Tea is for toxins

Fair trade importers swear Sri Lankan
products are not only ethical but way better
for you than the alternatives

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Marise May

Age: 30

Occupation: Co-founder of Sahana Ayurvedic Products

Bio: After this highly erudite, impassioned Pointe St-Charles chick graduated from UBC with a degree in nutritional science, she felt a strong need “to deprogram from the whole university experience” and went travelling, eventually finding herself in Japan where she met her current husband/business partner Chanaka Kurera, a sharp Sri Lankan dude with a shared interest in Ayurveda, an ancient holistic system of medicine dating back some 5,000 years. Eventually returning to Montreal with her new man after a nasty, lengthy ordeal with Immigration Canada, the happy couple, now with baby in tow, got down to business setting up Arayuma (arayuma.com), a company which distributes fair trade, ethically sourced teas and spices from Sri Lanka, including many alleged to contain Ayurvedic “healing” properties.

Marise’s “personal mission”: To inform people that “Health Canada is allowing unproven chemicals to be released into our environment at an astounding rate, only now taking action against ones we know cause cancer, like taking BPA out of baby bottles but not everything else. It’s ridiculous we have things like Walk For the Cure, which gives people the false sense they’re doing something. If one in 10 women gets breast cancer, and every single product in the pharmacy contains parabins—which causes the disease—why can’t they write laws forbidding companies to use these cancer causing materials in their products? Stop killing our population, government of Canada!”

One way to minimize your vulnerability to this chemical Armageddon: By purchasing her products, of course, in particular one tea “called Sariva. It’s picked from the wilds of Sri Lanka and has really strong detoxifying properties. Ayurveda is such a complete (medical) system. We’re consistently discovering ancient things that need to be rediscovered by modern nutritionists and doctors. I think Ayurveda will eventually be our new medical model—one we’ll hopefully adopt before it’s too late.”

And the science supporting Ayurveda is…? “Ayurveda is extremely scientific. The ancient texts detail in precise ways, for example, how physicians should practise surgery, do transplants, even vaccinations. All that we mostly attribute to the Greeks and modern medical science actually come from Ayurveda. Even modern medicine supports the claims of Ayurveda.”

Regarding all this fair trade stuff, what do I care if some Sri Lankan schmuck suffers so long as I can save 25 cents at Provigo? “I don’t think most Canadians realize the conditions people working in plantations are faced with, what it’s like to work the land all day and then go home and not be able to feed your family, to starve and be forced to sell your children into slave labour.”

Sure, but does she have any good reasons to support fair trade practices? “Fair trade doesn’t necessarily mean more expensive. As demand grows and production capacities improve, prices are actually going down. The only difference is that the farmer isn’t being exploited. Our spices are actually less expensive than so-called ‘gourmet’ spices, which I assure you aren’t the same high quality as our stuff.”

Last book read: The Complete Book of Ayurvedic Home Remedies, by Vasant Lad.

Musical preferences: The Ethiopians, Marcia Griffiths, Bob Marley.

Words of wisdom: “Be melting snow, wash yourself of yourself.”

Comments: dimwit@hdot.net