Abi, when it is time for you to bake
a little something for some celebration
remember, if you will, the situation
of those who grew the spices that you take.
Those who love fair trade often only make
their choices about drinks, no cerebration
is needed, yet I have the strange sensation
they don't think of what goes in the cake.
The hard, dull work of reaping all that spice
done for low wages (or, in my case, none)
gets no attention from the cognoscenti;
they don't think of the effort or the price
of all that sweating under tropic sun;
those who earn so little should get plenty.
18 January 2007
On fairtrade for Abi Sutherland
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2 comments:
Did you once harvest spices? Which ones, where, when? There's a story in there...
Allspice. Every summer for eight years.
My family moved to Jamaica in 1968, my father having bought a farm there. One of the things that grew was what, in Jamaica, is called 'pimento'. That's the allspice tree. Reaping the allspice berries is dull, hard, boring, underpaid work.
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