LA PUENTE, Calif. — Cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, paprika: spices are among the most popular items we buy at the grocery store, but those spices are usually two to three years old before they even hit our shelves. It’s because of a long and complicated supply chain — full of middle men and nebulous sourcing — but single origin spices can solve that.
In La Puente, tucked inside a run-of-the-mill suburban neighborhood, a farmer is quietly running one of the biggest curry leaf farms in California. Anand Prasad is a third-generation curry leaf farmer, and he owns and operates Prasad Curry Leaf farm, a piece of land he has been cultivating for the last 20 years.
He runs it with the help of his wife, Vijay, who is also the mother of well-known Bravo host and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi.
Originally from Fiji, Prasad said he knew he was going to carry on the family tradition when he moved to LA, though it was no easy task.
“Any friends or family who come to the farm, they all say, 'Oh my god, this is back home, you’re not in America,'” Prasad said, animatedly. “I say, it took me 20 years to build this.”
The climate and soil in LA is very different from the curry trees’ native tropical climates of South India, and for many years, Prasad said he wasn’t able to make the trees thrive. But today, Prasad is known in the culinary world for his superior leaves, which he markets and sells wholesale for chefs, and a single origin spice company called Burlap and Barrel.
Ethan Frisch, one of the founders of Burlap and Barrel, crushed some of the fresh curry leaves in his hand.
“The smell is like citrus, and a little nutty,” he said.
Frisch said the way we buy and ship spices around the world hasn’t changed much since the spice trade began, hundreds of years ago, when spices were stored at the bottom of great ships before making long voyages across the seven seas.
“It’s still a process of a farmer selling to a local intermediary, selling to somebody else, selling to somebody else, so by the time the spice gets to the supermarket here in the U.S., it’s often two or three years old, it’s lost a lot of flavor and there’s no traceability,” Frisch said.
It’s an unsustainable model. Those long supply chains — which often include auction houses, traders, importers and exporters — create lots of emissions, and ultimately produce adulterated crops. But not only do those large supply chains mean we get sub-par spices, it also means small spice farmers get paid far less than they are worth.
Ori Zohar, co-founder of Burlap and Barrel, said shorter supply chains means the farmers can actually get paid for a superior product.
“Because we work so closely with our partner farmers, they’re able to grow spices that are sustainable, and done with beautiful flavors that have never been grown before in this way.”
Indeed, single origin spices are often so much more robust than the grocery store variety, that home cooks and chefs require half of what a recipe calls for. Such is the case with Prasad’s curry leaves, something he takes great pride in, and one of the reasons he (and many other farmers today) choose to work with companies like Burlap and Barrel.
“It’s my hard earnings,” Prasad said. “I want somebody to continue this.”
To learn more about Prasad Curry Leaf farm, click here.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified Anand Prasad. The error has been corrected. (Feb. 17, 2022)