Abstract
Tea animates the daily life of millions of people around the world. Consumed in isolation or in a social setting, a quality cup of tea can lift one’s spirits or alternatively allow one to relax. Given the importance of the drink, Sarah Besky’s book, Tasting Qualities, aims to unravel how the ‘quality’ of tea is constructed and validated through various stages of production, consumption, and the accompanying cultural context.
Compartmentalized into six chapters and bookended by an introduction and conclusion, Tasting Qualities is an enjoyable read for the cultural afficionado. Besky’s research is comprehensive and her accessible writing brings a vivid narrative to the reader. The researcher’s rich ethnography with its beginnings in 2009 explores tea brokerages in Calcutta, tea plantations in Darjeeling, and tea science laboratories in London (through archives). Through the text, we come to realize that the quality in a simple cup of tea is in fact an attribute that holds within it the results of the marriage of various complex social, technical, and historical relationships.
The book fundamentally revolves around demystifying the process of how tea can be assessed to be of good quality. To achieve this end, Besky opens up organizational narratives around tea production, science, and selling to illustrate how ‘quality’ tea is produced physically and constructed socially. The author explains that quality is a process and not an end state. She also shows that quality is part of an iterative, nonlinear of a cultural system. Such a system comprises elements such as local organizational practices, buying negotiations, and tasting expertise, all of which are enveloped by a particular historical space that arrives at its present state indebted to its colonial past.
One major theme from the book regards taste and its infrastructure. Besky introduces us to Calcutta’s Nilhat House, one of the oldest tea brokerages in India. Nilhat House acts as a center for tea brokers and tasters who are seen as the gatekeepers of quality. The author narrates the rituals that tasters perform to determine the quality of tea. The lucid description explicates how quality is determined by the senses of the taster. Senses develop as an embodied consequence of the continual and historical interactions between the body and the material. This embodiment allows for expertise to define narratives around tea grades and to assess the price of tea. Higher grades of tea incur a higher monetary value while lower grades receive a lower value. Since the process of grading tea is collaborative but ultimately consensual and submissive to expert tasters, Besky’s account forms an interesting counterpart to the concept of nesting whereby producers translate multiple standards of quality in the pineapple industry (Arnold & Loconto, 2021). Moreover, Besky’s detailing of the Nilhat tea brokerage lends support to Gardiner’s (2019, p. 1551) argument that taste can be affected by organizational practices.
It is pertinent to note that Besky’s use of the word taste is tangentially related to Bourdieu’s use of the same word. For Besky, Bourdieu’s use of taste is dependent on the idea of habitus. Instead, Besky argues that taste is how the social non-material (ideas, stories, and so on) actively affects the body to influence sensory experiences or how we feel and experience tea. The sensory experience of ‘good tea’ is very particular and, hence, quality tea then relates to a very particular set of sensory experiences. In this sense, the book serves as a vivid example of the biomateriality of food as discussed in a recent editorial of this journal (Moser, Reinecke, den Hond, Svejenova, & Croidieu, 2021). Besky’s work shows how food (and its quality), organizing and organizations are integrated. In one respect, tea is the cultural product of organizational efforts. However, the beverage is also agentic with its biomaterial characteristics; tea shapes organizational dynamics, effuses organizational politics as seen in auction houses, and discriminates buyers on the basis of sensory and subjective organizational practices (auctions).
Another thread that is woven into the book is how tea is marketed. Once the teas are tasted and subsequently valued at Nilhat House, they are auctioned. The catalog at the auction serves as an archive of information for every tea buyer. Buyers record notes on the catalog and refer to it to make decisions. The auction involves a lot of coded behavior that acts as an infrastructure of communication between the various parties involved. Besky argues that the auction in itself is a performance where buyers and sellers act in a particular manner and use prices and other numbers as communicative devices to value tea. The buyer needs to purchase various kinds of tea to form a blend that gives a particular sensory experience. The actual taste is what validates the quality of tea. In order to buy the right mix, tea buyers split lots and haggle with each other. Later in the book, Besky depicts a recent government initiative to use an online marketplace for conducting the auction of tea. The drive behind this effort was the need to create an equitable market where the price of tea was determined speculatively rather than through the use of indicators such as notable tea plantations. With the online system in place, the quality of tea is determined by price and not through other signaling devices.
