Fire in the Dark, Seabuckthorn in Winter
Text and Photos by Max Walker
Vibrant orange berries cling to seabuckthorn bushes, set amongst inhospitable thorns and spidery olive-color leaves.
Sometime between the end of summer and midwinter, Lake Issyk-Kul in eastern Kyrgyzstan peculiarly resembles the Firth of Forth in Scotland. That is when the frigid mountains and clear waters of the Scottish Cairngorms and the Central Asian Tian Shan mountains play second fiddle to a wave of vibrant orange berries. These berries cling to seabuckthorn bushes, identifiable by their almost luminescent clusters of fruit, set amongst inhospitable thorns and spidery olive-color leaves.
After stumbling into these bushes during my daily lockdown walk, I inquired about them in my local Facebook foraging group, which was ready with recommendations from across Scotland. These included an array of seabuckthorn liquors and ferments, a comical Ray Mears video and an argument over the legality of pruning public shrubbery. To shed some light on the folkloric internet chatter, I met Kirstie Campbell from Seabuckthorn Scotland CIC.
Campbell knows the windswept beaches near Edinburgh better than any of the local dog walkers that greet her. The dog walkers pay no attention to what Campbell describes as “thorny baked bean bushes,” glowing orange from between the tousled dunes.
Campbell first came across seabuckthorn in the winter of 2010, working for the United Nations in Pakistan, reacting to what she describes as a “corporate ‘level 3’ emergency,” floods from the north of the country sweeping through poor communities on the plains. Campbell was part of a team of logisticians working with the World Food Programme food security review to determine “whether you need a tractor or a helicopter or a plane” to deliver supplies.
She says General Nadeem, the Pakistani commander of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), mentioned seabuckthorn as a potential food source. The berry has a long history as an emergency ration; it was allegedly a source of nutrition for the horses of Alexander the Great and Ghenghis Khan (hence the Latin Hippophae, meaning “shiny horse”). The communities on the flood plains of Pakistan were expected to survive off them, and survive they did. Campbell is careful to point out that politics at play meant that the NDMA were glad to deprioritize deliveries to northern areas and leave them to eat seabuckthorn, so long as it meant fewer foreign planes in the skies.
Scotland seems far removed from this tradition of survival. Yet, Campbell says that there is a sense that wasn’t always the case.
“I’ve heard stories of people giving their children seabuckthorn during the war, as they would have rosehip,” she says.
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Campbell knows the windswept beaches near Edinburgh better than any of the local dog walkers that greet her. She first came across seabuckthorn in the winter of 2010, in Pakistan.
Of the people in my local Facebook foraging group, few had heard of seabuckthorn, other than perhaps by coincidence in dietary supplement or cosmetics. Seabuckthorn has been labeled a super food, yet it is not treated as a food at all. Its super qualities (vitamins C and A and oils credited with reducing wrinkles, repairing skin cells, helping to moisturize and promoting healing) have been exploited by the wellbeing and cosmetics industries, but the traditions of eating it were lost with the end of World War II rationing, perhaps due to shortage of sugar to sweeten the bitter fruit.
Recent studies have explored the plant’s complexity. Super doesn’t really cover it. Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) yielded seabuckthorn water kefir and seabuckthorn ginger beer. Another study with Heriot-Watt university revealed the myriad tastes and aroma profiles of its different harvest times. Bangor University has developed means to use CO₂ to extract wax from the seeds, skin and leaves to be used as a vegan alternative to beeswax. Utility aside, the most surprising thing about seabuckthorn is its bright, sherbet flavor.
Caroline Eden, author and scholar on Central Asia, is a champion of the seabuckthorn and coincidentally a customer and neighbor of Campbell’s.
“In Kazakhstan, if you go to cafes, and I mean bog-standard cafes in Almaty, they have sea buckthorn tea on the menu,” she says. “It is not extraordinary. It is just an everyday ingredient, like having mint tea here. It is no big deal. It is just what people have.”
Seabuckthorn is an abundant resource on our doorsteps, but relative poverty may be an essential element in its forgotten status in Scotland, as Eden continues, “we just don’t use it! I wonder if it is because we are spoiled here. People in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where the landscape is more rugged, use what they have access to.”
Yet even in communities where seabuckthorn is revered, things are changing. The fall of the Soviet Union has allowed the small middle classes of Central Asia to become more cosmopolitan. Eden wonders if this younger generation retains their parents’ knowledge.
“They have a much more global outlook,” she says. “They are less interested in what grows on the shores of Issyk-Kul, where their parents would have spent their summers during the Soviet Union at spa resorts. The older generations were more entrenched with the local culture because they literally couldn’t go anywhere else.”
Traditional knowledge like seabuckthorn foraging endured due to the protectionism of Soviet rule. But the USSR also produced hunger. Eden stresses that “people are still poor, so they value these things which perhaps don’t cost very much money. Like a really good winter melon will probably cost less than a dollar, which is not nothing, but it’s not very much, and it will be really prized. There is a lot of respect for food, more so than in Scotland. That’s the great irony for me. People were always rude about food in Central Asia and so dismissive of ‘greasy shashlik’ and monotony. But, if you visit the markets and eat in people's houses, then it is a different story.”
Communities in Central Asia have had to continuously concern themselves with the provenance of their food in ways that are only resurfacing recently in the West. Eden stresses that “the Uzbeks all care. They know all the different villages for different apricots at the Osh bazaar in a scruffy part of Bishkek. Traders will tell you that these are from Batken or Arslanbob, they know the villages in minute detail, and these are not very local places.”
These concerns may evolve as the younger population becomes more cosmopolitan, as it has in Scotland. However, the pressure of the climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic raises essential questions about our readiness to abandon ancient practices for a globalized food system.
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Part of the future for foraging is bound to social enterprises. Campbell believes that Seabuckthorn presents “a potential opportunity, as it has been in Nepal for women to find avenues of income which are not linked to western influence.”
Her goal is to share production and harvesting techniques with communities in Asia, “whether developing tools for harvesting or helping people develop markets within their own countries for seabuckthorn,” using this foothold to empower women. The steady growth of tourism in Kyrgyzstan is already driving demand. Eden says “Seabuckthorn juice, salt and face creams often employ women cooperatives, there aren’t many other souvenirs to buy there, so seabuckthorn is everywhere.”
Meanwhile, seabuckthorn in Scotland is classed an invasive species, despite fossil evidence for its presence from before the last ice age. Seabuckthorn is still treated as exotic, where it appears on people's tables, yet the council prunes it back on a vast scale annually to keep beaches and footpaths clear, sending strings of bright berries straight to compost.
“Someone is missing a trick; just look at the colour of the stuff!” Eden says gleefully, pouring us each a generous helping of Russian vodka over some of the vibrant orange juice to make a delicious Caspian Anchor cocktail. She is right. Because although the flavor is almost tropical, the plant's abundance makes it, well, ordinary. My Facebook foraging group’s response shows a niche interest, but it is a long way from becoming a staple. In Central Asia, seabuckthorn’s road to market is slowly unfurilng, but in Scotland, the convenience of local supermarkets stands in its way. A kiwi from New Zealand or mango from Pakistan holds a more ordinary place in the Scottish consciousness than seabuckthorn. But, for those in the know, seabuckthorn offers a sharp, citrusy balm to the drawing closeness of the Scottish winter and more than a handful of vitamins—a welcome, if unintended consequence.
Caroline Eden’s most recent book ‘Red Sands’ came out in October 2020 and includes the ‘Caspian Anchor’ cocktail.
Kirstie Campbell is the founder of Seabuckthorn Scotland Community Interest Company.
