This book review on the business of botanicals, or "farm-to-supplement" is for those of us Mother Earth News readers who are home herbalists, wish we were, or who buy medicinal herbs for self and family care.
EPISODE 164
Join us for a conversation with Ann Armbrecht, director of the Sustainable Herbs Program of the American Botanical Council, and author of the EPISODE 163
Join us for a conversation with Alex Godin, founder of Lemontree, a non-profit that helps hungry people find EPISODE 162
Join us for a conversation with Suresh Pillai and Carrie Dashow, the married co-founders of Atina Foods. EPISODE 161 EPISODE 160
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ABC announces search for day-to-day replacement for founder Blumenthal
American Botanical Council founder Mark Blumenthal said he plans to step back into a more advisory role as the organization seeks a new Executive Director. NutraIngredients-USA photo.
“Just to clarify, I’m not leaving,” Blumenthal told NutraIngredients-USA.
“I’ll still be around as someone who can provide institutional memory.”
Blumenthal noted that ABC has grown tremendously since he founded the nonprofit platform in 1988. The original purpose was to provide greater support for the newsletter he was already publishing under the aegis of ABC’s progenitor, the Herb Research Foundation.
“It was a newsletter we created on a typewriter and pasted it up with glue sticks,” Blumenthal said.
In
The Business of Botanicals, author Ann Armbrecht follows the medicinal herb’s journey from seed to shelf, revealing the inner workings of a complicated industry, and raises questions about the ethical and ecological issues of mass production of medicines derived from these healing plants, many of which are imperiled in the wild.
From tulsi to turmeric, echinacea to elderberry, medicinal herbs are big business but do they deliver on their healing promise to those who consume them, those who provide them, and the natural world?
The following is an excerpt from
The Business of Botanicals by Ann Armbrecht. The excerpt was originally published on Literary Hub. It has been adapted for the web.
Courtesy
Seven Days writers can t possibly read, much less review, all the books that arrive in a steady stream by post, email and, in one memorable case, a richness of minks. So this monthly feature is our way of introducing you to a handful of books by Vermont authors. To do that, we contextualize each book just a little and quote a single representative sentence from, yes, page 32.
The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry
Ann Armbrecht, Chelsea Green Publishing, 288 pages. $24.95. It was a hippie dream, Drake said, to make $10,000. In the 1970s, herbalist