Show Notes
Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.
British TV - No disaster can happen before a cuppa Watch almost any British television series, and tea appears whenever you enter someone’s home or office. Tea, apparently, is not only a beverage but also a medication for both mental and physical issues. Oh, turns out someone has died? Put the kettle on. Yes, at some point, gin or whisky will be involved, but there is always tea. Were you shot at? Tea. Your spouse has left you? Tea. Need to discuss a murder? Tea. I have been watching Slow Horses, one of the great detective series about MI5. From this, I have learned that British intelligence can tolerate treason, Russian assassins, and Gary Oldman’s personal hygiene, as long as there is tea. It does not matter the hour, morning, afternoon, or evening. And I am always shocked that nobody ever looks at the clock and says, “Perhaps this caffeine will interfere with my sleep.” No. Kettle on. Could be 2 am, and you just showed up to tell them bad news, are hiding from a shooter, or you broke up with your significant other - tea it is. It is not like Americans, who offer coffee to everyone, but close. Tea is offered regardless of time, circumstances, or whether you even like the person. I am convinced that if you do not offer tea to a Brit, you will be breaking a royal command.
Civilizations and Tea In this series about foods that built civilizations, we have covered foods from wheat to salmon, allowing civilizations to settle and develop. Tea is different. Nobody survived a winter because they had enough tea. But tea, like coffee, helped build civilizations, providing a gathering spot. But the love of tea allowed for two wars, espionage, and ritual.
The Chinese Had Tea First The legend is that the Chinese Emperor Shen Nong discovered tea when some leaves blew into his hot water almost 5,000 years ago. By the eighth century, during the Tang dynasty, Lu Yu had written The Classic of Tea, an entire book about cultivating, preparing, and drinking tea.
Black and Green Tea I’ve always thought green tea tasted like pond water. And despite the many health benefits of green tea, it never appealed to me. Black tea is my preference, and it amazes me that black and green tea come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. Green tea leaves are heated quickly by steaming or pan-firing right after harvesting to stop oxidation. This keeps the leaves green. Black tea leaves are withered, rolled, and left to fully oxidize in the air, which turns them dark brown or black. Same plant. Different processing.
Then the British Discovered Tea When tea first arrived in Britain in the 17th century, it was a luxury item, as all new imports are. Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II, helped make tea fashionable at the royal court. Expensive and exotic, the sort of imported luxury you drank because other people couldn’t afford it. The tea moved from court to wealthy households and eventually into ordinary homes. Taxes on tea were high, which had the predictable effect of creating a thriving smuggling business. By the eighteenth century, Britain was buying enormous amounts of tea from China. This left a large trade imbalance. China was not importing many British goods, so the Brits had to pay in silver. Silver went east. Tea went west. This was an excellent arrangement if you were China. The British were less enthusiastic. Then they discovered that China would import opium.
Things Get Ugly The East India Company discovered an appetite for opium. Despite China's wanting to stop the drug, opium provided a tidy profit for the East India Company. Drug wars have had a similar problem. Opium also solved the trade deficit. When China responded by restricting opium, and when you limit the profit of a Brit, you have war. The so-called opium wars began in 1839. Britain did not go to war because somebody was lat
More from Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson
With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become. People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another. Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam. But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.
MesoAmerica and Chocolate In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate. Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology. I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog. And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.
I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories. As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement. In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions. Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.
In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built. From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans. All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon. Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them. Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade. Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.
Corn, beans, and squash, the three sisters, were the Native Americans’ crop, providing a stable source of calories, protein, and farming from Canada through South America. They allowed civilization to go from a hunting people to those who built cities that rivaled Europe and pyramids equal to the marvels seen in Egypt. The rise of civilizations has a pattern: grow a stable crop that allows people to survive, and go from nomads to develop complex societies. In our series of foods that built civilizations, we turn to the Americas before Europeans arrived. Long before Europeans arrived, civilizations in the Americas had developed writing, calendars, monumental architecture, cities, trade networks, irrigation systems, pottery, and sophisticated agriculture. Corn, or maize, fed the Maya, Inca, and Aztec worlds. In what is now the American Southwest, Pueblo peoples built multi-story communities in the desert, while Mississippian societies built towns and enormous earthworks along the great river valleys.