Amaranthus: They One They Tried to Burn

No. 1

Before we get into the plant, understand this: amaranthus didn't just travel. It survived attempts to destroy it. Twice. On two different continents. By two different empires. And it's still here — growing in backyards in Richmond, on farms in the Caribbean, in markets across West Africa, on grocery shelves labeled "ancient grain superfood" with absolutely no mention of everything it went through to get there.

That's the plant we're starting with.

Where It Started

Amaranth domestication began around 6,000 years ago in the Balsas River valley of South and Central America. For thousands of years it was one of the most important plants on earth. Not just as food — as identity. As ceremony. As power. Brian D. Colwell

The Aztecs reportedly received up to 80% of their caloric consumption from amaranth prior to Spanish conquest. Think about that number. This was not a side crop. This was the foundation. Amaranth fed empires. Lexiconoffood

Known as huauhtli in Nahuatl-speaking Mesoamerica, it was popped like popcorn over fire, crafted into delicacy, and used in spiritual ceremonies. The Aztecs called it the "grain of the gods" — it symbolized divine flesh, complementing maize, which represented the human body. The food, the spirit, the community — these were not separate things. The plant sat at the center of all of it. HistoricalMXCenterfortraditionalmedicine

During festivals honoring the war god Huitzilopochtli, 200,000 people annually consumed 3tzoalli* — statues made from amaranth seeds and honey, shaped into the forms of deities, broken apart and shared among the community. To eat the amaranth was to participate in something sacred. To grow it was to be connected to your people, your land, your gods. Brian D. Colwell

Which is exactly why the Spanish destroyed it.

The First Erasure

When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mesoamerica, they immediately recognized the spiritual significance of amaranth and saw it as a threat to Christianity. They forbade its cultivation, burned fields, and cut off the hands of farmers to discourage its future use. berkeleyLexiconoffood

Don't breeze past that, read that again.

They cut off the hands of farmers.

This was not about agriculture. This was about breaking a people's connection to something that made them whole. The Spanish understood what the colonized always understand before the colonized do — that food is not just sustenance. It is memory. It is identity. It is the thing that tells you who you are when someone is trying to make you forget.

Over time amaranth was mostly replaced by grains like wheat and leafy greens like spinach. Yet the plant was not eradicated. It has been kept alive through a chain of human hands.

Substack

That chain of hands is the whole story.

How It Got to Africa

Although amaranth never took root in Europe after the Spanish invasion, it quickly spread through Africa, gaining strong popularity among many cultures and becoming a staple grain across the continent. By 1620, it had spread through sub-Saharan Africa via trade networks carried by 1Hausa merchants* — traveling routes thousands of miles long. LondonfreedomseedbankBrian D. Colwell

African communities didn't just receive amaranth. They claimed it. Vegetable amaranths became arguably the most widely eaten boiled greens throughout Africa's humid lowlands. The leaves are rich in proteins, iron, calcium, zinc, vitamin C, and vitamin A. All parts of the plant came to be used as medicine in African communities. During the production season, the leaves provided African communities with at least a quarter of their daily protein. In parts of West Africa, young seedlings were pulled up by the roots and sold in town markets. National Academies + 2

In Congo it became bitekuteku. In Ghana, madze. In Nigeria, efo. In Malawi, bonongwe. Every name a different community saying: this plant is ours now. We know what to do with it.

By the time the transatlantic slave trade began, amaranth was fully integrated into West and Central African food culture. It was not foreign. It was home.

The Crossing

Dozens of Africa's cultivated plants made their way to the Americas as provisions on slave ships. Africans also braided seeds and grains into their hair to bring their foods with them as a way of survival. The Natural Farmer

Sit with that image for a moment. Seeds braided into hair. In the middle of the most brutal forced migration in human history — 12.5 million people across an estimated 30,000 voyages — people found a way to carry the seeds.

