Kayte Young

From WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, I'm Kayte Young, and this is Earth Eats.

00:00:14:19

Christine Folch

So I think food is a way to study how we are connected to the world of life around us. Whatever we think about humans being so cerebral, so intellectual, just sort of really breaks down because we are part of everything else around us.

00:00:30:10

Kayte Young

This week on the show, we talk with the author of The Book of Yerba Mate, Christine Folch, about how one plant can tell us so much about ourselves and the world around us. That conversation is just ahead. Stay with us.

Thanks for listening to Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young. Caffeinated beverages are a big part of American life. If I'm honest, they're a big part of my life. Coffee in particular.

00:01:19:14

Every single day. Multiple times a day. I have special equipment and rituals around coffee. It's a social connection. It's something I depend on at this point, but it's also something that I truly enjoy. And then there's also tea and various caffeinated sodas and energy drinks. We like our stimulants, and we are not alone. Globally, in most cultures, there's a preferred caffeinated drink.

00:01:53:09

Today we're focusing on one of those. I'm speaking with the author of the of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History.

00:02:01:24

Christine Folch

Hi, I'm Christine Folch. I'm a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, and I'm really lucky because I'm the kind of person who's turned her obsessions and interests into her job.

00:02:14:20

Kayte Young

To start off our conversation, I wanted to hear about how she approached the topic.

00:02:19:08

Christine Folch

Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe we can talk about why I study food and why I think it's so interesting to focus on this everyday aspect of people's lives and what I think it can teach us so much. So I want to start with a book that I read when I was watching my kid in the public library, and I picked up one of these books that they have lying around, and it just touched me, and I thought it captured exactly why I write about and love studying food.

00:02:49:13

So it's this book called Lunch From Home, and it's a kids' book where you have a number of different kids bringing their lunch from home to school. And, you know, most of the kids are eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or sort of very expected in maybe the North American culinary landscape lunches. And these kids are kids from immigrant families who are bringing foods from their backgrounds.

00:03:16:28

And the response that they get when they open their lunch boxes is that the kids around them are like, "Ew, what is that?" And so the story is a story of kids grappling with, like, figuring out that it's actually okay to bring that food to school and sharing that with other people." And I got a whole lump in my throat because I thought this happened to me. My family is from the Caribbean, my mom is from Cuba, and my dad's from the Dominican Republic.

00:03:42:14

And when I was a kid in schools here in the US, there weren't a lot of other kids from my background in our classes. And so when I brought food from home, people were like, "Oh, that's weird." But my family, my mom, and my grandmothers are really good cooks, so I knew our food was good. And so it became kind of this both personal passion, and then it became an intellectual interest to show how important our food was.

00:04:07:13

And so I know everybody says their grandmothers are good cooks, but mine were really, really, really good cooks. And so I became really interested in the stories that food tells. So it could be how you make dishes from the old country, in the new country, or it could be, well, why do we eat this this way? And so I turned to food as a way to kind of connect the very intimate parts of our lives to these really big stories about migrations, maybe about larger economic, global economic forces.

00:04:45:18

Also the knowledges that people have of their environment. So this is one of the things I love about studying food. And I love that kids book [LAUGHS] because it was so identifiable about the passion for food as a way to think about belonging. [INTERRUPTION] So as a cultural anthropologist, I study food as a way to get to the art of everyday life. [INTERRUPTION] So food is this amazing, aesthetic experience.

00:05:18:02

This is why we don't just want to be injected with, like, you know, the nutrients. We actually want the pleasure of our mouths and the pleasure of our eyes to see things, and the smells, and the presentation. That's why all of this matters. And I love that food is how people can be creative and express themselves and express themselves artistically without having to be in a museum.

00:05:37:09

So I think about food as these sort of big questions, but also questions about personal expressions. And that's how I study it as a cultural anthropologist.

00:05:47:26

Kayte Young

Well, to start with, could you describe what yerba mate is?

00:05:54:05

Christine Folch

Yeah. So yerba mate is made from the leaves and the tender shoots of an evergreen tree that grows in the heart of South America. And it's a member of the holly genus, but it's not really pokey, [LAUGHS] but it does have beautiful berries. And it grows in this really specific part of the world. And that's important because, so we'll talk about the botanical specificities in a second.

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But it kind of raises this question about coffee and tea and their botanical specificities and where they can grow it. And this kind of gets at the question of, well, why don't we drink more yerba mate in the United States? Well, one part of it is it doesn't grow in a lot of places. It grows in Paraguay, which is a landlocked country in the heart of South America, and Paraguay's surroundings.

00:06:46:15

And in fact, the scientific name for yerba mate is Ilex paraguariensis. So it has the name of Paraguay in the title. So it grows in this area of the world that is tropical. So it's nice and warm and humid, but it gets kind of close to freezing for like 30 seconds twice a year. [LAUGHS] So it's really, really, really precise. So it [INTERRUPTION] cannot really deep freeze. It just sort of flirts with, you know, 32°F and then goes back up to, you know, really warm.

