Spearmint
Common herb. Flavor monoculture. Diversified farms.
Native to Europe and temperate Asia and naturalized worldwide.
Spearmint became raw material for the flavor and chewing-gum industries. She’s increasingly cultivated in resource-intensive monocultures and traded by a handful of corporations that set price and capture value.
Lineage of Extraction
Spearmint was grown not for the herb but for distilled oil, feeding the flavor and gum industries through a narrow chain of corporate buyers.
With few buyers setting terms, family mint farms absorbed price shocks, disease, and the costs of monoculture while margins flowed downstream.
Pathways to Reclamation
Why This Matters
Spearmint is a lesson in market power: ecological monoculture mirrors economic monopsony. Reclamation diversifies both the field and the marketplace.