Food, Medicine, or Poison?
Understanding Relationships Between Apazote (Dysphania Ambrosioides) and Communities Across Guatemala
Two apazote plants that were growing side-by-side in the commercial field of one family from San Juan Sacatepéquez. Image credit: Tabitha Faber. 1/27/2022.
One of the hallmarks of colonialism, and of Western hegemony embedded within colonialism, is the impulse to essentialize in order to assimilate. Ideas, technologies, and lifeways from other cultures are broken down to their smallest parts to more easily integrate them into one totalizing Western framework. One framework, though, cannot hold the vast amount of information—and its associated contexts—needed to understand even seemingly simple things. Even things as simple as one stinky ‘weed’.
The stinky—or, rather, aromatic—‘weed’ in question is the plant species Dysphania ambrosioides. D. ambrosioides is known in various areas of the world as epazote, mastruz, American wormseed, Mexican tea, paico, m’khinza, or one of many other names. In Guatemala, where my research is based, pretty much everyone knows the plant as apazote.
Depending on which aspect of the global literature on apazote you encounter, you will find very different representations of the plant. Cookbooks and Internet recipes claim certain dishes must have apazote for un sabor auténtico (Marks; Logan et al.). Some Latin medicinal floras include apazote, though usually as a footnote, implying a lack of cultural importance (Estrada-Castillón et al.; Molares and Ladio; Silva et al.). There’s a huge body of ethnopharmacology literature that examines the disease-fighting potential of the plant’s essential oil (Kasali et al.; Stappen et al.; Singh and Pandey). Then again: there are casefiles of people, especially young children, getting sick or dying after having apazote administered as a medicine (reported from Morocco: Hazim et al.; Badinga et al.; and Latin America: Alonso-Castro et al.). There is an absolutism to each of these representations: apazote is a food to be embraced, or a medicine to be investigated, or a poison to be avoided.
However, underlying this literature about perceptions of apazote is literature examining aspects inherent to the plant itself. Taxonomically, botanists recognize that the species we call Dysphania ambrosioides is likely a species complex, or a wide range of genetically diverse plants grouped under one name (Uotila et al.). Relatedly, other studies have examined the chemistry of D. ambrosioides, which includes at least seven distinct chemical phenotypes or “chemotypes” (Owolabi et al.). One of the chemical constituents thought to be the most medicinally active, ascaridole, has been found to compose anywhere from 0% to 87% of the plant’s essential oil (Dembitsky et al.; MacDonald et al.; Barros et al.). Essentializing apazote as simply a food, medicine, or poison ignores the inherent diversity of the plant – and thus best practices when using the plant.
This literature represents global perceptions and examinations of apazote, though largely from a Western perspective. My work examines these same factors within Guatemala, a small but incredibly diverse country in terms of culture, language, and ecology. The central question: how diverse is apazote, the plant as well as its cultural construction, within this one geographic area?
I traveled to Guatemala for the first time between January and February 2022. Traveling with my friend and colleague Angelita Montejo, who is from Guatemala’s western department of Huehuetenango, we focused on interviewing a variety of people about their personal relationships with apazote. We talked with people ranging from Kaqchikel farmers who grew apazote for sale across the country, Tzutujil mothers who relied on apazote as una gran medicina for themselves and their children, and Ladino chefs who associated apazote with their grandmothers’ black beans.[1]
Diverse perspectives certainly show through in these first interviews, and a few common threads stand out. One: while not everyone had names for it, apazote was described as having a wide range of appearances. In some interviews, people described these “classes” of apazote by the color of the stem (Chavac, Sequen, and Chikival, pers. comm.), the shape and size of the leaves (Tacatic and Yotz et al, pers. comm.), or the number of seeds the plant produced (Yotz et al, pers. comm.). Others simply acknowledged that apazote could look very different, but everyone agreed you could always tell that a plant was apazote by the smell – apazote always had a distinctive smell. The ways these observations bear on the question of apazote diversity have interesting implications for how uses are (or are not) correlated to inherent differences in individual plants.
