Happy International Tea Day!

The Unexpected Rabbit Hole I Dove Down Today

Research rabbit holes are funny things. I mean, I set up this newsletter to document the random nature of the rabbit holes, but then sort of committed myself to publishing a new research rabbit hole once a month. And rabbit holes are not the sort of thing that can be forced. We stumble across a random question and find ourselves digging and digging to find answers.

Well, life is what it is. This past month has been full of illness and unexpected events. So, research got a bit sidelined, and yes, this newsletter is now almost a week late as a result.

I half-heartedly started grasping for a topic to write about and while I had a perfectly good newsletter poised to be written, it was an unexpected email falling into my inbox that set off today’s quest.

“It’s International Tea Day!” proclaimed the subject line of an email from Oliver Pluff & Co., the Charleston-based tea makers who have a line of teas designed to mimic the five teas thrown in Boston Harbor on 16 December 1773. My response? “Errr… Wasn’t Tea Day last month? Because I remember posting about tea day on Facebook last month…”

So, some digging later I discovered quite a few things. First and foremost, I follow way too many British businesses. Last month was National Tea Day, for the United Kingdom. Not International. Second, International Tea Day is a holiday declared by the United Nations. There is a whole line-up of speakers and everything, which I missed seeing as the celebration was based out of Rome and they were over before I had even woken up this morning.

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (or FAO), “The celebration promotes the sustainable production, consumption, and trade of tea, and offers an opportunity for actors at global, regional and national levels to ensure that the tea sector continues to play a role in reducing extreme poverty, fighting hunger and safeguarding natural resources.” You can see the full website and resources here: International Tea Day | 21 May

Britain’s National Tea Day and the UN’s International Tea Day are not the only holidays around tea. There are a lot more. Bubble tea, chai, and matcha all have their own holidays. The US also has separate days for hot tea and iced tea, which iced tea actually having a full month to itself. (None of this I knew before I started digging this morning! And I’m a huge tea drinker and historian… That’s almost embarrassing.) But today’s holiday has more of a social justice origin - and is arguably the most important of all of them.

We know from looking at the history of tea in regard to the beginnings of the American War for Independence just how important tea was to the global economy in the late 18th century. But what we often forget (especially in a country that practically runs on coffee) is that tea continues to be of massive global importance.

So, Happy International Tea Day!