India
India is the birthplace of black pepper.
Explorers have traveled there for centuries to bring back this “Black Gold” to Europe. Today the pepper is still harvested in much the same way as it was hundreds of years ago. Workers, climbing long, narrow, bamboo ladders, pick the strands of pepper and place them in a sack, fashioned from a cape, which they wear draped and knotted around their shoulders.
These photographs are from Wayanad, in the hills above the Malabar Coast in southern India where I photographed the pepper harvest for The Reluctant Trading Experiment, a spice company based in Chicago. Also included are some images from Mumbai and Rajasthan.