Eating Mulberries as a Spiritual Experience

To taste bliss, you sometimes need to get your hands dirty.

June is special. It is mulberry season in parts of the U.S. There is nothing quite like the taste of a mulberry, and for those who have never had one—which is likely most people, for reasons we’ll discuss below—it is a shame that there are no words to describe the flavor. 

There are few if any, words to accurately describe any flavor. For example, try to describe the taste of a banana to one who has never eaten one. Saying “it’s too sweet” doesn’t suffice. Grape drink is also sweet, which tastes nothing like a banana. One must eat a number of bananas at varying times of ripeness to appreciate the statement: too sweet. It doesn’t mean one generally hates bananas. 

But only those who have eaten bananas know what is meant by “it’s too sweet” or “This is a good banana!” Even then, it’s relative to one’s taste. Mulberries are no different. However, we know you’d like them. How do we know? Experience. We’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love them.

Mulberries are tightly-packed clusters of dozens of minuscule little spheres of deliciousness that grow in oblong collectives anywhere from half an inch to an inch long. As they ripen, they go from white to red to scarlet to deep purple. The darker they are, the sweeter they are; the redder they are, the more tart. On the end of a branch, they will grow three to five together, all ripening at different rates so that you can pick several in one gentle grab, allowing your tongue to simultaneously experience the tang of the less ripe and the syrupiness of the riper berries. (The combination is unspeakable good.) 

The initial hit on the tongue is much bolder than even the tastiest strawberry or raspberry. It is a fruit that is fully assured of itself and projects its voice to the back row of the theater of your mouth. It has a specific taste that is its own. Every year when you pluck the first ripe one you see, you know cognitively that this is a fruit you like. Still, it is not until you experience it again that you fully recognize, “Oh, right, it is THAT good,” and immediately start scanning the other branches to assess how many more are ripe now.

A mind-blowingly delicious berry should be on shelves in the grocery store, in jams and jelly jars, and in the bowl with your morning cereal. But it isn’t. The vast majority of people will never have the opportunity because the structure of the fruit is too delicate for corporate picking—they don’t merely bruise, but the slightest firm contact causes them to disintegrate into mush—and because the berries are actually lots and lots of tiny berries together, the increased surface area causes them to dry out very quickly. They simply cannot be marketed. They can only be enjoyed at the picking, there and then.

The seeds of the mulberry are tiny and embedded within the fruit; its sugar is designed to attract squirrels, birds, and humans. By ingesting its berries, the mulberry seeds reemerge within a coating of excreted natural fertilizer, which provides the chemicals needed to give rise to the next generation of the tree. Whether one wants to believe in an intelligent designer or give a fully materialistic evolutionary explanation, all, regardless of metaphysical commitment, can say rightly that the mulberry tree created its berries to bring us the joy they do. It is served by serving us, by our being made happy, gorging ourselves on its seasonal bounty.

But what is good for Nature isn’t always good for business. What makes them naturally successful is precisely what keeps them from being commercially successful. Farmers could make a lot of money from mulberries, yet they leave them alone, echoing 19th-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

As a result, eating mulberries is a sort of spiritual experience, a transcendental moment of connectedness to nature. Henry David Thoreau experiences such moments as freedom. “I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him… If this world were all man [made institutions], I could not stretch myself; I should lose all hope. He is constraint; she [nature] is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.” 

The only way you can have the ecstatic mulberry experience is to stand with the tree that spreads its branches and gives its magnificent offering to you. You don’t pick a ripe mulberry. Just touching it causes it to fall into your palm. The tree literally hands it to you, willingly, almost enthusiastically, the berry coming as a gift. Because it is so delicate, simply placing it in your mouth causes your fingertips and tongue to become a very specific shade of purple that mulberry lovers know well. That familiarity comes in part from its regular appearance but also from its staying power—use as much soap as you want; it’ll be there for a couple days. But it is worth it.

The taste of a mulberry is not only enjoyable but must be enjoyed with the tree that made it for you. It’s to be both at once with the mulberry. According to philosopher Martin Buber, you cannot be one with anything in nature but at once with something other, such as a mulberry tree. You stand beneath this tree, allowing it to witness the joy you received from its offering. 

We know that all the fruits and vegetables we eat come from plants. But in almost every other case, it is an abstract plant off in a field somewhere or other. Maybe it is an avocado from Mexico, an apple from Oregon, or a cherry from Chile, but you have no idea exactly where or what the plant really looks like. But in the unique case of the mulberry, the plant that made this food for you is the one you just touched, in whose shade you now stand.

This experience is not mediated by a farmer making calculations about market price, immigrants underpaid to pick, and buyers and produce managers figuring out delivery logistics and shelf placement. Eating a mulberry requires a person and a tree to be together where the tree grows. To be both at once. It is as intimate as it is delicious. The tree is in the soil of a place where you live, walk, or work. You share a location, and the tree takes that place and converts it into an object that it gives you. The mulberry tree translates earth to happiness, place to emotion.

In her most famous work Caring, Ethicist Nel Noddings argues that an act of care requires active contributions from both the one caring and the one cared for. The one caring must demonstrate both a knowledge of the needs of the other and a willingness to meet them. The one cared for must actively accept the act, allowing it to be completed. You cannot force care onto someone; they must open themselves up to your offer. 

The successful completion of an act of care generates a bond between the one caring and the one cared for. They are both at once at this time. When an acquaintance, for example, steps up in a time of need, they grow into a friend. Caring deepens the relationship.

In the case of nature, we humans so often see ourselves solely as the one caring in the relationship. We must act for the sake of the environment, to protect or restore it. We are called upon to heal the world. It is to victimize it, and we are both perpetrator and savior for it. As Thoreau noted: “I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There, a different kind of right prevails. In her midst, I can be glad with an entire gladness.”       

We have manipulated nature to feed ourselves and built houses to shelter ourselves from it. We have lights so that nature does not tell us when it is time to sleep, and furnaces and air conditioning so that we decide where to live and when to put on a sweater. But our relationship with nature is so much more complicated than the cartoon of a thoughtful master having dominion over subservient nature. Nature does care for us. It is nature that is the precondition for the very possibility of our existence. We are because of nature. As artificial and crafted to our desires as the surroundings we have constructed may be, we still depend on nature.

Of course, the 19th-century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was correct in his Darwinian portrayal of “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” From large predators like tigers to microscopic ones like viruses, the natural world is full of dangers just waiting for a chance to pounce and feast upon us from the outside in or the inside out. In our quest to protect ourselves—whether by building artificial environments with constructed artifacts like weapons or medical advances like vaccines—we see separating from nature as the key to human progress. We must transcend the natural world, and rise above it, to become truly human.

But that environment is also what formed us, that gave rise to us, that comprises us. We are a part of it and the intricate web it forms. A touching reminder of that fact remains whenever you enjoy a mulberry. You are now small. The tree is big. It feeds you. It shades you. It brings you joy because it knows what you like. It is an asymmetric relationship with a natural entity that does not need you. It does not ask you to water it. It does not ask you for anything. But for a few magical weeks each year, it calls you over and gives you a gift. And, if you are smart, you will gladly and actively accept the caring act of the mulberry tree. It comes not only with a tastiness that cannot be rivaled but with a warm embrace from mother nature.