Archiving healing, ritual, and transformation with spices

UCLA professor David Delgado Shorter has launched The Archive of Healing, one of the largest databases of medicinal folklore from around the world. The collection includes hundreds of thousands of entries that address a broad range of health-related topics, from midwifery and menopause to common colds and flus. The site aims to preserve Indigenous knowledge about healing practices, while preventing that data from being exploited for profit. Much of the entries involve food with healing properties, from traditional remedies involving ginger and turmeric, to others using salt cod and goosegrease.

Shorter speaks with KCRW's Good Food about the archive’s history, the conversations it has sparked, and the herbal discoveries within.

KCRW: What is the Archive of Healing, Ritual, and Transformation?

David Delgado Shorter: “The archives started as a means for a previous professor at the university to collect sayings, colloquialisms, we used to call them folktales. There's a very gendered way to say it, which is ‘old wives’ tales,’ things that people used to talk about that were related to healing, health, wellness, or curing.

And so he was really documenting things like incantations. ... But within this process, he actually started collecting information about not just spices, but food ways, rituals. These ways that, in a broader sense, I've come to call ‘the archive of healing,’ rather than what they previously called something like ‘traditional medicine.’”