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Beyond Organic: An Interview with Traditional Medicinals’ Josef Brinckman

by Chris Carlsson
3.21.05

I met Josef Brinckman years ago when he was a regular performer as part of The Conspiracy of Equals at the infamous underground music space Komotion International in San Francisco. Recently we reconnected, and I had an opportunity to learn about his work with medicinal plants and world trade in the intervening years. Brinckman currently serves as the vice president of research and development for Traditional Medicinals, a company in Sebastopol that manufactures traditional herbal medicines as teas, syrups, and pastels. Strongly committed to traditional pharmacology and social justice, Brinckman serves as a consultant for several UN bodies and initiatives relating to international trade and development. He’s also an ardent self-tester and home-brewer of herbal medicines.

Chris Carlsson: As I understand it, you didn't have a formal education in this area—how did you get started?

Josef Brinckman: What I do is entirely based on training and experience. When I started at Traditional Medicinals in 1979, I learned a lot from the herbalist at the company, Rosemary Gladstar—now a well known author, educator, and lecturer. She's the founder of United Plant Savers, a conservationist group in the US conserving medicinal plants that are [endangered]. They have land sanctuaries where they maintain the natural flora and reintroduce plants that are threatened.
Most of my experience in the area of therapeutic herbs has been practical, hands-on. I've ingested just about every known medicinal plant substance to observe what it does in my body, whether I need it or not. At the company, I'm one of the so-called “tasters.” I will put anything in my mouth. These days, for liability reasons, companies usually don't want people putting anything in their mouths. But I really do try everything, and so I have a really good understanding of physiological responses. I also grow my own herbs at home. I make my own medicines, extracts, syrups, concoctions, and all sorts of different things.

And have you had stuff go to market that you've developed?

I've developed a number of products that Traditional Medicinals has on the market. But I can't really say that I've developed them, because the basis of my development is traditional use.

That is the opposite claim of western pharmaceutical companies, who are trying to patent lots of traditional knowledge.

Traditional Medicinals doesn't patent anything. Let's say our company wants a product for nasal congestion. Because it's a traditional medicine company, I look through the formularies of what is [traditionally] used in, let's say, herbal teas. What's used in the Ayervedic medicine system? What's used in the Yonami system? What's used in the Tibetan Buddhist system? What's used in traditional Chinese [medicine]? What's used in traditional German herbal medicine? What's used in native North American [medicine]? The next step is to find out if the herbs that are used in those systems are commercially available. Can a company buy them? Are they available "certified organic?" Are they available wild-collected in some manner where you can have confirmation of a "sustainable” wild harvest happening? Are they available with any other meaningful certifications like fair trade certification or kosher? We look at the price, and then the taste. If people [don’t like the taste], they're going to spit it out. It doesn't matter if it works—you won't get patient compliance if it's not tolerable enough for them to finish their dose.

Then [there’s the question of] who you are going to do business with to get [those herbs]. What do you have to go through to get the stuff? Is it available already, or do you have to develop a source and work with the source to get it? Even if you find a source [for an herb], do they have the technology to dry it, cut it and process it in the ways that you need it, or do you buy it in a whole form and import it and then process it yourself? Do you have to get involved at a deeper level than just picking up the phone and buying it?

One time, USAID people—working for the United States government—came to visit me here in Sebastopol. They asked, "Have you ever considered having your products made where there's a lower cost of labor, instead of in California?" I'm thinking, "This is our community—we live here, these are all our friends who work here, so I guess we really haven't thought about it." But here was our tax money paying a guy to visit me saying, "Not to supplant the jobs you have here in California, but let's say you wanted to export your projects to the growing Middle Eastern market. Now would it make more sense to make the products in California, or to make the products going to the Middle East in Egypt? That's what we're talking about. We want to introduce you to some companies in Egypt that have tea-bag machines. There are herbs growing there, and you could have your packaging made there and you could make a more economical product for that market over there." It is true that it is more economical, and this is what most companies do. If you're going to be more global with your products, you don't make them all in California and ship them everywhere. You start making them all over the place in the context of the labor and material costs in the region that you're going to ship to—otherwise you can't compete. We've done it the wrong way, economically speaking. We make our stuff in California. It ends up in different parts of the world, but my friends in New Zealand say the products sit on the shelf for twice the price of New Zealand- or Australian-made teas, and nobody buys them. That's because they're made here and shipped across the ocean. Other companies are having theirs made somewhere in the region, or at least in Singapore. We're going to begin to do that for the European market, in Germany, through a company whose qualities we trust.

I think the most important thing that you can do independent of any business model is make sure that you have local food security. If you're producing extra of something that is unique to your area, then that can be exported. I drink coffee every day, and I put cocoa and cloves and cardamom and cinnamon in it. These things don't grow in Sebastopol. I'm not against world trade—I want those things. I like things that come from the tropics. Should I just move to the tropics? Maybe. People have always been wanting exotic things that come from somewhere else—that's natural, and it won't stop. [But you should] make sure that all of your sustenance, everything that you need to get by in your community is taken care of before you think about export. If you have biodiversity, don't ever switch that out for monocropping—no matter what. And if you have something unique, unfortunately you have to protect it, because otherwise somebody else will steal it.

I wonder if you have any examples of "sacred cows" from the point of view of people who are pro-sustainability?