00:07:17:19

So it has these really precise growing requirements, which is why it's not transplanted in lots of other parts of the world. So it's this tree that grows there. And since time immemorial, indigenous communities in this part of the world have used its leaves for their potency. And so one of the things I think is really cool is that, clearly, these leaves are potent in the sense of they are caffeine-bearing, just like the tea plant is.

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And it also has some other really cool stimulants like theobromine, which is inside coffee. Well, coffee is a little bit, but chocolate is well-known for its theobromine. And it has theophylline, which is another alkaloid stimulant that's especially also found in tea. So yerba mate has caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline. It has this combination of these chemicals that produce certain sensations in humans that we enjoy, which is why we love chocolate and coffee and tea.

00:08:14:28

But it also is treated as a sacred plant and as a way for people to communicate with other than human beings. And so it has this sort of religious or shamanic aspect as well, historically. So it does this thing that we really enjoy, but it's also potent in these other ways. It's a way of getting connected to wisdom. I want to be really clear. It is not narcotic or anything like that. It's just a delightful caffeinated plant, but it's seen as a really important actor.

00:08:50:27

Kayte Young

So these kind of sacred and traditional sort of ceremonial uses, it's not like, you know, peyote or something.

00:08:59:18

Christine Folch

No. No, not at all.

00:09:00:09

Kayte Young

It's not that kind of drug, but it does have some kind of psychoactive effect that sort of lends itself to a certain kind of ceremonial use?

00:09:09:21

Christine Folch

One of the things these plants open up for us is this question about, you know, what it is that we consume and what it means that we're consuming, you know, our food. There's a song, like, I learned in fifth grade for some musical that went something like, "You are what you eat from your head to your feet, so be sure to eat food that's good for you." And this idea that, you know, we are what we eat.

00:09:33:12

And so plants have power and the food that we consume has power because it connects us to all other living things. I think maybe that would be the way to think about these sacred uses. So this plant was really important historically. It is a lovely, stimulating beverage. It's a lovely caffeinated beverage, and the way that people consumed it was to clip the leaves and the twigs that went with it to flash dry them with intense heat, and so to stop sort of an oxidation process, and then to slowly smoke it or roast it over a fire so that it's smoky, and then to crush it.

00:10:13:00

I mean, I love smoked things. Like, I love smoked meats, I love smoked cheeses. And so this is like a smoked tea. [INTERRUPTION] And so it has that nice roasted flavor. People drink it cold, people drink it warm, and people drink it socially. It is something that is shared in community because it's made in community. And so these sort of convivial or social experiences of drinking it, talking about it, and connecting to nature through it, that practice transferred very, very quickly to the Spanish when they got to the heart of South America.

00:10:47:26

Kayte Young

When you talked about this flash drying with direct, intense heat, what is that like? I was just really trying to picture that because the only thing I can think of is fire and fire would burn it, and you're not burning it. So how are they doing this flash drying?

00:11:04:28

Christine Folch

So the way it works is, so today, in traditional mate processing, maybe the stuff that follows as close as possible to the processing that we know about more historically, what people will do is build ovens and put really high-burning, like, sort of high-heat content wood, hardwoods in there, [INTERRUPTION] and then pass the mate through it, like, on a tube over the flames [INTERRUPTION] or on some sort of tray.

00:11:37:22

So that obviously you're not putting it in. It's not getting charred by going into [INTERRUPTION] the fire, but it's touching something that's touching the heat and the flames are really, really high. And obviously, it's really concentrated because it's an oven, a brick oven or a clay oven, that gets to really, really high temperatures [INTERRUPTION] and it's maintained at a really, really high temperature.

00:11:58:09

And it lasts like a minute or two [INTERRUPTION] because it's just so, so hot. Otherwise, you would singe it. [INTERRUPTION] Then it is moved from maybe a tray that's placed on that really high heat [INTERRUPTION] to a kind of dome-shaped device [INTERRUPTION] that's quite, quite large, where these leaves and twigs and branches are spread over this dome to maximize the surface area. [INTERRUPTION]

00:12:22:17

And there will be a fire off side, so not underneath the dome, but sort of to the side, so that the smoke from the fire comes in [INTERRUPTION] and slowly roasts it and smokes it. [INTERRUPTION] And that will take a day and a half. And then often there's somebody there stirring the leaves all the time, raking the leaves [INTERRUPTION] so that it sort of distributes the heat equally, etc.

00:12:46:13

Kayte Young

Yeah. I was just trying to figure out what that device would have been originally like out in the forest. [LAUGHS]

00:12:52:15

Christine Folch

Yeah. I think out in the forest, what they would do is they would have built something called a tatacoa, which is a fire pit. And so what you would do is you would start by beating the ground with, like, really, really heavy sticks to flatten the earth, and then you would build a dome of brick [INTERRUPTION] or maybe mud. I don't know, depends on the resources you have. You'd build a dome over it, a small dome with a hole, and then you would put the fire in there.

