Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (Taiwan and the World)

A friend introduced me to Oolong tea. We try different teas yoguru or the green tea from Japan and tea from Alishan and other mountains.

It was natural to be curious about this book, given my daily interaction with it. 

Oolong tea started as a tea that I tried one time in winter with no appreciation for it. And now I wonder how much of the exotic words hide so much of iceberg behind them whose economic lines are intertwined, whose national pride is that food nationalism part of. I thought of many places and foods during the book read. Basmatic rice, Thai iced tea, Vinacafe 3 in 1 Vietnamese Coffee and Ceylon tea to name a few.

While enjoying tea or coffee at an amateur trying to develop a taste, you think of the flavor but start to know the variables in the processing and the growing of the tea plants or coffee beans. Every step makes a difference.

Hung uses many frameworks to understand the role of place in food indigeneity, the political actions that make tea or any food a state actor. You hear in the news about coffee going to get expensive or pressure on matcha due to golobal demand. And in one such case of demand for Taiwan's bubble tea, just like assembled in America a euphonym for Made elsewhere, MIT - Made in Taiwan tea has routes to other countries like Thailand and Vietnam for not just the reason of demand but also the resilience of tea crops and how can you make your food identity without sharing something enough with the world that they like it and assign it with the terroir.

 There is more complicated aspects of our food, that one could think of and go write books on say tomatoes like the Tomato Land but the book does make you think about not just the food and growers but the incentives and needs of other actors behind it. 

In an ideal world, every grower gets to be the face of their product but the constraints of brand, souvenir teas and favorable pricing -  souvenirs make up for those who cant travel but still taste the world from afar.