I think people have an assumption that if something is certified organic, it meets sustainability criteria. It doesn't. I once worked on an organic farm. You can monocrop on your certified organic fields–you can clear out all the biodiversity on your land and put in a couple of thousand acres of the same thing and grow it organically. People think that organic cultivation is the solution, [but] it’s not. One reason is that is that 80% of the medicinal plants in the world are wild-collected. Organic [medicinal plants] may or may not be cultivated in the same area where [they were once] wild-collected. They probably won't be. Some farm's going to start doing it somewhere else, because now [consumers] would rather buy certified organic cultivated than wild-collected. All these people who were making a livelihood from wild collecting are suddenly losing their sources of income because some company starts growing [the same plants]. But hey, it's certified organic. The other thing is that [organic cultivation] doesn't ensure biodiversity, it doesn't ensure that there's good labor practices—there's a number of things that it doesn't ensure. It just ensures that certain inputs weren't used, and that the groundwater and the soil are clean, and that you followed organic cultivation rules. But [people] think that if it's certified organic it meets a lot of social criteria. It doesn't.

There is no comparable social stamp of approval as far as I know...

At the moment you have to join a number of concepts together. Some of the organic farms I work with are also certified Fair Trade, and they're also certified Biodynamic. To get certified Biodynamic, there's an ecosystem approach that requires biodiversity on your farm. All of your inputs have to come from your farm. If you need manure, you don't buy it from somewhere else, you produce it with animals on your own farm. If your soil needs amending on a biodynamic farm, you make herbal amendments that you put into your compost for the soil. Everything happens on the farm. Plus, in a biodynamic farm the human beings on the farm are part of the ecosystem. So the balance and the health of all the inhabitants of the farm are part of the program. Biodynamic is a system that Rudolf Steiner developed from thousands of lectures that he gave in the early 20th century. If an organic farm has biodynamic certification, that means something to me. The two biodynamic farms that I work with, one is in Darjeeling, India. The biodynamic certification comes from Demeter Bundt in Germany, they're the main certifier. The other one I visited is in Egypt. [These farms] have to be self-sufficient. They have schools, clinics, hospitals, they make their own clothes. Their surplus is produced for export. On the Sikkim farm that I visited in Egypt, they grow cotton and then they have a factory on the farm where they process it and make clothing. So they make clothing, they grow herbs there, they make tinctures, they have teabag machines, they have extractors, they make their own herbal medicines, they've got a clinic, they've got a school. Everybody who works there that doesn't live on the—they don't call it a commune, but I would—if you even work there from the neighboring community, your children can go to school there, and they can use the health care services there. I'm not going to say that biodynamic farms don't have an overarching belief system that you kind of have to buy into. For example, if you didn't believe in astrology, you wouldn't fit in, because they plant according to the moon cycles and watch the stars. If you didn't agree with it, you'd have a hard time being part of it. But they produce incredibly high quality materials, and they are a model for sustainability.

There's no perfect system, and never will be, or one certification that means it all. There's a perception that organic [alone] does the trick. I remember well when Whole Foods bought the natural food store in [Sebastapol], they started making changes in the sourcing of their produce. I remember I was in there one day, and they no longer had organic bananas from a particular co-op in Mexico. One of the people that shopped there noticed that and said, "I really want to support that co-op with those bananas." And [Whole Foods] said, "well, Dole has organic bananas now." So a chain store, even a natural foods store like that, is going to decide, "Dole complies with organic rules, that's good enough for us. We're going to get Dole's organic bananas, and forget about that little co-op because their bananas cost more. If it's organic, it meets our customers' criteria." There's no social element [inherent in organic]. So you have to pile up certifications.

The farms in Egypt and in India that [Traditional Medicinals] does business with are both certified organic and certified biodynamic, which for me takes care of the environmental and social issue, but they're also certified Fair Trade, which takes care of [another] social thing. We've been to both places and have seen how they work, and have seen that the people have a reasonably good standard of living—certainly compared to people just off-farm in the region. It's pretty remarkable. Also, through this company, we've been able to do direct business with people who live on the farm, which gives them an additional income. For example, on this farm in India, we buy green tea leaf and black tea leaf from the estate that the workers produce. But the workers also have their own patches on the estate where they grow ginger. So we buy ginger from them [directly]—they typically grow [that ginger] for the fresh market in Delhi, but they can make a premium by selling it to us under these same certifications, fair trade and biodynamic and organic, and they get to make extra money aside from the money they're already making from living and working at this farm.

[Going back to] the sacred cow of “organic.” The example I like to give is that you can get organic ginger produced on a large scale in Indonesia that comes to market for half the price of the organic, biodynamic, fair trade ginger I'm buying in India. When the consumer comes into a Whole Foods market, they say, “Wow, this organic ginger tea is $2.50 a box, and this [other] organic ginger tea is $5 a box. They're both organic. Why should I pay $5 for that one when this one is $2.50? Organic satisfies my criteria.” So now the issue is that we've got to educate people: organic is one thing, but do you know anything about the labor practices where [the product] was grown? Do you know anything about the political system that the people are living under? You’re paying $5 a box for this ginger tea because the people who are producing the ginger are making a living wage, their children are in school instead of working in fields, they have health care, they have food security. It really depends on there being an upper class that is interested in the topic and willing to pay a high premium for social equity. I'm gambling that there's enough people around willing to do that.

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