00:13:19:12

[INTERRUPTION] And it would pass close to the tatacoa. That would be what would be [INTERRUPTION] used to singe it. Whereas the barbacoa, so the place of the barbecue, would have been [INTERRUPTION] a very large wooden structure made of twigs lashed together that you would put the leaves on top of and there would be a fire close to it.

00:13:39:17

Kayte Young

So the other thing I wanted to just describe is the method of drinking it and sort of the vessel that you drink it in, and the sort of straw, the bombilla or what.

00:13:51:06

Christine Folch

Yes. Yerba mate is photogenic. And so this drinking vessel and the metal straw, I think, capture a lot of people's attention. In fact, that's what caught my attention the first time I saw and experienced yerba mate. Well, the first time I thought I saw and experienced yerba mate. And so I had a friend from college, we just graduated from college and she went down to Chile. She was there for a few weeks.

00:14:16:15

Then she came back with this kilo bag of like something, which I now know is yerba mate, and this gourd and this metal contraption with a capped end. And I was like, "What is that?" And she was like, "I don't know." And I was like, "How do you drink it?" And she's like, "I don't know." And this was in the early 2000s. So this is before YouTube. I mean, I think maybe Google existed at this point, but barely.

00:14:41:18

So, you know, I did a lot of looking online to try to figure out how all these three pieces came together, and in places like Argentina and Uruguay and Brazil, the southern parts of Brazil, mate is consumed hot. But Paraguay is a very, very, very, very, very, very hot country. And so people there prefer to drink it cold. And so the water will be like sort of ice cold, and maybe we'll have some citrus in it and gets poured into the vessel as well, and drunk, and then shared in the same sort of round.

00:15:15:05

So it feels very intimate because you're drinking from the same straw as someone else, [INTERRUPTION] and that's beautiful.

00:15:22:23

Kayte Young

And there's no steeping time? Like, do you wait for it to steep a little bit in between or you just keep passing it?

00:15:28:14

Christine Folch

So that's such a good question. So the first water that you place on it often takes a little bit longer to sort of soak in. And so often what happens is you have the gourd, you fill it with the yerba mate leaves, you stick the straw in it, you pour the water, and you wait. And then the leaves soak it up. And then you pour water again and then drink it out. [INTERRUPTION] And those first few drinks will be a little bit more bitter than the later ones because you're extracting more of the chemicals, more of the stimulants.

00:15:57:29

Christine Folch

[INTERRUPTION] But yeah, no, you don't sit and wait for it and then sip it, like, five minutes later. It's a non-stop process.

00:16:04:27

Kayte Young

Yeah. Which kind of explains one of the first questions that I had about it was that perforated straw versus the way so many teas are consumed, where there's some sort of straining method, whether there's some kind of little mesh ball that you put in there or you're straining it through a mesh before you drink it. The straw is serving as the mesh.

00:16:27:00

Christine Folch

Yes, exactly. And so there's a lot more yerba mate leaves per drinking vessel than you would have tea leaves in a cup. People do drink yerba mate as a kind of tea-like [INTERRUPTION] drink as well, where you can put it in tea bags and basically [INTERRUPTION] have the same amount of product to water ratio. But the more traditional way to consume it is this other thing where you've got three quarters of a cup of leaves in some sort of drinking vessel, whether it be a gourd for the hot mate or, in Paraguay, the traditional way to drink the cold mate is in a cow horn.

00:17:03:11

And so things will look like the shape of a cow horn or will be a cow horn. And that's how people consume it.

00:17:09:15

Kayte Young

But that is not how we are going to consume it. It's time for a quick break. When we come back, we're going to have a yerba mate tasting session with Earth Eats producer Leo Paes. I'm speaking with Christine Folch, cultural anthropologist at Duke University and author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History. We'll have more from our conversation later in the show, so stay with us. Welcome back.

00:17:45:15

This is Earth Eats, and I'm Kayte Young. With me in the studio is producer Leo Paes.

00:17:57:25

Leo Paes

Hi. My name is Leonardo Paes. I'm a senior here at IU studying journalism, and I'm from Brazil. I have family in Paraguay and Argentina, and I've been drinking mate since I was eight.

00:18:11:00

Kayte Young

Since I'd never experienced yerba mate myself, I asked Leo to show me the ropes.

00:18:16:02

Leo Paes

So I am from Brazil, which not all of Brazil drink mate. Usually, the south, like the two or three states that are towards the south because they're colder, they usually drink it hot. But I'm not from that part of Brazil. I'm from Sao Paulo, but my mom is from Paraguay and both of her parents are also from Paraguay. And because we have such a big family, some of those, I guess, great uncles of mine moved to Argentina too.

00:18:51:24

And then since then, I also have cousins and uncles and aunts in Argentina.