Because they understood, in their bodies, that food knowledge was survival. That if they could get the seeds to the other side, they could feed themselves. They could remain themselves.

Old World crops entered the Americas as provisions on slave ships and were planted by enslaved Africans in their home gardens, known as the "Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed." That name deserves its own paragraph.

The Botanical Gardens of the Dispossessed.

The places where people who owned nothing — not their labor, not their children, not their own bodies — grew food from seeds they had carried across an ocean and cultivated on the scraps of land they were given. springer

2Provision grounds* — small tracts of the least desired land — were allocated by planters to enslaved people so they could grow their own food for survival. What the planters didn't understand was that they had handed Black people the one thing that could not be fully controlled: a relationship with the land. Wikipedia

By 1700, amaranth was established as "callaloo" in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, with enslaved Africans cultivating it on those provision grounds. They had taken a plant that originated in Mesoamerica, that the Spanish had tried to erase, that had traveled through Africa and been claimed as its own — and grew it again. On the worst land available. Under the worst conditions imaginable. And fed their families with it. Brian D. Colwell

What It Became

If you grew up in a Caribbean household, you know this word the way you know your grandmother's voice. Today it is a cornerstone of Caribbean cuisine, especially in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Grenada, where "callaloo" refers both to the plant and the dishes made with it — an heirloom green that connects communities to ancestral food traditions. UJAMAA SEEDS

In Trinidad, crab and callaloo is the national dish. In Jamaica it would show up at Sunday breakfast like a family member who never misses. These are not recipes. They are rituals. The ongoing practice of a knowledge that survived a Middle Passage.

Unlike many white Southerners in the United States, greens were seen as food for enslaved people, who were resourceful in growing and consuming leafy greens on plantations and subsistence gardens, and even foraging wild plants. In time, incorporating greens into African-American cuisine — soul food — became tradition. Frontiers

The people who dismissed it as slave food were eating the evidence of their own failure to understand what they were looking at.

Where It Lives Now

Today amaranthus grows as a weed in vacant lots across America. People spray it. Pull it. Discard it without knowing its name. Without knowing that this "weed" is one of the most nutritious plants on earth — packed with protein, iron, and calcium — that it fed pre-Columbian civilizations, crossed an ocean in someone's hair, and kept Black families alive in the Caribbean for three centuries.

It also shows up in Whole Foods as an "ancient grain superfood." Trendy. Expensive.

Decontextualized entirely.

Neither version tells the full story. That's why we're here :)

You can grow amaranthus in Virginia right now. It thrives in our heat, tolerates our clay soil, produces all summer long. The leaves are edible — mild, slightly earthy, excellent sautéed or in soups. The seeds can be harvested and popped or ground into flour. The plant is drought-resistant, fast-growing, and almost aggressively alive once it's established.

It grows like it knows it's supposed to be here. Like it's been trying to get back to us this whole time.

Plant it. Know its name. Know where it came from and what it cost to get here. Feed yourself with it the way people fed themselves with it when feeding themselves was an act of resistance.

That's what we brought. And it's still growing.

Notes 1Hausa Merchants Traders from the Hausa people — one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, centered in what is now northern Nigeria and southern Niger. The Hausa built some of the most extensive trade networks in African history, moving goods across thousands of miles of sub-Saharan Africa long before European contact. Hausa merchants didn't just trade goods — they moved knowledge, seeds, and food culture across an entire continent. That's how a plant from Mesoamerica became a staple in West African kitchens within a generation. 2Provision Grounds Small plots of the least desirable land on or near plantations that enslavers allocated to enslaved people to grow their own food. What they didn't anticipate was what those grounds became. Enslaved people brought seeds they had carried from Africa, grew the foods they knew, fed their families, and in some cases sold surplus at market. 3Tzoalli An Aztec ceremonial food made from amaranth seeds ground and mixed with honey or syrup, then shaped into figures of gods, mountains, animals, and birds. These figures were eaten during festivals — a ritual of communion between the community and the divine.