“If white women are going to consume turmeric, how do I make sure brown farmers make as much money off of it as possible?”

Indian American Sana Javeri Kadri has had a turmeric latte twice in her life. Both times were at wellness cafes, the first in Seattle and the second in Oakland. She was unable to finish either one. The drink was aggressively unpleasant.

Finding herself in a cultural terrain so far from what she knew in India, she had a mounting sense of frustration with turmeric’s newfound status as a luxury product, race- and class-coded in a way that was at odds with the realities of the Indian farmers who harvested it so tirelessly.

For her, the battle began with turmeric.

The example she likes to give is, “if you think about coffee and cacao ten years ago, [they were] commodity crops—something that had a very low price that was produced in the global South and then consumed here in the West. “

“With direct trade and working with farmers, the quality of coffee brought into the West has changed completely. The national prices in several coffee- and cacao-growing countries has gone up. So overall, this idea of direct trade and sustainable tracing of your product has been wonderful for these two crops. I’m trying to do the same thing for spices.” Says Kadri

She further told Munchies,”If white women are going to consume turmeric, how do I make sure brown farmers make as much money off of it as possible? That was honestly the driving force for the first many months of Diaspora Co.: Let’s just make this as profitable for India as possible.”

The driving force behind her business is to put money into the hands of Indian farmers. But then it’s also, in the marketing of it. Kadri re iterates , “I’m not your Ayurvedic healer selling you turmeric. I’m a queer woman of color selling you turmeric.”

Kadri, 24, grew up in Mumbai, but moved to California to attend Pomona College six years ago.

So she founded Diaspora Co. last August. You could consider it her way of addressing the injustice at the heart of turmeric’s sudden stateside popularity. Diaspora Co. sells turmeric sourced directly from Vijayawada, a city in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

The turmeric is harvested by a fourth-generation turmeric farmer named Mr. Prabhu. Prabhu’s turmeric is a curcumin-rich heirloom pragati strain that Javeri Kadri offers in tins and jars . Farmers like Prabhu often get the short end of the stick in the global spice trade, where supply chains can be so convoluted, with markups so excessive that these farmers often see very little profit. One kilogram of of turmeric in India is about US $0.35; in the States, Javeri Kadri explained to me, it can cost roughly $35.