Herbalist Elizabeth Beamon’s Quest for Simple Living

Elizabeth Beamon needs herbalism to look simple.

Herbalism is the apply of utilizing vegetation alongside approach to heal the physique and promote wellness by means of botanical data. It’s not simply teas and tinctures however pots of scrumptious soup, filled with the plant medication your physique must get well after a chilly. While most of us would possibly discover it formidable to protect, harvest and may meals in our personal yard, Beamon has been utilizing these practices all through her youth. Her ardour for this work is pushed by her perception that herbalism is a ritual.

At the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Beamon demonstrated each cooking and stress canning. While making her French onion mushroom soup, she mentioned the significance of cooking for well being, vitamin, and stopping illnesses by means of meals. Using the completed soup for example, she taught Festival guests easy methods to can items with or and not using a stress canner.

Beamon is the youthful half of one of many apprenticeship groups within the Virginia Humanities Folklife Program’s 2024 Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship. Her mentor, Leni Sorenson, is a meals historian, instructor, chef, and farmsteader. Their work collectively focuses on conventional Virginia foodways and historic homesteading practices inside the African American group. Their initiatives embody gardening, canning, preservation, outside cooking, and internet hosting historic dinners.

Beamon learns and shares helpful expertise and traditions from Sorenson after which makes use of her apprenticeship to deepen her work as an herbalist. Herbalism and plant medication have guided Beamon’s imaginative and prescient for her future wanting ahead.

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When Beamon got here off the Festival Foodways stage, I had the possibility to take a seat within the grass on the National Mall and communicate along with her about herbalism, cooking, and what it means to be a teen studying conventional sustainable practices from an elder of their group.

“I think my work contributes to reigniting a passion for simplicity, a passion for home-based activity, and for a desire to nurture each other, our bodies, our minds, thoughts, free thought, free movement,” Beamon mentioned. “I want people to feel like they have the skills to survive in or out of the dominant social schema. Start a garden, figure s*** out, and live a happy, healthy life, full of curiosity and intellectual thought.”

Beamon’s apply of herbalism expanded into bartending, creating modern and scrumptious tonics for cocktails at her native Korean bar. This sort of work introduced herbalism and her culinary expertise collectively. The extra she labored on drinks, the extra she found how plant medication can be integrated into culinary work of all types. As an individual who lives with power sickness, Beamon defined how she has additionally used her data and apply as medication.

“I have had pretty rough eczema my whole life,” she mentioned. “For my health and for my sanity, it’s just a beautiful practice. What’s better than rummaging through a big medicinal garden? Digging for echinacea root, digging for dandelion root, or cutting milky oats.”

Beamon and I mentioned our personal experiences with delicate pores and skin and allergy symptoms, recalling instances that straightforward cures have been essentially the most useful, like aloe or pure salves. Understanding easy methods to make this stuff has shifted her perspective, and studying from Sorenson has formed a lot of her understanding of her personal dedication to her private herbalist apply.

I requested Beamon, what does it imply to be a data keeper, or to bear the accountability of passing on cultural apply? Beamon detailed her relationship with Black Elders who’ve impressed her, citing Sorenson and the writings of Toni Morrison. Morrison is famend for incorporating themes of the pure setting alongside her tales of Black femme id and belonging. Beamon’s dedication to her personal mental enrichment from a author comparable to Morrison has been essential to her personal sense of culinary proficiency. These tales additionally maintain classes, strategies, and methods of dwelling about her group that Beamon can relate to and see herself in. It has been important for Beamon to concentrate to those that have achieved the work to report African American custom.

“Culinary historians, historians of all types, are super important because they have the information that we have lost in a lot of ways in cultural practice,” Beamon defined. “People don’t know what to do when the lights go out. They don’t know how to make a candle. These are the things that are about to be very important for people to live well and to live free.”

Black girls have performed a key half in American culinary historical past, together with traditions in homesteading and herbalism. As homesteading turns into extra common by means of social media, Beamon is interested by their perceptions of who practices herbalism.

“I think people are afraid of herbs because of the ‘wise woman,’ because of a certain idea of who is an herbalist and who is not,” she mentioned. “And so for me, it’s about demystifying. Then I think there’s a certain personage. People don’t look at Black women and think, ‘Oh, this person knows a lot about tinctures or a lot about salves.’ But I would argue, in the U.S., no one knows more. This is our inheritance, and it is our tradition. So it’s for all of us. And that’s really what my goal and my point is, to make it for all of us again.”

Part of that purpose is making what she’s discovered and what she is aware of look less complicated. Plenty of the traditions, culinary strategies, and gardening methods come from a easy routine. While a talent like canning is meticulous, it usually requires only some clear steps.

“I want someone to look at what I do and go, oh, this s**** easy. I want it to look easy. I want it to be like, oh, I can totally do that. Maybe it’s not easy labor, no, but it’s simple practice. You can spend days canning a full garden, and it’s labor. It’s a lot of lifting, it’s a lot of heat, it’s a lot of intention. But they’re simple, and I think I’m not alone in being someone who longs for simplicity in the modern era, you know?  I want it to be simple. I want people to be able to live simple lives.”

When I requested Beamon the way it feels to take what she discovered about herbalism and reinterpret it as a teen, she spoke to the methods by which herbalism has developed—and remains to be evolving as science advances.

“The way that we can extract something in its purest form is not just by putting it in a jar and covering it anymore. It’s actually by titrating it,” Beamon gave for example.  “There are things that we know now as young people that we can develop further. I think that’s really wonderful. When I think about the future and being a young person in this game, I’m like, oh, we have the time, and we have the science behind us. Maybe an unpopular word, but science. I think that that’s what it is for a lot of people, especially in food.”

Many of those practices additionally maintain a religious and recurring connection for Beamon. As we talked, Stax Music Academy’s vocal teacher, Leah Buckley, started singing close by, main a gospel workshop within the Music Apprenticeship program space. Beamon then informed me about how herbalism is extra than simply apply, however a apply of religion.

“Herbalism is part ritual,” Beamon mentioned. “I think the ritual and the practice of it is protective, whether it is in a spiritual sense or not. I think there are certain things that keep communities whole, and it is shared faith. And it doesn’t have to be in God, but it could be in protecting yourself with rosewater. There are practices that—and that are often land-based, too—which I really think are important practices in your home.”

Ritual, custom, and cultural heritage are on the core of Beamon’s work. Young individuals throughout the United States are studying what it means to maintain their very own cultural traditions and form them into their very own. I requested Beamon what it means to her to be doing this work.

“[Doing the work means] to be Black and alive and growing into the traditions of my ancestors,” she replied, “and to try to hold those traditions while also forging new paths, especially in the face of incredible difficulty and eventual suffering that happens when you don’t have certain programs and certain practices in public health etc.” She has taken her household’s traditions and formed them with science, ritual, and data from the mentors of her life.

Lirit Gilmore is the foodways coordinator for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.