The Year To Seed Medicine Security

As a matter of grassroots public health.

Feb 20, 2025

A photo of the full moon's reflection through tree branches shining into my bedroom onto the wooden wall, with a wooden bedframe below it. — The full moon reflecting through naked branches into my bedroom.

My dream of sowing a new garden has lain dormant for a few years while I moved around to complete my master’s. From my suburban apartment in Rhode Island, I built its Pinterest board, sketched its keyhole shape in my mind, and tended to community food gardens with the Rhode Island Master Gardeners. Now, my fingers are itching to start planting this spring — albeit on partly shaded ground.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered seeds from BC’s Ravensong Seeds & Herbals, prompted by their Imbolc discount. Browsing their catalogue, I noticed cucumbers, spinach, and radishes forming neat rows alongside poppies, tobacco, and borage. It got me thinking (again): Where is the line between food and medicine — particularly herbal medicine?

I’ve grown potager gardens and food forests where herbs nestled up beside food crops, offering layers of protection and nutrients. Similarly, my new garden is going to be a delightful tangle of what many would categorise separately as ‘food,’ ‘medicinal plants,’ and ‘ornamentals.’ I believe this intentional diversity makes for a happier garden.

Like humans, plants do well in diverse ecosystems. They don’t classify themselves as medicinal or not (at least to my knowledge). Rather, their biochemistry shifts in response to environmental stressors like drought or insect predation, increasing their secondary metabolite production and, in turn, their therapeutic actions.

A plant’s biochemical makeup determines if and how we can work with them. We herbalists sometimes reference Hippocrates’ adage: The dose makes the poison. This is known as the therapeutic window, or the optimal range in which a plant offers the most healing action. Exceed it, and harm can potentially result. The concept is poetic, reinforcing the call to respect plants, whether as food or medicine, by taking only what we need, and sowing more than we take, when we can.

We can also extend this concept beyond individual health. When at least 25% of pharmaceuticals come from medicinal plants — often through the theft of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous Land — haven’t we, as settler-colonial capitalist societies, surpassed the window of respect for plants and their human stewards, which is a gateway to communal healing?

A photo of a mason jar of loose leaf herbal tea on a grey marble counter, with mirrors in the back. — A gut supportive tea I’ve been making on the regular, with food medicine besties like rosemary, plantain and nettle.

Grassroots Public Health

Increasingly, public health is recognising the importance of access to dense, nutritious food as a social determinant of health. Many public health programs focus on educating folks about food — how to prepare, eat and grow food together. As an herbalist, I naturally wonder why education on sustainable, culturally appropriate herbal medicines can’t also be considered a social determinant of health?

With food insecurity and apartheid on the rise, herbal medicine can help fill nutritional and therapeutic gaps, improving quality of life and disease resilience while fostering greater respect for the land and all its inhabitants.

Take fire cider, for example. In the early 1980s, the fairy godmother of contemporary North American herbalism, Rosemary Gladstar, created a powerhouse immune formula with her students. Combining grocery-store staples like onion, garlic, ginger, and horseradish, the recipe bridges the imagined gap between food and medicine. It has helped generations rediscover herbalism after it was driven underground around a century ago. When an enterprising business attempted to trademark the name, three herbalists — now known as the Fire Cider Three — fought back, protecting this and other collectively held recipes.

Since, whorls of herbalists are teaching their communities how to engage with plants, in areas from wound care and sleep hygiene, to chronic illness and pain management. Additionally, many Indigenous healers, growers and activists have never stopped doing this work in spite of multilayered genocide, criminalisation and environmental changes. In recent years, The Indigenous Food Sovereignty (IFS) movement has gathered momentum around revitalising Indigenous food traditions — including medicine — as well as reclaiming Indigenous Lands.

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Just as food knowledge is passed down through generations, medicinal plant knowledge is also a transgenerational resource meant to be shared within bioculturally connected communities. Doing so fosters medicine security, a concept similar to food security—one I wrote about years ago in my free guide, Making Gardening Medicinal. Simply, everyone should have reliable, equitable access to the medicines and supplies they need to sustain their bodyminds. This includes both pharmaceuticals and herbal medicines, as each has strengths and limitations in addressing our vitality.

Herbal medicine security is not a radical concept, though it may seem so today. Until roughly a century ago, it was common for herbal recipes to pass through Indigenous, enslaved and coloniser lineages, with the latter often coopting the formers’ knowledge. Apothecaries were widespread, and most households/communities shared some form of cultivated land. However, the Flexner Report (1910) changed the landscape of medical education across Turtle Island, shutting down healthcare institutions that did not conform to the biomedical model that dominates today. This relegated many traditions to ‘alternative’ status, including herbal ones.

Gradually and then all at once, safe, edible foods and medicines became the purview of grocery stores and pharmacies. Supply chains distanced us from farmers and the land-based origins of the food we rely on. Many gardens shriveled up, replaced by condominiums and parking lots.

Today, I would love for every child to be able to identify at least a handful of medicinal plants in their neighbourhood — the weeds, the trees, the mushrooms that sprout after a thick rain. I want them to learn their unuttered names and make potions the way we ’90s kids did. To grow up nourished by mineralising teas, heal rashes with salves, splash around in rose and cedar baths, and sip diaphoretic elixirs at the first sign of a flu, instead of looking to suppress it.

Note: As we reclaim food and medicine security, it’s also important to resist purity culture around ‘whole foods’, ‘natural medicines’ and even ‘native plants’. For instance, ultraprocessed foods can be demonised, yet the vast category ranges from canned beans to candy. For many, these options provide nourishment when fresh produce or home-cooked meals aren’t viable. I know ultraprocessed foods like chips have at times nourished my being when an apple couldn’t. Food and medicine security should cater to all the ways folks sustain themselves, not just an idealised few harkening to a pre-industrial past.