Trying to Find the Words

I like cilantro a little too much. I like it on my tacos, which is to say I don’t really care if there’s anything else besides some tasty meat and an obscene amount of cilantro. I am not one of those unlucky people who think cilantro tastes like soap or metal or swamp water.

But the names of foods—especially plants—are tricky. Cilantro is the Spanish name for coriander, which is Latin. Most of the time here in the US, the stems and leaves are sold in a bundle as “cilantro” and “coriander” is reserved as the name of the spice that is made from the seeds of the coriander plant. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone, but I do find it a little weird when it’s referred to as “Mexican parsley” because we’ve already got two pretty good words for the plant that are highly accurate and from Romance languages. Why bring parsley into it?

Way back when, I went shopping at the grocery store for a fennel bulb, along with some staples. I casually surveyed the produce section at first, then did a more methodical search and finally started moving through the vegetables one by one like some kind of very discerning, foraging animal.

This was before I knew what fennel was and before I had a smartphone. This was before smartphones, in fact. This was long, long ago, in a time when information was locked away on supercomputers that did not fit in pants pockets.

Anyway, there were these weird things that the grocery store labeled “Anise” that had big white bulbs and green stalks and frilly leaves that reminded me of dill weed. I kinda thought they might be fennel, but obviously the grocery store knew better than me so it couldn’t be what I was looking for. Clearly. Besides, it sorta smelled like licorice. I was not told to buy a licorice plant—that would be silly. I mean, I knew that anise was used to flavor black licorice. I was looking for fennel. But I was becoming a little annoyed. And frustrated. And panicky. Where, in this monstrosity of a grocery store with everything, is the goddamn fennel?

I did have a cell phone and I did eventually work out with my wife that the bizarre object I was looking at was, in fact, probably a fennel bulb but when I got to the checkout line, there was no little sticker on the side of it.

The Latino cashier puzzled over it ever so briefly before looking at me and said, “Anís?”