Two: people interviewed who live in el campo claimed that fresh apazote had the same smell, flavor, and medicinal use as the dried plant. Meanwhile, the series of professional chefs, all Ladinos, described very stark differences and held strong opinions about when to use each one. One woman explained that the way the plant is dried may have an effect—in her experience, apazote dried in the sun loses its flavor, while apazote dried slowly in the shade keeps its distinctive smell (Mendoza, pers. comm.). If the smell and flavor of the plant really changes, what about its medical efficacy?
How apazote processing may affect its chemistry (and thus use) bears heavily on the last point: every person in every interview mentioned that today, apazote is more difficult to grow and more difficult to find. People who do not grow their own apazote often resort to buying it in local markets, but even there it is becoming less common and more expensive. Some people are coping with a scarcity of apazote by drying the plant to keep it around longer (Sequen, Mendoza, Batz’, pers. comm.), while others are simply not using the plant as often. With the decline of apazote, are plants with certain characteristics more susceptible to whatever mechanisms are causing the plant’s decline? What uses are declining alongside the plant? Clearly, with these first conversations, many questions have already been raised.
One facet of the legacy of colonialism is an attempt to reject difference in favor of creating a simplified singular “truth”, where one authoritative body can approve or deny alternative ways of understanding. When we instead reject this absolutism in favor of approaching incongruity with curiosity, we can see a multiplicity of understandings as reflecting a multi-faceted truth. Through this work, we see that apazote does not cleanly “fit” as a food, medicine, or poison; instead, we begin to understand when apazote is best understood as each of these, individually or simultaneously, and celebrate relationships where people intimately understand these overlapping perceptions. Through this work, we—myself and the many collaborators sharing their time and expertise—hope to understand more about our relationships to apazote, the factors influencing these relationships, and how we can continue these relationships in a changing world.
UW-Madison Collaborators
Claudia Calderón, CALS
Ken Keefover-Ring, Botany
Guatemalan Collaborators
Angelita Montejo, USAC
Armando Cáceres, USAC
Collaborators listed below are individuals who participated in interviews with the author between January and February 2022. All individuals have consented to sharing their experiences with apazote for a public audience and wished to have their contributions to the project acknowledged.
Collaborators from San Juan Sacatepéquez (Kaqchikel):
Familia Tacatic: Maria, Manuel, José, Rosalinda Chavac
Maria Sequen
Anadelfina Chavac
Collaborators from near Lake Atitlán (Kaqchikel):
Thelma (surname not given)
Alberta (surname not given)
Collaborators from San Juan La Laguna/near Lake Atitlán (Tzutujil):
Graciela Mendoza
Petronila Yotz
Asociación Q'omaneel: Maria Yotz
Asociación Kemo': Candelaria, Martina, Ácelene
Asociación Batz: Lupe, Catarina, Elena.
Dolores Chikival
Dolores Ratzam
Soila Sicajau
Collaborators from Guatemala City (Ladinos):
Gabriela Orive
Mirciny Moliviatis
Juan Carlos Santa Cruz
Eduardo Gonzalez
Euda Morales
Jorge Jorge Lamport
[1] Kaqchikel and Tzutujil are two of the 20+ Indigenous Mayan ethnic groups. Ladino is a Guatemalan term that refers broadly to mixed Indigenous ancestry with European or non-Indigenous heritage.
About the Author
Tabitha Faber is a PhD candidate in Botany, working with Drs. Claudia Calderón and Ken Keefover-Ring, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity at the University of Michigan in 2019, where she fell in love with plants. For her research, Tabitha is interested in how people relate to their environments, especially in how they choose which plants to put in their mouths.
Works Cited
Alonso-Castro, Angel Josabad, et al. “Medicinal Plants from North and Central America and the Caribbean Considered Toxic for Humans: The Other Side of the Coin.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, vol. 2017, no. c, 2017, doi:10.1155/2017/9439868.
Badinga, Luc Pascal Christian Loulouga, et al. “M’khinza-Related Intoxication: About Two Observations.” Pan African Medical Journal, vol. 31, 2018, pp. 1–4, doi:10.11604/pamj.2018.31.18.15987.
