Okra Is Oh So Global

The world is blessed with a bounty of poetry about okra, and this does not surprise me in the slightest. The verses run the gamut from the ridiculous (musings on its mucilaginous texture and the polarizing nature thereof) to the reverent (reflections on okra as a totem of survival, every last syllable both earnest and earned). Okra doesn’t just happen by accident; you either have to be in a place that embraces it, or you have to will it into your life because you have realized you cannot be your full self without this singular and perfect plant.

“Whenever I see okra popping up, it is a way for me to connect with my ancestors. Really, that’s how deep it is,” Pierre Thiam, chef and author of the upcoming cookbook Simply West African, tells me on a recent phone call. Thiam and I had met a few years back, and when he told me that okra is his favorite food, I showed him the flowering red okra stem I have tattooed on the back of my left arm. It started a conversation I hope will go on for ages. “Okra is spiritual, and that’s why it’s not for everyone,” Thiam says. “Many are called, but few are chosen. I feel that way when I see people who don’t like okra. I feel bad for them. I’m like, ‘Oh, sorry, more for me.’”

The genetic and geographic trail of okra is as slippery as its insides. This member of the mallow family (which includes hibiscus, marsh mallow, cotton, and hollyhock) was once in the genus Hibiscus before it was reclassified as Abelmoschus in the 18th century. And though okra’s genesis was once widely assumed to be in tropical West Africa, Jessica B. Harris (a food historian and author, and as close to a professional okra-ologist as exists on this earth) related in an essay for 64 Parishes that northeastern Africa’s Upper Nile Valley (modern-day Ethiopia, Sudan, and Eritrea), where okra grows wild and free, is a more likely point of origin — though scholars from Southeast Asia and South Asia surely would like their chance to stir that pot.

Vishwesh Bhatt, an Oxford, Mississippi–based chef born in Gujarat, India, confesses in his 2022 cookbook I Am From Here that for a very long time, he was under the impression that okra was native to India. “I once even tried to argue that with a friend from Senegal. (I lost.) I may be forgiven for being misinformed, given that okra is a staple across India.” If it’s of any consolation to Bhatt, in 2021, India produced 59.7% of the world’s okra, and the late culinary historian Karen Hess once wrote that okra came to India “so early that it is very nearly regarded there as being indigenous.”

At some point, okra made its way to Egypt, where its presence as a cultivated crop was documented in 1216 by Spanish-born botanist, pharmacist, and theologian Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Mufarrij bin Abdillah. His protégé Ibn al-Baytar went on to quote an unnamed source as saying it had few nutritive properties, produced blood that is “bad,” and agreed only with people of a “hot temperament,” though this harm could be averted with “a lot of hot spices.” (Let the record show that okra does nothing of the kind. In fact, in recent years, okra has been cited by the National Library of Medicine as having the potential to help people with diabetes and digestive issues.) There’s a reason Harris refers to okra as “the Rodney Dangerfield of vegetables” — the lack of respect is a centuries-old historical fact, perhaps as much a referendum on okra eaters as it is on the foodstuff itself.

Ships bearing human beings who were stolen from their homes also almost certainly brought okra seeds across the Atlantic along with them. Accounts vary as to the method; farmer and author Leah Penniman dedicates her book Farming While Black to “our ancestral grandmothers, who braided seeds in their hair before being forced to board transatlantic slave ships, believing against the odds in a future of sovereignty on land.”

Enslaved Black women’s labor and knowledge made a seismic impact on the cuisine of the cultures they’d been subjugated to serve. The next major historical documentation of okra showed it growing in Brazil alongside other African crops like sesame and spider plants. This wasn’t by chance; traffickers were concerned solely with keeping their captives (over 5 million of them) fueled by inexpensive foods that they would eat.

Okra was familiar to them, and it grew well in the climate, so it went into the ground and the rations—and into the sustenance and spirituality of the nation where it had been transplanted. Each June 24 and 29, Black Brazilian practitioners of Candomblé, a religion of the African diaspora, make okra-based amalá de Xangô to celebrate the god of justice, fire, and equilibrium, placing 12 whole pods around the perimeter of the dish to evoke a crown. Okra may be sacred, but it is not precious, and to this day, it’s a staple in everyday Brazilian dishes like caruru and frango com quiabo.

It’s safe to assume okra’s path from Brazil and Africa to the rest of the Americas was also laid by the passage of African people. In the 1700s, there are historical mentions of okra being grown in the slave gardens of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and being served in Philadelphia’s pepper pot — a close kin to West African and Caribbean stews. Cookbooks in the 1880s attributed okra-centric recipes to white women deemed homekeeping experts. Who do we think taught them its pleasures?

From 1936 to 1938, the Works Progress Administration tasked workers to interview formerly enslaved people throughout the South and Appalachia, and time and time again, octogenarians like Prince Bee, Lou Smith, and Lizzie Farmer invoked “coffee” made of parched okra seeds, and meals of okra served with meager meat like hog jowl and possum, made palatable, even pleasurable, by hands used to making the most from what little they were given. Gumbo — a word that is derived from ki ngombo, the word for okra in several West African languages — lies cheek-by-jowl with the identity of Louisiana, and South Carolina’s Lowcountry would be so lessened by the absence of okra-packed pilau. For so many souls, okra stands for endurance. For survival. For joy in the face of long and terrible odds.

I could practically hear Thiam grinning over the phone as he told me about the food he’d grown up eating. He makes his home in California now with his wife, Lisa, and their three-year-old daughter, Na’ia, whom they are raising to be an okra lover like them. Thiam is from Senegal, and Lisa is from Japan, and “We’re both just crazy for okra. That’s the ingredient that unites us in this family.” He describes a Japanese natto okra dish that all three love, as well as his favorite way to share it — in an okra stew as fundamental to him as mother’s milk, rich with smoked fish and palm oil — and I think we’re both about to gnaw on our phones.

He laments that he’s been unable to successfully grow okra where he’s living, and I tell him how there are okra flowers blooming year-round in an AeroGarden in my Brooklyn hallway because I can’t stand to be without them. I offer to mail him some seeds — my favorite Jing Orange, Red Burgundy, and Bowling Red varieties — so he can grow them with Na’ia, and he says yes. We both just know he’ll find a way to make them sing.

Okra recipes