It’s Time to Decolonize Tea

I wrote everything I’ve wanted to say and have been thinking for the last 10 years about regarding tea, its colonial history, and the legacy of that still today for Whetstone Magazine’s Online Journal.

Here’s an excerpt of the beginning:

One of the most worldly and globally sophisticated people I know introduced me to his prized collection of Mariage Frères teas. They were French. From Paris.

French tea? They don’t grow tea in France. This “French” tea was Chinese, Indian, Sri Lankan and Japanese tea repackaged in French branding.

At that time my friend and I were both living and working in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a tea-producing country.

Something similar happened again a few years later.

While living in Beijing, I visited a friend’s organic farm on the outskirts of the city. The founder, a fellow American, brought out a special tin of tea to share with the group: It was Mariage Frères tea. Again, France does not grow tea, it only has a colonial trading relationship to tea. We were in China—the world’s largest and oldest producer of tea. The fact that both encounters with this “French” tea were examples of people going to great lengths to bring tea that had been exported from Asia to France, back into two historical tea producing countries, highlighted the absurdity of what colonial mentalities can create.

Ever since these two encounters, I have sought to learn as much as I could about tea, and specifically Chinese tea. For seven years, I lived in China to start and run a tea social enterprise, learning from local tea experts and working directly with small family tea growers to showcase the richness of China’s teas and tea traditions to new audiences.

My experience navigating the global tea market and talking to many tea drinkers from around the world made me realize that in the 21st century, we have yet to decolonize tea.

It is time for us to decolonize tea. What I mean by “decolonize tea” is, it is time for us to learn and recognize the actual historical colonial systems of the global tea trade. It also means it is time to confront our inherited colonial mentalities that European tea processes and culture are superior. And lastly it means restoring an appreciation for tea as a seasonal crop grown and crafted by people and discard the colonial idea of flattening tea into a commodity.

You can read it all here online on Whetstone’s website or if you want to download a PDF of it here.

You can also listen to an interview I did with Evan Kleinman of KCRW’s Good Food to discuss the article I wrote.