Barros, Aline F., et al. “Nematicidal Screening of Essential Oils and Potent Toxicity of Dysphania Ambrosioides Essential Oil against Meloidogyne Incognita in Vitro and in Vivo.” Journal of Phytopathology, vol. 167, no. 7–8, 2019, pp. 380–89, doi:10.1111/jph.12803.
Dembitsky, Valery, et al. “Ascaridole and Related Peroxides from the Genus Chenopodium.” Biomedical Papers of the Medical Faculty of the University Palacký, Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, vol. 152, no. 2, 2008, pp. 209–15, doi:10.5507/bp.2008.032.
Estrada-Castillón, Eduardo, et al. “Ethnobotanical Biocultural Diversity by Rural Communities in the Cuatrociénegas Valley, Coahuila; Mexico.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, vol. 17, no. 1, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 2021, pp. 1–22, doi:10.1186/s13002-021-00445-0.
Hazim, Asmaa, et al. “Confusion Syndrome During COVID-19: The ‘Herb’ That Hides the Forest?” Cureus, vol. 13, no. 9, 2021, pp. 4–7, doi:10.7759/cureus.17775.
Kasali, Félicien Mushagalusa, et al. “Ethnomedical Uses, Chemical Constituents, and Evidence-Based Pharmacological Properties of Chenopodium Ambrosioides L.: Extensive Overview.” Future Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, vol. 7, no. 1, Future Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2021, doi:10.1186/s43094-021-00306-3.
Logan, Michael H., et al. “An Empirical Assessment of Epazote (Chenopodium Ambrosioides L.) as a Flavoring Agent in Cooked Beans.” Journal of Ethnobiology, vol. 24, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–12.
MacDonald, D., et al. “Ascaridole-Less Infusions of Chenopodium Ambrosioides Contain a Nematocide(s) That Is(Are) Not Toxic to Mammalian Smooth Muscle.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology, vol. 92, no. 2–3, 2004, pp. 215–21, doi:10.1016/j.jep.2004.02.018.
Marks, Copeland. False Tongues and Sunday Bread: A Guatemalan and Mayan Cookbook. M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1985.
Molares, Soledad, and Ana Ladio. “Ethnobotanical Review of the Mapuche Medicinal Flora: Use Patterns on a Regional Scale.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology, vol. 122, no. 2, 2009, pp. 251–60, doi:10.1016/j.jep.2009.01.003.
Montoya Cabrera, Miguel Angel, et al. “Envenenamiento Mortal Causado Por El Aceite de Epazote: Chenopodium Graveolens.” Gac. Méd. Méx, vol. 132, no. 4, 1996, pp. 433–37.
Owolabi, Moses S., et al. “Volatile Constituents and Antibacterial Screening of the Essential Oil of Chenopodium Ambrosioides L. Growing in Nigeria.” Natural Product Communications, vol. 4, no. 7, 2009, pp. 989–92.
Silva, J. D. A., et al. “Ethnobotanical Survey of Medicinal Plants Used by the Community of Sobradinho, Lus Correia, Piau, Brazil.” Journal of Medicinal Plants Research, vol. 9, no. 32, 2015, pp. 872–83, doi:10.5897/jmpr2015.5881.
Singh, Pooja, and Abhay K. Pandey. “Dysphania Ambrosioides Essential Oils: From Pharmacological Agents to Uses in Modern Crop Protection—a Review.” Phytochemistry Reviews, vol. 6, Springer Netherlands, 2021, doi:10.1007/s11101-021-09752-6.
Stappen, Iris, et al. “Antifungal and Repellent Activities of the Essential Oils from Three Aromatic Herbs from Western Himalaya.” Open Chemistry, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 306–16, doi:10.1515/chem-2018-0028.
Uotila, Pertti, et al. “Phylogeny, Biogeography and Systematics of Dysphanieae (Amaranthaceae).” Taxon, vol. 70, no. 3, 2021, pp. 526–51, doi:10.1002/tax.12458.