00:18:58:00

Kayte Young

It was in Argentina that Leo first tried mate when he was about four years old. It was too hot for him and he didn't like it. He later tried it cold on a visit to Paraguay. His cousins were drinking it and he liked it. It's so hot in Paraguay. Everyone needs to drink so much water.

00:19:15:26

Leo Paes

Like, it's still water, you know? But instead of drinking water the whole day, you kind of get tired of drinking water if you're drinking it the whole day. But if you're drinking it with the flavor, it's not as tiresome, you know? So I think I kind of got over the bitterness-ish taste because, obviously, I would drink water throughout the day in intervals like everyone does. And then when I was not drinking regular water, I would just sip it on the cold one, the cold mate, you know, to kind of keep it interesting.

00:19:45:23

Kayte Young

Yeah. I could also imagine it being you're away from home and you're participating in a ritual of the place where you are. And so maybe even as a kid, it felt sort of like, "Oh, I want to do what they're doing. That looks interesting." [LAUGHS]

00:19:59:15

Leo Paes

Yeah, I wanted to be an adult really bad, you know? I think every kid does. So whenever my family would sit around, you know, just talking, especially when you live far away, you have to catch up. So you sit around and the first thing someone do is like, "Okay, let me, you know, prepare a mate." You know, it's automatic. And I'm sitting there trying to get all the gossip from the family and that kind of stuff as an eight-year-old.

00:20:23:24

And I'm like, "Yeah, I'll drink it," you know, just so they don't kick me out of the table.

00:20:27:23

Kayte Young

Yeah. Now that totally makes sense. [LAUGHS] His family brought mate back with them when they returned to Brazil, and he kept drinking it. When Leo first moved to the US in 2018, he stopped drinking mate, just as so many other habits changed in the new environment.

00:20:42:21

Leo Paes

And then one day, I think a couple of years ago, I was like, I really miss it, you know? And then I went on Amazon trying to find the same brand and whatever. And I found it on Amazon, this big bag. And I bought the bag and I bought everything I needed. I bought the container, I bought the cup, the straw, everything. I have the thermal water bottle too. If I want to carry it around, I have the little tote bag that comes with it.

00:21:06:20

So I have the whole thing. Yeah.

00:21:08:11

Kayte Young

And at my request, Leo brought his set up to work one day so that I could see for myself how it's prepared and so that I could finally taste it.

00:21:16:17

Leo Paes

So I brought a mate on a container, and I brought a mate cup I have, just a metallic one, I bought off of Amazon with the straw. They call it the bombilla. So it's a metal straw and that the end that goes into the mate has like a filter. So you're not sucking up the herbs, just the water. So [NOISE] once you have a good amount, you tilt 45 degrees. So you have the mate on one side, and then [NOISE] you have a space for your straw on the other end.

00:21:55:18

Kayte Young

Interesting. Okay. So you were kind of tapping the side of it too. And what is that for? Just to kind of get it settled?

00:22:03:15

Leo Paes

Yeah. Just to get the dry leaves settle on one side, and then the other you have where you're gonna put the straw over here.

00:22:11:04

Kayte Young

Okay. But you don't put the straw in yet?

00:22:13:28

Leo Paes

No, because you have to put a little bit of water first, especially at the bottom there. So the leaves don't go up the straw and you have the mate a little, like, more consolidated.

00:22:25:27

Kayte Young

All right. So do you want to go ahead and pour some in?

00:22:29:08

Leo Paes

I'm trying not to make a mess. So you pour just a little bit for the bottom. And then pro tip, just let it rest on the straw because it needs the angle. So the water goes all the way down. So we wait for like 30 seconds, a minute just to dry it up a little bit. Once you have that, you're going to put your straw. So you have to scoop it, like, under and not just place it. So what I'm going to do is, like ,I put it in and then I scoop.

00:23:02:07

See? So it's all the way down. [INTERRUPTION] So now we can pour the water. So you pour it on the side of the straw, not on the whole mate. So that way you can get more mate for less air refillings, I guess. So just one side gets wet and the other one gets dry. [INTERRUPTION] And every time you're refilling the water, you're pouring on the same side. So every time I'm pouring more water, I'm still pouring on the side of the straw here.

00:23:30:24

Kayte Young

Okay. And then at what point do you drink it?

00:23:33:12

Leo Paes

It's ready. You can go ahead..

00:23:34:21

Kayte Young

Right now?

00:23:34:26

Leo Paes

...if you wanna try it. [INTERRUPTION] Do you want me to try first?

00:23:37:02

Kayte Young

Yeah. Go ahead.

00:23:40:27

Leo Paes

Yeah. Good.

00:23:43:03

Kayte Young

So it doesn't have to steep for a long time or anything?

00:23:46:22

Leo Paes

No. You can just pour water as you feel, you know, as needed, I guess.

00:23:52:08

Kayte Young

So, do I drink from it now or do I wait till you refill it?

