The Decolonization of Tea: An Exploration and a Call to Action

Whether it’s black tea, green tea (like matcha), fermented pu’er, or even tisanes (herbs, fruits, and spices, but not the plant itself)---the act of brewing plants in hot water has a home in every culture. Hot-plant-water-brews are so popular that many have become commodified and when things become commodified, the people and the planet take the backseat. If you want to drink tea while taking care of people and the planet, you can use the decolonization mindset—learning and acknowledging tea’s exploitative history and moving forward together to support people and the planet. 

The art of Japanese matcha (green tea) has existed for centuries and is a delicious and meditative art. It has exploded in popularity all over the world. By learning about its roots, we honor and protect its authenticity. 

In this blog, we’ll explore the history, environmental impacts, and social aspects of tea and the very meaning of adapting the decolonization mindset—so that tea is incredibly enjoyable, both in flavor and impact.

High Tea: Past and Current Realities

It all began in 2737 B.C., where legend has it that Chinese emperor Shen Nung tasted the delicious leaves that had fallen into his cup of hot water while he rested under the Camellia sinensis tree. 

Then, In the early 1600s, a Portuguese tradesman tasted tea from the Japanese, birthing the European commodification and ensuing colonization of tea. Fast forward to the 1930s, and companies like the notorious British East India Company sourced teas from China, India, and even Kenya, catering to the elite tea drinkers. 

Even if your Twinings and Lipton is Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance Certified, it certainly does not guarantee that the farmers who actually grew the tea are being paid even minimum wage. A joint study done by Oxfam and the Ethical Tea Partnership found that Assam tea workers in India received only 40% of India’s minimum wage—mere U.S. dollars a day. With such low wages, Indian girls who pick tea are more likely to be trafficked. In Kenya, rampant sexual violence on tea plantations highlights how poverty silences rural women. Around the world, children pick tea because it’s the only option in order to help feed their family.

This brief history only highlights how since the beginning, the very act of drinking tea extends far beyond recycling the packaging or choosing loose-leaf tea for less plastic: how were the tea workers treated themselves?

Terroir of Tea - The Nature of Flavor

How tea is grown and processed will affect how the tea leaf unfolds and unleashes its flavors—a concept called terroir. It’s so important because tea could be grown into something bland or something so delicious that family businesses and daily rituals prosper. Many factors affect terroir. Soil health, biodiversity (or lack of) where the tea is grown, elevation, temperature, humidity, and when the tea is picked (first or second flush, for example) all affect flavor.

Love & Tea farmer and Mayan K’ich’e indigenous Doña Elena (second from right) talks about the regenerative agricultural principles she uses to grow the herbs like mint and lemon verbena.

Similarly, Agrobiodiversity equals delicious tea—and less deforestation and chemical residues. For example, ancient Camellia sinensis trees in the Jingmai Mountain of China, managed with regenerative agriculture, yield less but sport far more “concentrated and complex” flavors. 

There is not just one type of sustainable tea cultivation. Tea trees interspersed with native trees, organic tea monocultures, corridors for elephants, and combinations of agroforestry and polycultures all have benefits for the tea to taste better. 

After the entire cultivation process, the leaves are dried, steamed, oxidized, and shaped—and depending on whether it’s produced at a large scale or artisanal, this too adds an extra layer of mouthfeels and flavors. 

Charlene Wang de Chen, tea blogger and expert, writes of her first moment tasting un-factory-ized, fresh, single-origin tea: 

“The flavor was soft, round, there was a fresh greenness, and then it ended in a taste that was velvety almost creamy. The crisp, light-yet-clear notes of the flavor conveyed a freshness I had never experienced with tea before.”

This is nothing new. Appreciating the many ways that tea tastes has existed for centuries. Chinese formal tea ceremonies, for example, celebrate the tea drunk plain and savored in community. Beginning with this high respect for tea, it began to pervade all aspects of society.

Peach tea with honey in the rural highlands of Guatemala. These heirloom, grown-with-indigenous-regenerative principles peaches are a common sign in indigenous’ farmers lands and are a common treat with citrusy, honey floral notes. 

Spilling the Tea over Tea: An Exploration of Chai and the Meaning of Tea Globally

Tea is a “social lubricant”. 

It’s sipped for conversation, sick stomachs, and the 3 pm hour; compared to fine wines; and given fancy European names (despite being grown anywhere but Europe).

Chai—which is the Hindi word for tea—is the story of how the Indian peoples adapted Camellia sinensis to their cultural preferences. Understanding this unique story  is an excellent way to understand the power of tea as a social lubricant in different cultures. 

Chai began with a sky-high tea harvest, the Great Depression of 1929, and the HQ at the British East India Company desperate to make a profit despite record low prices. So, the Brits targeted the very populations they had indentured to grow tea—the Indian people. 

With a strong marketing campaign and tea being equated with wealth, tea made its way to the people’s hearts—but not in the way the Brits had hoped. Thanks to India’s regional gastronomy of making brews from grains like millet and rice, in addition to kadha from the North and kasaya in the South (both of which brewed spices like ginger, fennel, and turmeric in water to promote health), adding spices to black tea was a no-brainer. 

In addition, the practice of double boiling the milk added creaminess and prevented spoilage on hot summer days. Chai was fluid—literally—reaching all people in India. And so this is how chai was born—through colonization. 

Then came chai lattes. With the hippie trail of the 1960s, radically-minded Europeans and Americans brought back chai with them. In the 1990s, Starbucks followed suit and launched a chai latte. With less caffeine, warming spices, and pairing with alternative milks, chai lattes have exploded and are beloved. 

Yet as chai becomes more and more commodified, there is the constant clash of what is authentic—and this is normal in any chai culture. More people are seeking and wanting to appreciate the authenticity, cultures, and mindfulness that is practiced within chai. 

This is what is needed not just with chai, but with any food or beverage—like tea.

The decolonization mindset: The people behind the tea

For most tea we drink, we have no idea where it comes from or how it was grown. Someone grows the tea, then someone picks our tea, for many hours and very low wages, and then delicately processes (withers, oxidizes, shapes, dries, etc.) the tea. Finally, it’s shipped. Name-less, person-less, and packaged into a neat little box. Perhaps with a cutesy name like Peppermint Apple Chocolate or Berlin Paris Fog to finish it off. 

Then, we drink the tea and it’s . . . bland, and so it has a lot of other fillers and additives (artificial flavors, tea dust, oils, sugar, etc) to make it have some sort of taste. 

Do you want your cup of tea to taste better, and even more so by knowing the people and the planet who grew the tea are being treated with justice? It’s time for the decolonization mindset. Here are some tips on how to do it. 

1. Keep an eye out for teas that actually talk about sourcing from one place/region (single-origin) and directly from the farmers, with no middlepeople (direct-origin). This increases traceability and transparency, further increasing the likelihood that the farmworkers and the planet are treated with justice. 

2. Then, taste the teas! Talk is just a whole lot of talk, but taste isn’t something that’s easily forgotten. By reforging your relationship with tea and how it can and should taste, it’ll be a whole lot easier to actually want tea that is grown with justice.

3. Make it a part of your routine to enjoy the tea with a friend or a family member in a relaxed setting. Practicing mindfulness while you drink the tea will help bring consciousness and awareness to your tea and how it is grown. 

We hope this has helped shed light on the fact that what we consume creates the ripple effects that we plant—which is why it’s so important to buy sustainably and ethically. 

So is tea really just dried leaves, herbs, fruits, and spices? It never was, and it never will be. There are children, family members, community, and the land behind each cup, and it should be treated as such.