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Commodities and Stories

Stories and Commodities

Do Stories Matter?

A month or so after I returned from my first trip to eastern Europe to visit producer companies, I was buying a box of Traditional Medicinals Gypsy Cold Care tea. I rarely read the descriptions on boxes, dismissing them as pure marketing with little grounding in reality.

Yet a paragraph on the side of the box caught my attention. It said that the Elder flowers in the tea were FairWild certified, wild-collected from near the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. It described the region and the collectors, one of whom was very likely the collector whom I had just met.

With surprise, I realized this was probably the first time in my entire life that I had actually visited the places on the far side of the supply chain for a product distributed on the international market. And as I placed the box into my cart, I felt something shift inside. A lowering of a defense I only realized had been there by its sudden absence: the defense against all I can’t control about the impacts of every purchase I make. For this one box of tea, there was nothing to defend.

I know commodity systems are complicated. I’ve read enough anthropology to know that certifications like Fair Trade are mixed, that things aren’t always what we want to believe and that the benefits don’t always flow to the people to whom they are meant to flow. Supply chains are complex and, as with anything, it is important to do our homework.

Yet I can’t help feeling that the stories of these people are a missing link in the herb industry. That as much attention as we’ve given to thinking about the plants that make their way into the medicines we ingest to heal, we’ve missed how the plants also connect us to people whose lives the economy renders invisible.

Stories and Healing

Seen in this way, my attention shifts from thinking about how this herbal product can serve me to how my purchase of this product made with these plants can help particular people in particular places.

I begin to understand how the plants might reconnect us not only with a larger ecological web of life but with a social and cultural web as well. Might this be a key piece of the healing they make possible?

 

Review The Business of Botanicals

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Dear Friend,

I hope you are enjoying reading The Business of Botanicals!

Online reviews really do matter, and sharing your personal experience with The Business of Botanicals will help spread the important message of this book.

Please help me reach my ambitious goal of 500 reviews!

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Holistic Herbalism

Holistic Herbalism

Anne McIntyre’s comments about The Business of Botanicals are my favorite – because what she describes is exactly what I set out to do in writing this book.

“Like herbs themselves, The Business of Botanicals is rich in colors, scents, and flavors and is rooted in the earth—exquisite and messy, beautiful and dirty all at the same time. Armbrecht takes us on a journey to many corners of the world to visit plant growers and collectors, as well as teachers and conservationists. In the true spirit of inquiry, her journey comes back to the heart, the organ of true perception…. If the herbalism we practice is holistic because it considers the whole picture of a patient before formulating a prescription, and the whole plant we use is clearly more than the sum of its constituent parts, so too this book offers a truly holistic perspective. As Armbrecht says, her journey became the medicine these plants offer. . . . That is their promise.”

—Anne McIntyre, author of Dispensing with Tradition and The Ayurveda Bible

Healing as Wholeness

The promise of herbal medicine is that it is better for us and for the earth. Is that really the case? The end product can only ever be as healthy as the health of each step of the journey. What do you know about the health of the plants in the products you purchase? About the lives of the men and women harvesting and growing and handling the herbs? What about the ecosystem? The water? The health of the soil?

In Hedangna, a Yamphu village in northeastern Nepal, the priests and shamans can see double, they can see the living and the non-living, the ancestors on whom their lives in the present depend. Not seeing those ancestors, not seeing what it is that sustains us, these healers say, makes us selfish.

In the same way, not seeing the ways our choices impact the lives and places on the far side of the supply chain makes us selfish. We think of our needs: how will this product help me be well? Not our responsibilities: how, by purchasing this product rather than that one can I use my resources to create more wellness in the world?

Doing this requires seeing behind the veil of an economic system that depends on our not seeing.

It is up to each of us to lift that veil, to see beyond what the market wants us to see. To ask and to ask again. it means we might buy less, perhaps, to minimize our footprint. But we can also be more discerning in what we do buy, so that, perhaps, we can make more of a difference. Through that discernment, we engage. And, in my experience, through that engagement we may find the deeper healing we didn’t even know we were seeking.