Besky’s portrait of the auction shows how organizations are instrumental not only in evaluating tea but also in how markets are organized. Hence, we note that the book buttresses Ahrne, Aspers and Brunsson’s (2014, p. 14) claim, i.e., it is usually organizations that have the ability to organize markets and different types of market organization are the result of firm involvement. By helping us understand how organizational buyers and sellers interact, Besky shows us how the tea market is organized as it is.
The quality of tea in the market, Besky illustrates, is also dependent on the wider organization of production processes. Making a case for capitalistic operations in the tea industry, the author traces a history of tea monocultures (fields on which a single crop is grown) in India. She uncovers that the gold standard for tea production, the plantation, is in ruins. Besky explains that the plantations have been overworked and have become ‘sick’. Sick is a term that is used to signify a plantation that is not producing in quality what it used to produce in the past. Once sick, a plantation needs time to rest before it can return to its previous state of production in terms of quality. Hence, the author illuminates how tea quality is dependent on sustaining the natural environment.
Another strain of thought that the book unveils is that tea production is ultimately shaped by everchanging socio-historical processes. Besky draws our attention to the use of science in tea production during the British Raj. The book examines tea at the chemical level and chronicles a chemical history of producing flavorful tea. The story starts at tannins, chemicals found in tea, and takes the reader into the rivalry between Chinese and Empire (Indian) tea. Besky reports that tannins were once believed to be bad for health and related to various gut related diseases. This belief about tea led to people preferring Chinese tea over Indian tea. The boycott by customers of Indian tea led to investment in research by tea producers to change the composition of tea. As a result, the British were able to apply science to the process of creating quality tea. This idea remains an important part of tea production to date. This relates to Gardiner’s point that each organization is influenced by its cultural context and history (2019, p. 1548). The story of British science is also used to corroborate Besky’s primary argument of viewing tea as a complex artefact that encompasses relationships between various stakeholders.
Related to historical processes, Besky’s work also collates a narrative of decolonization of tea production and gatekeeping. In 1947, at India’s independence, control of tea production passed from the British to the indigenes of the Indian subcontinent. British knowledge too was eventually passed to the Indians who consequently played a more important role in appraising tea. The book illustrates the role of British colonialism in tea production and thus allows the reader to understand the link between tea, science, and colonialism. More importantly though, Besky depicts to the reader here that quality tea was founded as a British craft.
It is here that we feel that one idea that the book could have substantiated better is the notion of the decolonization of tea. We see decoloniality in tea through the transfer of production and selling to India, but we fail to get a complete picture of how the taste of tea has been decolonized. An exploration into the decoloniality of taste would have made the argument of the book even more cogent.
In sum, Tasting Qualities articulates the organizing and organizational complexities of social, historic, and technical relationships that go into determining the quality of tea. Arguably, Besky’s most important contribution is that quality is not only a connoisseur’s concern, nor is it a matter of industrial control; quality is maintained by a host of other concerns in the value chain, from government offices to laboratories to plantations and more. Quality is not an isolated sensory attribute; it requires thinking about the material as active rather than passive objects (Moser et al., 2021), understanding markets that work to produce quality commodities, and tending to legacies of colonial power relations. The book unearths how everyday objects have contested pasts and complicated presents that need to be studied in order to understand them better. Hence, changing one dynamic such as democratization of the expertise of taste or the circulation of tea will not move the taste infrastructure that is affixed by so many other variables. By the end of the book, one can hold a cup of tea and appreciate it as part of a larger narratives that dates back to the 19th century.
