From goldenseal to reishi, what is the true cost of the wellness industry’s obsession with wild foods?

There’s also been a concurrent uptick in consumers seeking naturally derived ingredients that might boost their immunity to infections, reduce inflammation in their tissues and make them feel stronger and sharper. In fact, the American wellness industry, already worth an estimated $500 billion annually, is expected to increase by as much as 5 percent every year in spite of the current dire economic state of the grocery market. But this frenzy around certain natural ingredients — which comes with little knowledge or scrutiny of the opaque supply chains that bring them to market — has the potential to strain ecosystems and endanger human workers.

These concerns aren’t so different from the ethical challenges that exist around cultivated crops from the Global South, like bananas, cocoa and sugarcane. But where there’s been an effort in past years to increase the traceability of certain foods farmed in vulnerable countries, wild ingredients “move through supply chains invisibly,” says Caitlin Schindler, a sustainability consultant, now working for a company called Biodiversify, who coauthored the WildCheck report. “The sources that businesses would normally look to to gather information about whether something is sustainable or not — plants largely go under the radar.”

The problem starts, Schindler says, with the fact that “plants are lower-priority across all parts of society” — as evidenced throughout the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which is described as “the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of animal, fungi and plant species.” The IUCN list is where a company might turn first when trying to learn of a wild ingredient’s ecological status — but of the 26,000 plant species that “have a well-documented use, only 21 percent have had their global threat status assessed,” Schindler says, part of a cognitive bias known as “plant blindness.” For those plants that have been considered, many were last evaluated in 1999, making the contents of the list woefully out of date. On top of that, the existing frameworks for evaluating ingredients — measuring water use, pollution, land-use change and biodiversity loss — are generally applied to commodities such as palm oil. Noncultivated botanicals are largely left out of these equations.

Where the wild things are

Wild plants, says Schindler, can “slip through the cracks because they’re such a niche thing, and also they are usually sourced in quite small volumes, so they don’t really fall that far up on the priority list for companies” — if those companies are even aware they’re using wild plants to begin with. Ann Armbrecht, founder and director of an organization called the Sustainable Herbs Initiative, says that by one knowledgeable (if unconfirmed) estimate, “Less than 5 percent of herbal-products companies can tell you where they source their ingredients, which is shocking.” Purpose-driven companies that recognize that their economic dependence on wild plants means they need to “invest in the health of the ecosystem” often take the critical extra step of visiting the communities they source from, making it likelier that their products support people and planet, Armbrecht says.

The WildCheck report takes a deep dive into 12 ingredients, the “Wild Dozen,” that illustrate the challenges inherent in the wild-plant supply chain. These include ingredients that turn up in, or as, foods and beverages, in addition to those used in cosmetics, supplements and traditional medicines. They are usually sourced in small quantities, Schindler says, through an aggregator who might provide a company with “possibly even hundreds of different ingredients, and understandably, they can’t be focused on responsible sourcing of every single one of those.” For example, juniper berries can be grown as a crop, but since an aggregator won’t sort the juniper, “It might not be possible to figure out, even if a company does want to know, whether it’s wild or cultivated” — let alone whether there are human rights risks associated with it.

One of WildCheck’s Wild Dozen is the Brazil nut. This selenium-rich snack is considered vulnerable due to habitat loss. In sourcing it from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Bolivia, there’s a high risk of child labor, modern slavery and unsafe working and living conditions in seasonal encampments — due to polluted drinking water, the potential for scorpion bites, and sometimes fatal blows to the head from falling nuts, which can weigh as much as 5 pounds. But the report also points out that protecting Brazil nut trees can help conserve the rainforest as well as ensure critical income to impoverished communities.

There are similar sourcing concerns surrounding the “superfood” baobab, loaded with Vitamin C, that’s grown across sub-Saharan Africa and used in fruit chews, chips, energy bars and juice blends; and the shea nuts grown in West Africa whose “butter” — considered a heart-healthy fat — is a common ingredient in chocolate, in addition to being ubiquitous in skincare products. Licorice, a rhizomatous herb from the Caucasus that’s listed as low concern on the IUCN Red List, is nevertheless seeing a decline in wild stocks due to increased demand; the collection of its root for use in energy drinks and digestive teas destroys the remaining plant, too. Some countries where licorice grows are also war-torn regions where worker rights might be violated.

Not every wild plant of concern comes from abroad. American ginseng is native to Appalachia, and harvesting this stress-busting “green gold” from forests across the region has long sustained communities there. The root can be cultivated, but a growing Chinese market prefers it wild — at least in part because this ensures it was grown without fungicides — which has lead to its current diminished state in its native habitat. To take some of the pressure off wild ginseng, Penn State University ethnobotanist Eric Burkhart has been working on a compromise: cultivating it in situ in the forest, making it quasi-wild, or “wild-simulated, in forest farming lingo,” Burkhart says.