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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?