Hi there :)
On Wednesday, I wrote to all of you about how we're trying to navigate the rollercoaster of tariffs as a small business. I also announced free shipping site-wide until today (Sunday, 4.13) midnight PST. We've been flooded with support and are truly so grateful. We received hundreds of wonderful comments and emails, and we're so excited to ship out all your orders. BUT one snarky one stuck out to me. They wrote "Why can't you just move more of your supply chain to America? By making your business about politics, you've lost me as a customer.". Eight years into running this company, I've got tough skin, my head screwed on right and am pretty damn good at finding the silver linings in every situation, but the tone was so flippant, I was peeved off enough to respond.
First of all, whilst indigenous communities across the US have been cultivating and foraging incredible herbs and spices (sumac, sassafras, wild ramps, spicebush, juniper, and sage to name a few!), most of the spices that we are famous for cannot be cultivated domestically, especially not at scale. Our Aranya Black Pepper (our #1 bestseller by far!) is indigenous to India's Western Ghats, having growing in the hills of Kerala as far back as we know. The knowledge of how to vine ripen, slowly sun dry and hand sort each pepper berry to its full potential has been passed down across generations in the Parameswaran family. There is simply no way to recreate that terroir, and that flavor elsewhere. The process of juicing, clarifying and cooking sugarcare to make Madhur Jaggery dates back at least 2000 years. We work with a family that still does things the traditional way - using wild okra to clarify, time and hard work to turn juice into a natural sugar, and regenerative farming to grow the best heirloom sugarcane.
We are so overwhelmingly proud to source from India and Sri Lanka, to champion the highest quality ingredients from my homeland. Moving our supply chain would be antithetical to our work - introducing our community and the grocery aisle to the flavors and farmers of South Asia is a job we're very proud to do every day. I am all for sourcing everything we can as locally as we can (I'm the most earnest ambassador of the Full Belly Farm produce and flower CSA, and Fruitqueen's weekly fruit box!), but as long as our taste for ingredients from faraway like coffee, chocolate, and spices remain, we will continue to do our best to bring those ingredients to you, equitably and sustainably.
Secondly, a few years ago Alicia Kennedy wrote an essay about how she felt that saying "food is political" is a bit of a cop out. She's right that in saying that it's become a liberal platitude meant to elicit applause but doesn't really urge people to action in any way. In our work, we operate at the intersection of so many layers of politics across two continents, it would definitely be easier to just gnore it all than try to explain it. We confront the very real effects of climate change in the unseasonal rains, unbearable heat and sudden flash floods that dictate our farm partners' lives, only exacerbated by global politics. We see and try to mitigate the casteism that affects the farm workers who harvest each spice we buy. We watch as trade policies made in far away rooms influence our ability to do business this week or not. We exist in response to the hundreds of years of colonialism that built the spice trade into something so stale and unjust that generations later, we are all craving equity, freshness and flavor. We exist as a business because of and in response to the politics that impact each of us every day. It's true that we're just out here slingin' spices and somedays it isn't much more complicated than that. But most days, we really do it out of a relentless and wild idealism that this work is political and that we're fueling change just as much as we're feeding our community.
With love & in community,
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