00:23:55:06

Leo Paes

I can pour a little bit more for you.

00:24:03:21

Kayte Young

It is pretty hot. I could see where you might want to. It's also a little bit bitter. Wow. Very interesting. I mean, when I think about coffee or tea, you know, black tea, it's also bitter. It has that same quality to it where it's, yeah, you're getting kind of the herbal, you know, tea flavor, but you're also getting some of that, like, sharp bitterness. I also now totally understand why you don't want the water that hot.

00:24:30:25

That was too hot. I gave it another sip and tried to describe what I tasted. I wish I could think of a word.

00:24:41:00

Leo Paes

It's hard, right? I know. When people ask me like, "Oh, you drink it, but, like, how does it taste?" And I'm like, "I don't know how it tastes. It just tastes like mate, you know?"

00:24:50:25

Kayte Young

There's definitely a bitterness. There's also a little bit of a sourness, but not quite. Not quite sour or acidic. It's not acidic.

00:24:59:27

Leo Paes

I've had people tell me that it kind of tastes like dirt. So I guess if you really don't like that kind of taste, but I don't personally think it does taste like dirt. But, you know, some people say it. So that kind of illustrates it, I guess.

00:25:15:10

Kayte Young

Yeah. I don't think it tastes like dirt, but the word earthy does come to mind, but more just like a root or something, almost. I don't know. Yeah, it's hard to describe.

00:25:26:09

Leo Paes

Yeah. There's two ways you can drink it too. So my Argentinian cousins, because it's colder, they drink it warm. My Paraguayan cousins, because it's hot, they drink it with cold water.

00:25:38:17

Kayte Young

So are they brewing it with cold water too?

00:25:41:12

Leo Paes

They're not brewing it, but you still get the flavor on the water because the leaves are dried up. So once they get the water, you know, the flavor comes out.

00:25:49:27

Kayte Young

That's what I meant, is they're making it with cold water. They're not making it and then chilling it.

00:25:54:01

Leo Paes

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They're just straight up pouring the cold water on the mate when they're preparing. So instead of just pouring the warm water like we did now, we're just pour cold water.

00:26:03:06

Kayte Young

But so this really could have just been warm water at the temperature that you would want to drink it at. It does not need to be very hot to extract the tea?

00:26:11:18

Leo Paes

Yes. I mean, I guess it's good to find a common ground where you can still drink it and you can still get the most out of the leaves. You know, that's why they say 80°C. I think that's a good, you know, mark there. But if you want it a little bit cooler, a little bit hotter, I guess that's up to you.

00:26:28:15

Kayte Young

So yeah, could you talk a little bit more about that ritual? Because, you know, first of all, I think it's uncommon in the US anyway around, you know, having tea together to drink from the same vessel, to drink from the same straw.

00:26:44:01

Leo Paes

Yeah. So I think it goes with something I learned when I moved to the US, what you guys call double dipping. I've never heard of that in my life until I moved here. I think South Americans don't really mind. Not that they don't care, but they don't really mind sharing food, drinks, that kind of stuff. Obviously, you don't do it with complete strangers, but if you're at a party, you're at someone's house and, you know, you're eating chips, you dip it in the salsa and then you eat half the chip, and then you dip it again, no one's going to stop you, you know?

00:27:15:18

And I think with mate especially, because it's such a socializing drink, you drink it with family, with friends, and you sit around and talk and keep passing the cup. Everyone drinks from the same straw, and it's been like that since. I don't know. The indigenous times, that's when they first started drinking it. So it's just kind of how it is. No one really minds, and it's kind of a bonding situation.

00:27:39:22

So if you drink out of my cup, you know we're friends or family, we're connected in a way.

00:27:44:15

Kayte Young

That was Leo Paes sharing yerba mate with me in one of our recording studios at WFIU. Find photos on our website EarthEats.org and on Earth Eats' social media @EarthEats. It's time for another break. When we come back, we'll return to my conversation with Christine Folch, cultural anthropologist and author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History. Stay with us. Kayte Young here. This is Earth Eats.

00:28:27:15

Kayte Young

We're back with Christine Folch, cultural anthropology professor at Duke University, and author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History. I was curious to hear more about the special vessel that yerba mate is traditionally prepared in. Leo's model was a contemporary style. It was manufactured. The inside of it was lined with stainless steel, maybe even double wall insulated. It wasn't fashioned from a gourd, in other words, with a decorative metal band around the edge.

00:28:57:26

Christine Folch

The word mate actually means gourd. Mate itself means it comes from the Quechua mati for cup. And so obviously it's a pre-colonial term for the drinking vessels that were present at the time, which were bottle gourd cups. So using the mate, people drank this leafed beverage. And I mean, we can think about this today too, right? Like, our culinary consumption vessels, accoutrement, like our our forks and our knives and our plates and our cups, show off class status.

