how it started

Owner & alchemist Fiona Lucia Genadio-Allen was trained as a chef in Ireland & London, and has been a student of herbal medicine for 10 years, most recently at Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. Wolfpeach was brought to fruition in 2021 as a fusion of her passion for food & herbal medicine, flavor & health, revolution & empowerment.

a story of stolen fruit

The tomato was first introduced to Europe in the early 16th century by corrupt conquistadors who pillaged the Nahuan people of mesoamerica. The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan dwelt upon an island in Lake Texcoco; the Spanish stole the city, stole the tomato, drained the lake & built Mexico City.

And so the fruit the Nahuan called xitomalt or tomati, landed on the pewter platters of the European elite. The acidity of the tomato, mischievously dissolved the lead on many of these pewter plates, causing {misunderstood at the time} lead poisoning. Once identified as a member of the notorious nightshade family, the roguish fruit became associated with its poisonous, hallucinogenic, delirium-inducing cousins mandrake & belladonna.

Rife with witch-hunt culture, the middle-ages unsurprisingly deemed August’s beloved gift a devilish plant & cohort of werewolves. Lore said that witches used the plant to turn themselves or others into werewolves, and thus it was dubbed in Latin, lycopersicum, which translates to {drumroll} …wolfpeach.

Our name pays homage to the rich & tragic history represented in the nuanced etymology of this well-traveled & battle-scarred fruit. It is a nod to a fruit that has been feared & revered, that has transformed & elevated cultures & cuisines. It is a nod to the vilified witches who came before us & the condemned psychedelics that have been forced into hiding for hundreds of years. It is a nod to the indigenous people who domesticated this glorious food & an acknowledgment of the demonic colonialists littered throughout our ancestry, whose effects remain present in the white privilege inherently provided to their descendants. It is an acknowledgement of injustice, of sinister ancestry & the problematic privilege that has followed, and a nod to the ways that food & culture connect us to the people & events that came before us, in the words of Carl Sagan, ‘against the shackles of time.’