Lay go by the name “Weed Day” (雜草稍慢), the word “Day” being a homophone of the Taiwanese word for “tea” (tê). Founded in 2014, Weed Day advocates that weeds are part of the nature around us and has launched various workshops about tea-making with weeds, notably at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab. The two artists were also invited to hold an on-site workshop at the Taipei Biennial 2020. Their recent art exhibitions include “Unusual Dishes”' (Kaohsiung, 2019), “Ki-pataw: Witches-Brewed Tea” (Taipei, 2019), and “Nurtured by Mother Earth” (Taichung, 2020). Tea-making with weeds amounts to a biodiversity project and a protest at herbicide abuse that’s polluting the land. Every time Lin and Lay make tea, they utilize more than 20 types of site-specific plants to show the botanic diversity within the city. Lin embraced this vocation of weed-gathering after quitting her previous job as a graphic designer at a publicly listed company in 2014. She started learning the art of tea-making in 2015 after an epiphanic encounter with the carcass of a land crab that had possibly died from herbicide poisoning. Lay is a tea lover who devotes herself to fermenting and cooking weeds, as well as making hand-made paper. For Lin and Lay, weeds are herbs, rather than a useless nuisance to be eradicated. Weeds, even those on an overgrown urban street corner, may have medical or culinary uses. They can treat stomach aches, help people sleep, or be used in salads and teas.The following is an exchange on Weed Day’s “Nurtured by Mother Earth” exhibition, an imageof which we have adopted as the cover of this issue.

En-Chieh Chao: In this exhibition, why do you keep weeds inside Petri dishes? Is this to create a sort of “medical” and “scientific” feeling? Also, why do you juxtapose calligraphy here? Zo Lin: Nowadays medical science rarely studies the weed itself; what they are interested in is its specific ingredients that have medical effects and can be developed into some kinds of medicine. This way they can control the quality of herbal products, and it is more efficient and profitable for commercial purposes. When people get sick and take medicine, we probably forget that the origin of medicine comes from plants in nature. In ancient times when medical resources were not available, people were more resourceful about the herbs around them.

When it comes to the imagery of the Petri dish [literally “a dish that cultivates” in Chinese], the concept I want to bring up is one of “cultivating”, or “attending to.” The least attended-to things, such as weeds, are actually worthy of our respect and study.

I regularly write down the names of weeds in calligraphy. In olden times the prescriptions for herbal medicine were written with brushes. In this exhibition we also write down each plant’s Family and Genus based on the Western classification of botanics. And also because I personally love writing calligraphy with a brush.

En-Chieh Chao: The idea of the Petri dish is really interesting. In a laboratory, whatever is inside a petri dish is something humans want to pay close attention to. By contrast, weeds are things to get rid of, and usually no one thinks they are worthy of attention. To put weeds inside petri dishes is to reverse these assumptions. With artsy calligraphy side by side with the scientific Family and Genus, is this a way of merging different epistemological perspectives?

Zo Lin: Yes. I do want them to bring about different ways of knowing. With a particular plant, I often purposely write down different nicknames of the same plant in calligraphy, but their scientific names remain the same.

En-Chieh Chao: Besides the exhibition, our cover also features the yellow drink you brew as the background. Can you tell us more about it?

Zo Lin: Oh, that is natural root beer made by Tiffany with fermented turmeric and fennel. Interestingly, we have a garden, where turmeric is wildly overgrown, so vibrant just like weeds. We gather turmeric plants and use them to ferment other things. We want to use overgrown turmeric well, just like we want to learn about weeds and make weeds part of our lives.

‍

For Weed Day, life is a combination of arts and experiments with plants. Feeling what plants can feel implies not only a thought experiment but also a bodily practice of seizing our fleeting thoughts with tiny, everyday objects. In addition to the ethnographic accounts of urban ecologies presented in this issue, through this exchange we hope readers to seek out from here ethnography beyond the human, notably Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013).