00:29:34:08

So this is why we have, you know, the nice porcelain china, versus the, you know, plastic that we get at Ikea. And, you know, who gets to eat with what. Or we show off something about our economic status or our social status through the things, the tools that we use to eat off of. Same thing here, right? So some of the gourds were highly decorated and plated with silver or other worked metals, and this would've been a way to take something that looks very rustic, and make it look super, super fancy.

00:30:07:08

And this, turning something rustic into something super, super fancy, is a part of the story of the Spanish Empire, because the place where yerba mate is traditionally found is a not Quechua speaking part of South America. So the word mate, for what this beverage is, is something that comes as a result of yerba mate traveling throughout the Spanish Empire. And the use of metals for decorating a gourd would've been something that arose most likely in Bolivia and Peru, so these very sophisticated metal working parts of the Spanish Empire.

00:30:46:19

So that's where that would've come in for the gourds, and now people, like, decorate them or brand them. But, yeah, with yerba mate we have no first encounter.

00:30:56:08

Kayte Young

Wow.

00:30:56:25

Christine Folch

What we find is that the first encounter we have with it in writing is in the 1560s, and it's already about trade. It's already about legalizing Spanish commerce of yerba mate, which means the first moment of encounter of origins and connection is fully lost to history. But it's just so clear that it became an important plant right away. It also is pretty clear that that means that the indigenous communities that the Spanish encountered using it, were also trading it.

00:31:30:12

Kayte Young

So, you describe how the plant was really difficult to cultivate, and it was originally harvested in the forests where it was growing, and that Spanish colonizers were forcing indigenous laborers into the forests to harvest and to process it under these kind of grueling conditions. Could you talk a little bit about that?

00:31:51:23

Christine Folch

So, when the Spanish come to the Americas, they have a different imperial philosophy than the British. And so the idea was that the British would maybe export surplus population to the Americas. The Spanish, that's not what they were doing. Their empire was extractive, and the idea was to extract wealth from the Americas and take it in ships back across the Atlantic to Spain. And of course, people settled the Americas as well.

00:32:20:07

But that was the goal. The goal was not to send farmers to the Americas, which is what the British did. The goal was to find ways of extracting the wealth of the Americas, and getting it back to Spain. So, when the Spanish got to Paraguay, there is no mining wealth there. There's mining wealth in the Andes, there's mining wealth in parts of Mexico, but there's no mining wealth in Paraguay. And so then the question became, well, how do you extract wealth from a place where there isn't silver and gold?

00:32:53:26

And the answer was through the labor of the people. And so yerba mate became currency in especially the River Plate, Rio de la Plata area of South America, as opposed to, like, you know, in the Peruvian Andes where you had gold and silver being currency. In this vast part of the land east of the Andes it was mate. It was yerba mate that was the currency. And so the way that the Spanish got it, was that they would organize expedition parties of indigenous men to go deep into the woods for half a year, deep, deep, deep into the woods, and chop down massive amounts of yerba, process it out there, and carry it out of the forest in packs that were carried on the backs of individuals, that weighed somewhere between 250 and 300 pounds.

00:33:42:21

And then this was put on boats, 'cause deep into the forest it was hard to get to rivers. So it was taken down, and then it was put on boats, and these boats moved it throughout South America. And then it was put on the backs of mules, and those mules carried it up to Peru, or across the Andes to Chile. And so there's this incredibly strenuous harvesting procedure that was a form of slave labor.

00:34:06:09

When the Jesuits came to South America, they came with a mission in Paraguay to missionize, to evangelize the indigenous people. And so I think sometimes from our perspective in the 21st century, we kind of see, like, the church and the Crown as, like, all the same kind of colonists, but they actually hated each other. The Jesuits really, really, really disliked the Spanish colonists, because they saw the Spanish colonists as using indigenous people for slave labor, and not preaching to them, and not protecting them.

00:34:38:22

And so what the Jesuits did is they organized mission communities on hilltops all throughout South America, but especially in Paraguay. They created these missions, but they still had to pay for things with coinage, and there was no coinage. So they had to figure out how to get coins. And so what they would do is they would initially have indigenous people and Jesuits go into the forests and harvest, and then the Jesuits and the Guarani indigenous people who first knew about mate, figured out how to create mate orchards.

00:35:09:25

And so they planted these extensive, extensive orchards of mate just outside of the walls of their missions, and this they harvested and cultivated and sold. And the Spanish colonists hated them for it. Oh, they hated them for it, because it was a controlled labor situation, so the Jesuits had really the ability to do, like, quality control, and to, you know, and to do creative things with their mate.

00:35:36:05

And so the Jesuits basically, with the indigenous people in the communities, came up with a really interesting recipe for yerba mate called ka'a miri. Ka'a is the Guarani word for plant, and it's also the Guarani word for yerba mate. They call Ilex paraguariensis "the plant". They have words for all the plants in their environment. So they didn't call plant, and plant, and plant, and plant. Only this thing is called plant.

00:36:06:03

Kayte Young

The plant.

