Soulfood meets Skincare and Feeds Social Justice

My mother, Lynette Joseph-Brown, an Afro-Guyanese Program and Research officer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, has been maintaining her home garden for many years now. It’s quite the source of pride for her.

My sisters and I call it her 4th child. Every time I visit home I am met with a new patch of lawn that she has converted into tilled garden beds, Whenever she has visitors she has to show them how the garden’s doing. It gained her 2nd place in a University-wide home gardening competition and it’s home to a multitude of plant species. Moringa, pumpkins, ginger, turmeric, okra, papaya, lemon balm, hibiscus, basil, mint, amaranth to name a few. Several species that are known across the diaspora for their nutrient-dense superfood status.

She likes to wake up early before work, just before the sun rises fully so that anything she transplants has a little time out of the intense heat, and she gets to work watering, tilling, fertilizing, pruning and harvesting.

This labor of love produces high yields and even though she has to contend with some of the local fauna who also love these superfoods- iguanas, squirrels and birds alike (I’ve put up figurative miles of fencing around her garden beds so far), She gets a lot out of it. My Whatsapp is filled many a morning with pictures of what she’s harvested for the day, a 2 for 1 infliction of and remedy for homesickness.

Herbalism is fairly common in Trinidad and throughout the diaspora. It’s as commonplace as culture. It’s seeped into our dialect. “Yuh hadda (you have to) take a bush bath” is a common retort one would make in Trinidad to a friend facing hard times, implying that the spiritual properties of the “bush” will wash away whichever bad energy is clinging onto you. Our foods are laden with seasonings and nutrition from these diaspora plants which are hearty and nutritious. These plants fortify our cultures and our bodies and link us to each other no matter where we are in the world.

About 2000 miles north of her garden is a skincare store in New Jersey with many of the same nutritious ingredients.

The moringa sits in a bottle under some powered collard greens. On the same shelf rests hibiscus oil, apple powder, rosehip water amongst many other natural ingredients at the Pholk Beauty lab on Monticello Avenue in Jersey City. Across from it on some shelves are the products it makes. Face masks, washes, oils, all fortified with natural ingredients which feed the skin as much as it would the body.

The enterprising minds over at Pholk Beauty lab have been making their “Soul food for the skin” for 3 years now- they started in the summer of 2018- and all with natural, sustainably sourced ingredients. This has been a labor of love from Niambi Cacchioli, the company’s founder, to the wider African diaspora.

I met Cacchioli while I was working at a café right across the street from their storefront. We got to know each other over a mutual love for ginger. She gave me some of her ginger balm and I told her about how you can find ginger in everything in Jamaica, where half my family’s from.

That was over a year ago. These days I’m doing graphic design for Pholk and getting my fill of home surrounded by the botanicals they hold in such reverence for the benefits they provide the body.

Over generations and generations, Africans and those who belong to the diaspora have been working with the land, harmonizing with nature and feeding themselves with the richness of the earth. Some of these foods like okra were brought with their enslaved ancestors as early as the 16th century and subsequently became part of the local flora.

They already had quite the reputation as a solid skincare resource for women of color but these days, because of the pandemic-driven boon in support lots of black-owned businesses have been getting, operations at Pholk are ramping up. Sales have seen an increase from $38,000 in 2019 to $270,000 in 2020 and Cacchioli has been adapting to the rise in demand. She’s partnering with other businesses to expand her reach and talking to farmers in an attempt to change the farm to skin care assembly line in the southern US.

Cacchioli, born in Atlanta and raised in Kentucky, has a very close connection with natural food. This isn’t uncommon for those of the African diaspora. The appreciation for natural, nutrient-dense food is something passed on through generations. This fact in tandem with the historical context of slavery which displaced so many Africans around the world has led to many similarities in our knowledge of and appreciation for natural food regardless of where the global diaspora is in the world.

Cacchioli uses that knowledge to pivot into feeding the skin.

Her drive to get into the skincare business came from her inability to find natural skin care products that wouldn’t clog and break out her skin.

Over in Trinidad, many in the diaspora can already attest to the natural ingredients used in Pholk’s products.

My sister makes full use of our mother’s superfood garden. She likes to make a tea out of lemon balm, turmeric, mint, moringa and lemongrass in the morning, she cuts and rubs aloe on her skin to make it silky smooth and she swears by the moisturizing effects of aloe in the hair and skin.

This incorporation of so much natural, nutrient-dense food in their lives is easy for the mother and daughter to keep up with. They have a garden right in their back yard and a tropical climate year-round to maintain healthy plants. Operating out of a store in temperate Jersey City provides some challenges for Cacchioli to leap over. She appears, however, very willing and able to hurdle over any obstacles she faces.

