Where does flavor come from? This short film series examines the provenance, potency, history, and mythology of our favorite spices. 

There’s an old maxim that goes, “The only constant is change.” Traditional philanthropy creates change by funding targeted interventions that address specific problems. But what if there was a way to change the very conditions of possibility under which philanthropy becomes necessary? What if, in other words, philanthropy could tell a different story – one where flourishing became constant, too?

This year, we explored that question by funding the production of three short films about seemingly simple ingredients: ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon. But these films are not documentaries in the conventional sense. Instead, they are poetic, expressionistic works that bring ingredients to life — not as commodities, but as characters.

Why approach an ingredient as though it were a person? Because personhood changes the terms of recognition. Around the world, natural features like rivers are beginning to receive the same legal rights as humans to protect them from exploitation. By treating an ingredient as a protagonist, we invite audiences to imagine it as more than a raw material. Cardamom is not only a spice; cinnamon is not only a bark; ginger is not only a root. They are threads in longer human and ecological narratives, stories of survival and creativity, entangled with the communities who cultivate them, as worthy of empathy, attachment, and care as any story’s hero.

Moreover, the films are co-created with the communities that grow our ingredient-heroes because their stories are inseparable. The knowledge, rituals, and labor embedded in farming practices are every bit as vital as the spices themselves, and often even less recognized. Bringing these human stories into frame helps resist the flattening effects of markets, which reduce the rich socio-cultural milieu from which ingredients arise to a country of origin.

Taken together, these stories illuminate an unaddressed past, an obscured present, and an uncertain future. These plants and the communities that co-create them carry histories marked by colonization and resilience. They live within the fragile present of climate change, migration, and shifting economies. And they speculate – sometimes anxiously, sometimes hopefully — about futures for themselves and their land. All of this complexity resides within what Donna Haraway has called the "thick present": a present moment that is saturated with entanglements of past and future, human and nonhuman, dire and hopeful. Within this knot, however, is the potential for change.

The expressive possibilities of moving image, sound, and poetry allow us to weave together natural and human elements, memory and possibility. These films do not aim to explain or solve; they aim to evoke. They create an opening for viewers to feel that they are encountering not just ingredients but presences — ones that ask to be known more deeply and recognized more fully. They sow, into the thick present, resonances of the past, reflections of the present, and new possibilities for the future, seeding new possibilities to be carried into consistent change.

At The Yogi Foundation, philanthropy is not only about producing a single intervention with a neat, measurable outcome. It is about shifting the conditions of possibility. Film creates a splash in our sense of what is possible, sending ripples of new ideas radiating outward. It sparks curiosity, invites change, and alters what we think is possible. It can let light into places that were once overlooked or obscured.

That is what we mean when we say that philanthropy can tell a different story. By giving voice to cardamom, cinnamon, and ginger, and to the communities whose lives are entwined with them, we are not creating change within the established confines of the possible. We are rehearsing new ways of seeing, imagining, and relating, within the thick present we all share.

We hope that after watching these films, viewers will be curious. Curious about the spices themselves, but also about the communities whose lives and futures are entwined with them. Curiosity is a starting point for care, and care can spread into new forms of recognition, solidarity, and responsibility.