00:36:06:28

Christine Folch

And yerba, the word yerba, it's the Spanish word herb, and it's actually just a translation of ka'a. It's just a straight up translation of the Guarani word. So it means plant. The Jesuits and the Guarani together created a really exquisite form of yerba mate that they called ka-a miri, which is the small beloved plant that the Spanish hated them for, because ka'a miri was way more expensive than the stuff that the Spanish produced.

00:36:36:26

Kayte Young

Wow. So it wasn't just that they were cultivating it and could therefore more easily access it and process it. It was they were actually making a higher quality product and then naming it something else.

00:36:48:06

Christine Folch

Exactly. And then they could sell it for easily twice the price as what the Spanish were able to sell their wild foraged yerba mate.

00:36:58:04

Kayte Young

And so it is cultivated today too, right? It is a cultivated plant.

00:37:02:22

Christine Folch

It is absolutely cultivated today. So one of the things that's fun about this story, and also really interesting about this story, is how knowledge is lost and found, and lost and found again. Kind of have this sense about history, that history is just a summation of knowledge. But there are these really interesting puzzles in history over things that people knew in the past, that we don't know now. Similarly, with the ability to germinate and cultivate yerba mate, now it's in orchards.

00:37:36:17

Kayte Young

It's surprisingly straightforward. You just need to pay attention to the plant. When the berries are fresh, pluck them, and plant them immediately. If you let them dry out first, they won't germinate. And that's the secret.

00:37:49:25

Christine Folch

And again, this is another really fun part of studying food. Studying food is a way to study how we are connected to the world of life around us, right? Like, we eat plants, and some of us eat animals, right? It totally shows that whatever we think about humans being so cerebral, so intellectual, just sort of really breaks down because we are part of everything else around us. It is part of our bodies, and when we pass, our bodies return to this earth, right?

00:38:22:06

So it's this beautiful cycle. Here's an argument. I'm not the only person who makes it, but it's an argument I make in the book, which is this. The drugs of choice in a culture tells you a lot about the economics of that culture, or maybe of that society. So there's this really interesting puzzle. When you have vast agricultural labor, or vast mining labor, right? This is, like, grueling physical work that is tiring of the body and painful.

00:38:54:11

The psychoactive substances that people tend to consume are things that make you not feel the pain. So things like alcohol, or things like opium. Things that deaden pain. But if your economy does not depend on brute force, but rather a really focused attention to detail, all of a sudden stimulants become way more important, because you need to stay focused, you need to stay awake, you need to be precise on something.

00:39:24:11

And so one of the fun things to do is to kind of see through the expansion of the consumption of caffeinated beverages. They really coincide with the burst of economic activity that is the Industrial Revolution. I'm not saying people don't drink alcohol now. I'm not saying people don't do opium now. I'm not saying that, you know, these things are gone. I'm just saying that one of the interesting things is that the most centrally important psychoactive substances connects to something more than just personal preference, but gives us a clue into these larger economic forces.

00:39:58:07

Kayte Young

This is a fascinating part of Christine Folch's book on yerba mate. We don't have time to fully explore it here. In wrapping up our conversation, I asked Christine to read a passage from her book. This is from the conclusion.

00:40:12:05

Christine Folch

Yerba mate is more than a drink. As a recipe, it's a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how South America is inserted into the global economy. Social, economic and political priorities get grafted onto plants via the recipe. Recipes showcase human knowledge about the material non-human world, and simultaneously represent human preferences. As the distinct mate preparation styles between the South American markets that consume the drink demonstrate, recipes crystallize intense rivalries between neighbors and nations.

00:40:51:14

New recipes also point to new economic opportunities, new ways to consume. Though they have different social valences beyond the culinary, pharmaceutical patents and medical prescriptions are recipes too. The Book of Yerba Mate is a story of culture, consumption, cuisine and commodities. By asking the deceptively innocuous question of why we in North America don't drink mate, we've taken a journey across centuries and continents to explore how the modern world's political and economic order is put together.

00:41:24:15

Our consumption practices are simultaneously intensely personal. What could be more personal than our individual taste? And reveal the complicated social structures in which we live by exposing cultural priorities and supply chain networks. Mate connects seemingly disparate people and places, cosmopolitan Latin American metropoles, mountaintop towns in the Levant, the ecologically sensitive energy drink sector, and more.

00:41:50:20

I'm going to go to Texas in two days to present at the University of Texas at Austin, and the thing I really would love to think about intellectually is what does a recipe do. That's not the heart of the book. The book is about a plant that introduces, or a drink that introduces us to the world, but I think it really matters. I think recipes really matter, and so I'm really glad that you were like, "Read this part." Like, actually that part really matters to me.

00:42:16:10

Kayte Young

So there are a lot of different ways of preparing this beverage.