The main challenge is sourcing the natural ingredients she needs for her products.

This lack of availability is something that Cacchioli is working on and a niche that she’s on her way to filling. Her angle? Black farming, of course.

The state of black farming is still in racism-fueled disarray. So much so in fact that in March, for the first time in US history, members of the House agriculture committee heard from Black farmers on the impact of systemic discrimination by the department of agriculture (USDA).

Black farmers used to represent 14 percent of all farmers in the US. Today, they make up less than 2 percent. Racist lending practices and discriminatory buying shut many out of an industry that has accumulated masses of generational wealth for their white counterparts.

Some of the problems that leads to today include a weakened workforce and farming infrastructure that prevents black farmers from ramping up production and catering to companies like Pholk whose material needs would align perfectly with their nutrient-dense stock.

To get around that many southern black-owned farms have taken to collaborating with each other. Harvesting together, lending farm equipment amongst themselves, anything to catch each other up when needed.

Cacchioli has been in conversation with many farms with a solution in the form of a proposal.

Skincare is an economic outlet for agriculture that has high yields given the proper resources. This includes seed presses for extracting oil, machinery for harvesting delicate botanicals in bulk and properly developed soil to grow the soil in. Ideally for her operation, Cacchioli says she would have a farm of her own but that’s a lot of hard work- quite the feat to keep up.

In lieu of that Cacchioli has turned to the power of collaboration and plans on investing in black farming to feed her skincare business.

She wants to bring resources to the farms who would then work together and get her the materials she needs for her products in a much more streamlined manner.

As it is right now the process for sourcing these ingredients is fairly spread out. Each of her products is made with materials sourced from the US (The south, west coast and Arizona) Africa (Senegal, Ghana and South Africa) and the Caribbean (Haiti). They’re all from black or woman-owned farms.

Some of her sources give her the already extracted product- her hempseed oil is pressed to order and delivered straight to her from the southern US- and some of her sources give her the raw material such as fresh botanicals so that she can infuse her products with it herself. These farms can sometimes be small enough to more accurately be called gardens than anything else.

Her African sourced materials, the moringa and hibiscus, are gathered a bit differently than in the southern US. In order to source her moringa she talks to a company, Moringa Connect, which works with lots of small farmers in Ghana to source their raw material and sell it as a powder. The process is similar in Senegal as well.

With a sudden need for more materials, and with the proof of concept of the African sourced materials, Cacchioli has decided to take matters into her own hands, another labor of love for her fellow Americans from the diaspora.

“Other supply chains in the diaspora are better [for material sourcing] than in the US black-owned farming ring,” says Cacchioli. It’s mainly a matter of resources. She identifies a need for black farmers in the south for more opportunities to resource for themselves and thinks that skincare is the perfect opportunity to fulfill it.

Back in Trinidad, my mother’s garden has reached a point where she needs help to keep up with it from time to time. This help is readily offered through community. Her nephew and his fiancé also do quite a bit of farming themselves and are there to offer help tilling the soil, providing plant material to grow, even maintaining greenhouses for her plants to get more protection from the pests she unwillingly feeds every now and then.

This sense of community is something that Cacchioli thinks can strengthen the state of black farming in the southern US.

She wants to make use of the foot she already has in the door to lend a hand to those who are in need of it due to historic disenfranchisement. “There is a resurgence of black farmers in the south,” says Cacchioli. Black people own more land in the south and are more primed to supply the demand that Cacchioli herself is cultivating through her entrepreneurial spirit and marketing know-how. She also has the appeal of a different type of market that can give them more returns on their hard work.

She says that “With skincare, you can set the price of your goods based on what you think people will pay for it.” When it comes to food, you are more beholden to market prices.

With this in mind, she has set out to provide these farms with the resources necessary to extract the materials she needs for her products. The benefits for her are two-fold. She gets what she needs to sustain her business and she gets to support and enrich her community.

Cacchioli grew up in the south and has always been interested in the “black experience”. When she left Kentucky and as she met more of the different factions of the global African diaspora she noted something.

“American pop culture has distilled blackness as one thing,” she says. Through the connection of our plants and food, the narrative opens up. She sees this investment in southern black farming as an opportunity to mend a part of the African American experience. The way she sees it, food, plants, agriculture, concepts of that ilk, is an effective, holistic way for those in the diaspora to talk about ourselves and our past without focusing on the trauma associated with blackness.