CULTURE + HISTORY

Move Over, Olive Groves! Meet the OG Mediterranean Tree

The carob — even more craggily representative of the Med than its fancier look-alike

The ancient Foia Brell carob tree in Alfaz del Pi, Spain (Photo by author’s daughter)

Before I moved to Spain’s Mediterranean coast, I had no idea what carob really was. I’d first encountered the name in the 1980s, when my sister gave up meat and the weekly grocery shopping was extended to to include wholefood places like Holland and Barrett, where it seemed to loom large. As a non-gelatin thickening agent, or the basis for unconvincing ersatz chocolate.

I also vaguely recalled being told that when they said John the Baptist survived on a radically austere diet of “honey and locusts” in the wilderness, it was actually a mistranslation: they were “locust beans”, or carob.

But what was carob, and where did it come from?

There were unlikely to have been many branches of Holland and Barrett in 1st-century Galilee, so it presumably came from a pretty hardy plant that could survive in an empty, arid landscape. Some kind of scrubby, scrappy shrub, or maybe a kind of cactus?

Living in Catalonia years later I became familiar with the sight of wizened olive trees, decades or centuries old, redolent with all manner of symbolism: cultural, historical…