00:42:20:17

Christine Folch

Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of different ways of preparing the beverage. The thing about recipes is that, you know, often we get super territorial with them, right? Like, there's the right way to make potato salad. Should it have bacon in it, yes or no? And I am simultaneously rigid and agnostic on this question. Like, there are ways of preparing things that I like. This is the right way to prepare it.

00:42:47:18

But I also understand that actually what happens is it's an opportunity for people to be creative, and to be creative with what they have around them. And that ability for food to be flexible, and then become a new tradition, is part of its power. So yeah, so there are many different ways of drinking yerba mate. What I think is interesting is what kind of travels everywhere, and then what doesn't travel?

00:43:10:12

I think it's really interesting that the more traditional preparation style of a gourd and a metal drinking straw, bombilla, travels from South America to Lebanon and Syria and parts of Palestine. And that does not make it to the United States outside of the South American communities that are migrants here. Instead, here we have energy drinks in bottles. But I think they're all yerba mate.

00:43:37:21

Kayte Young

Yeah, we didn't really get to the kind of new post-industrial hipster mate. [LAUGHS]

00:43:44:13

Christine Folch

Oh, yeah.

00:43:45:05

Kayte Young

Yeah. So it has definitely made it into North American, US culture.

00:43:48:27

Christine Folch

Yeah. I mean, I think that it's really interesting to see how these three Ilex stimulating drinks have finally made it to a broader North American market, and they've made it here. Even though coffee and tea really command the stimulating beverage market, and even though Coca-Cola is, you know, one of the largest entities on the planet, finally these drinks have broken into what looks like a dominated space.

00:44:19:23

And the way they break in is through their connection to land, and connection to nature. And also, specifically, as a ready-made drink that advertises that connection to land, and connection to nature.

00:44:36:27

Kayte Young

Mm-hmm, yeah. But now yerba mate is in, as you said, pointed out, energy drinks.

00:44:42:23

Christine Folch

It's in energy drinks. On college campuses throughout the United States there are yerba mate energy drinks. So I think it's gone mainstream. Maybe it's not the most-- It's not Maxwell or Folgers. Maybe it's not that mainstream, but it's never going to be that mass produced because its growth requirements are so specific. So this goes back to the beginning of our conversation when you were like, okay, so let's start by talking about what is it.

00:45:09:11

And let's start by the it being, like, where does it grow? How does it grow? And I said it's a really picky, picky plant. It grows really well in one part of the world where it has very particular temperature requirements, but it's not planted elsewhere, so it can't meet the demand of a Folgers or a Maxwell House.

00:45:28:13

Kayte Young

It's kind of incredible, though, that there's a limitation on it.

00:45:31:20

Christine Folch

As far as I can tell, there's no limitation on yaupon. Yaupon grows everywhere in the US South. And if you neglect it, it loves you even more.

00:45:40:01

Kayte Young

Okay.

00:45:40:18

Christine Folch

Which means it's drought resistant, pest resistant, ocean water resistant, wind resistant, lots of watering resistant. And it's really, really, really easy to grow, really easy to transplant.

00:45:52:07

Kayte Young

So yaupon could actually become even more important than--

00:45:56:05

Christine Folch

Yeah, 'cause you can scale it up. It's still very, very artisanal, very small production right now, but I really do wonder about the botanical particularities of that plant, and the questions that you're raising.

00:46:08:08

Kayte Young

Yeah. And when you said the particular temperature requirements for growing yerba mate, I just felt like, well, for now, because it just feels like climate change is-- If it's so specific, and it's about a particular temperature at a particular time of year, like, I think that [LAUGHS] that could change.

00:46:29:14

Christine Folch

I think that this is also a huge open question. And so I think one of the things that's, again, fun about writing about food is it's actually a way of writing about everything else. And so what you're saying is you're asking this really uncomfortable question around what happens with the way agriculture has been organized when we get what seems like a very small difference in terms of temperature, but actually rocks the world.

00:46:57:13

And then, you know, how are we going to get our caffeinated needs met? Yeah, that's a that's a really big question.

00:47:05:11

Kayte Young

Well thank you so much for spending this time with me and considering all of these really interesting questions around one particular plant.

00:47:14:08

Christine Folch

Well, I'm so thankful for the ways that yerba mate brings people together. And this conversation right here is another example of how this beverage actually brings people together, because we get this chance to talk about its particularities, and then how that connects to everything else. So thank you.

00:47:32:08

Kayte Young

Yes, thank you so much. That was Christine Folch, cultural anthropology professor at Duke University. She's the author of The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History. Find links to her work on our website, eartheats.org.

00:47:51:24

Kayte Young

That's it for the show this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.

00:50:06:26

Kayte Young

The Earth Eats team includes Eoban Binder, Alexis Carvajal, Alex Chambers, Toby Foster, Leo Paes, Daniella Richardson, Samantha Schemenaur, Payton Whaley, and we partner with Harvest Public Media. That's it for our show this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Special thanks this week to Christine Folch. Earth Eats is produced and edited by me, Kayte Young. Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from Universal Production Music. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge.