As LB and I climb back down the steep trail, she stops to point out each individual part of the legume: the root crowns embedded in the dirt, smelling herbal and pungent; the blanket of brittle, intricate vines atop them; the seed pods crowning the growth, the only visible sign of the vine’s blossoms remaining in December. “In one generation,” she says, “we lost the little bit of cultural value it had.”In the modern American consciousness, kudzu arrived on our shores with malintent. Georgia lore said that if you didn’t close your windows at night, kudzu’s slender fingers would creep in while you slept. These anxieties are so ubiquitous, they’ve become a punchline: Lewis Grizzard once joked that the leaves could cover an entire house in a single evening, before musing, “Those who try to eat their way out of kudzu quickly have their innards entangled in the vine because no matter how much you chew it, the blamed stuff just keeps on growing.” While scientists have repeatedly found positive attributes hidden beneath the mass of tri-tipped leaves—from its availability as a biofuel to its usefulness in regulating blood pressure levels—these findings have done little to change kudzu’s weedy reputation. But where Americans tend to revile kudzu, others see great potential. Japanese kuzu producers have historically foraged, rather than cultivated, kudzu. But in 1990, Inoue Tengyokudo, a century-old kuzu producer based in Nara, Japan, purchased 165 acres of land in Lee County, Alabama. Less than thirty miles from where Auburn’s Agricultural Extension was then researching how to loosen the vine’s grip on the region, the conglomerate planned to open the world’s first kudzu farm. But harvesting kudzu roots is labor-intensive and best done by hand, in part because the roots tend to become tangled with their underground neighbors. The Tengyokudo experiment proved a swift failure. “They grew some good kudzu,” Auburn University agronomist John Everest told the Athens alt-weekly Flagpole in 1999. “The deer wiped the company out.”

While scientists have repeatedly found positive attributes hidden beneath the mass of tri-tipped leaves— from its availability as a biofuel to its usefulness in regulating blood pressure levels—these findings have done little to change kudzu’s weedy reputation.

For 150 years, kudzu has remained anchored in Southern soil—an ornament, a miracle, a pest. It has been over-planted and underutilized, loved and loathed. But, throughout its American tenure, kudzu has never been what LB and the rest of Kudzu Culture understand it to be: an opportunity to find balance, both ecologically and economically.

Kudzu Culture began in 2011 as a loosely organized group of neighbors and friends with the mission, as they playfully put it, of “eating the vine that ate the South.” Initially led by Zev Friedman and Justin Holt, two western North Carolina-based permaculture educators, the pair were drawn together by their shared interest in designing ecologically diverse and resilient communities. Friedman and Holt would host biannual, three-day events called Kudzu Camps, where they invited community members to learn the intricacies of processing the different parts of the plant. In winter, they dug out the roots for starch extraction; in summer, they harvested everything from the vines to the flowers for a variety of craft and culinary applications, such as baskets, jellies, and woven garments. LB, a fiber artist long interested in creating textiles from kudzu vines, connected with the group after she moved to the area from her hometown of Davidson, North Carolina. In the years since, the trio has been brainstorming how best to provide comprehensive, year-round education and training resources for local people to work with the plant, rather than against it.

However, making kuzu is far from easy work. Rhizome extraction is a delicate and labor-intensive event, as the starch-rich root crowns can be more than six feet in length, seven inches in diameter, and weigh more than 400 pounds. Each root must be individually dug out by hand: Any cuts made directly into the tubers’ flesh enable starch fermentation, significantly lowering the quality of the final product. But, if properly produced, kuzu can be valuable—Cozzo says he last saw it retailing for thirty-six dollars a pound in an Asheville health-food store before the pandemic, while LB recently found it selling for more than sixty dollars a pound online—in part because it is incredibly expensive to make, especially on a commercial scale.

Whether on a Japanese mountainside or a western North Carolina farmstead, kuzu production is generally the same: After careful unearthing, processers crush each root and submerge them in water before sieving the slurry to remove any large fibers. The remaining thick, milky solution stands until the heavy starch sinks to the bottom, while the impurities and other unwanted particles rise to the top. Once this cloudy liquid is removed, the starch is re-washed and allowed to settle again. This process is repeated continuously until only pure white starch remains. Cold water and cold weather ensure that the starch does not ferment throughout this process, which in a traditional, family-owned Japanese shop can take up to ninety days.

Kudzu Culture first experimented with refining starch using whatever equipment they had access to, from simple buckets to a repurposed old washing machine. (“The centrifuge helps to separate that heavier matter from the liquid,” LB explains.) But to sell kuzu commercially, they’d need USDA certification. To avoid the financial investment of purchasing industrial, food-safe shredding and extraction machines, the team hoped to find a “white label” producer—a pre-existing potato- or cornstarch manufacturer that would process the foraged kudzu roots in exchange for a cut of profits. But, as LB found, all American-based starch processing facilities were owned by one of a handful of big corporations, and the trio was unwilling to pursue a contract with a multinational conglomerate. Apart from independent artisans, “domestically, there’s no kudzu starch producer or kudzu fiber producer other than us right now,” she says.While a handful of family-owned kuzu producers still exist in Japan, in the last half-century the global forces of industrialization and agricultural consolidation have also affected kuzu production in Japan. Only a fraction of the kuzu businesses that existed before World War II are still in operation, and younger generations do not have the same understanding of starch production their forebearers did. With fewer foragers to keep root growth in check, kudzu has started to exhibit invasive growth patterns in some areas—meaning it’s begun to eat Japan, too.

Although the number of kuzu producers has fallen greatly in the last fifty years, globally, demand has continued to rise. Health food stores across the United States started carrying kuzu in the 1960s, as holistically minded consumers began to seek out more traditional forms of medicine. Many were inspired by the healing properties the starch was supposed to store. (Cozzo, who is originally from New York, says he encountered the powdered root in macrobiotic food stores more than a decade before he ever glimpsed a thicket of kudzu.) The influx of East Asian immigrants and refugees in the late twentieth century increased the demand for kuzu, which can be found today in many international grocery stores.

In recent years, a handful of restaurateurs across the South have begun to grasp the culinary possibilities of the invasive plant. Kudzu Culture previously sold kuzu to Sean Brock in an experimental capacity. Brock, the Nashville-based owner of Audrey, is one of several chefs interested in the possibilities of a locally produced, Southern starch. Other culinarians infuse teas with kudzu flowers, long clusters of grape-scented petals that Southern women have traditionally turned into jelly. Asheville-based Shanti Elixirs already brews kudzu jun, a fermented tea similar to kombucha, using Kudzu Culture’s foraged goods. Shanti Elixirs currently sells two seasonal products: a kudzu-dandelion-chicory drink in colder months, and a summertime brew flavored with Asian pears, ginger, and kudzu blossoms.Does kudzu have the potential to become a staple ingredient in restaurant kitchens across the South? Kudzu Culture thinks so. Still, the group has had trouble securing funding over the years, largely because of kudzu’s invasive reputation. But oft-cited numbers purporting that kudzu covers somewhere between seven and nine million acres across the United States have come under recent scrutiny. Assessments from the United States Forest Service estimate the total figure at less than a million acres. (By comparison, privet, brought to America in the 1700s as an ornamental hedge, now grows on more than three million acres across the country.) Kudzu Culture finally received their first grant earlier this year from the Educational Foundation of America, a $20,000 investment toward creating a community starch processing facility near Asheville.

While they work to commercialize their kuzu operation, Kudzu Culture is planning farmer-harvester trainings that teach interested folks how to appropriately excavate, clean, and process the roots for starch. If an individual wants to harvest on their own land, the group will perform a site visit to certify that the kudzu is grown in uncontaminated soil. Once harvested, Kudzu Culture will buy the roots from people in the community as part of their “Root Buy-Back” program. As of August 2022, they’re paying three dollars a pound. They purchased about 150 pounds of roots from local residents in the first year of the initiative.

This sort of work has a historic precedent in western North Carolina. Cozzo studied the root digger economy, where locals have long supplemented their income with wild foraging. “That type of economy thrives in a low-income area,” he says. “While you’re out hunting, you go gather some ginseng. Then, at the end of the season, you’d sell your ginseng and that’d pay your property taxes for the year.” Whole families and sometimes entire towns would gather ginseng and other medicinal roots, similar to how multiple generations would harvest kudzu together in Japan.

Kudzu Culture doesn’t expect this work to be a quick fix or a wholesale salve to the larger historic and systemic problems rural western North Carolina communities are up against, such as land degradation and limited economic opportunities. Rather, it’s a generations-long quest to replicate the balanced ecological systems that sustained communities both here and in Japan for centuries. In the short term, the group sees it as a way to engage with longtime residents and provide direct access to capital, all while pushing Southerners to engage with their natural surroundings differently—no matter if the flora is invasive or native, abundant or ephemeral.

“Abundant species” is a term LB relies on, as she finds it contains more possibility and less prejudice than a word like “invasive.” Besides, as she tells me, “The vilification of abundant plants at this stage of the Anthropocene”—a reference to the modern environmental era defined by human presence—“is missing the point.” In other words, kudzu isn’t going anywhere. Rather than work to eradicate it, why not try to understand the latent possibilities it holds?

“That’s the important thing not to miss,” LB says as Japanese knotweed, another imported species, whistles in the December breeze. “We have opportunities to heal through humility.” She’s speaking of the humility to reexamine misunderstood history, to confront long-held prejudices, and to look to the future for answers, rather than to an idealized past. As people across the South, and across the world, grapple with the inequalities wrought by land misuse and rising temperatures, LB believes this kind of reframing will become key to forming strong, adaptable communities. But for now, she’ll settle for kudzu.

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