The weekend after Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving please) last year, I found myself back in Toronto after months away from home. I hadn't been home longer than two weeks at a time since July of that year. It had truly been a summer of "post-pandemic travel", but a season of patio dinners and summer evenings had finally come to a close, and it was simply time to bundle up and settle down. I decided to get off the internet, take a bunch of Fridays off, stock up my pantry, and become a tender herb person. A tender herb person could be someone, say perhaps, a woman who has been working from home for approximately one (1) lifetime, physically incapable of eating the same dinner two nights in a row, someone who at any point of time could open up her fridge to find fresh sage and think okay, yeah, I’m going to make butternut squash sage pasta for dinner, and then make butternut squash sage pasta for dinner. A tender herb person does not have a herbless kitchen. She does not throw away slimy bunches of coriander on a near weekly basis. She doesn’t eat dal without coriander, salad without parsley, an omelette without chives, tuna without dill. A tender herb is chic, type A but not try hard, and she always eats well and entertains even better.
So I was not a tender herb person. But in my defense, I am but one woman living by myself in a world that hates single people. The great minds of this generation have somehow managed to build internet powered toasters and robot vacuums but can I walk into a store to buy TWO stalks of mint just because that's all I need? This is impossible, apparently.
I suppose sometimes you simply have to submit to the reality of the world we inhabit, and it turns out that this is one in which all too easy to end up with a whole lot of herbs that threaten to turn to rot the minute you look away. So you do your best, you use a little bit here, a little bit there, and then eventually throw the rest out because it’s gone bad and then you get can just some more because what the hell, it’s a couple of dollars, and you apparently have more important things to do than tend to your herbs. But in the fall of 2021, I apparently, did not.
~
In a world of aggravating selfishness, it seems a little counterintuitive to even posit that we lack love for ourselves. We live in a society that rewards us for hyper-fixating on ourselves over our people, bombards us with constant encouragements to indulge ourselves, to treat ourselves because it's Friday, because it's Wednesday, because it rained today, because the weather is so good today. We're told to put ourselves first, to cancel plans the minute we don't feel like going anymore, to say fuck you to anyone who dares cross us, to take up our space and reclaim our time, and we do it all in fact, heartily and righteously, and then wonder why something still doesn't feel right. But the truth is that selfishness is not the same as self-love but in fact the antithesis of it. The truth is that even as we are selfish, we are also our harshest critics and coldest bullies before we drown out the noise with a useless dose of whatever the hell we are calling self-care these days.
In All About Love, Hooks says that “when we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing these qualities, or...extend them to ourselves”. This idea is simple and powerful, but hard to digest because it means that while selfishness is quick and dirty, self-love, ultimately—is work. To have true love for the self is to persist in the belief that we have the capacity to invent our lives and shape our destinies, and more importantly, that we are worth the work. Self-love is less a series of easy fleeting highs strung together one day after the other, and more act of tending to the self, giving it deep nourishment and tender care, a love that can exist separate from the validation of others, and thrive in any season, weather any storm.
~
Here is how you become a tender herb person. Swirl your herbs in a bowl of cold water to loosen any dirt and then dry them with a kitchen towel (surface debris can accelerate decay). Once fully dry, cut off the bases, remove any wilted leaves. Fill a jar with an inch of water and store upright. Cover the top to the jar with a ziploc bag, seal with an elastic band and store in the refrigerator. Enjoy the fruits of your labour for weeks, and weeks, and weeks.
Tender herbs ask of us a little attention, a little meticulous care, maybe an hour spent painstakingly drying them because you refuse to buy a salad spinner (salad spinners are for people who live in the suburbs). But if you give them that, they feed you forever. Suddenly, your soups have flavour, your salads aren't boring, your dinners hit different. Now, I use month old parsley in my tabbouleh. I have a dill and feta omelette on rotation for iftars, and I top off every lentil stew and bowl of rajma with dhania. I eat well, and I entertain even better, if I do say so myself. I’m still working on the rest, but mostly, I'm working on treating my brain with the tenderness that I do the three dollar bunch of the not-organic dill that I got from the corner store last month.
Herbivorously pallatable! Nice 👍