Bitter words won't sweeten your tea

Some more thoughts on the matcha shortage

Multiple people forwarded the recent article in The Atlantic to me about the matcha shortage. The New York Times has written about it as well. Just by talking to people in our brick and mortar store, it is clear they have been made well-aware of the matcha shortage - I don't need to tell them about it, they bring it up again and again.  Of course, it does have me a little worried, but as you may know, we've been adapting our strategy and expanding our sourcing for tencha, so the doom and gloom headlines don't really feel pertinent to at least someone in the matcha industry. 

But I'm not here to write about fear.  I want to talk a bit about why there is a shortage. There is a trend in these articles I've been reading to...well, hate on "trends." A trend-bashing-trend. They drip with disdain for the young Gen Z crowd that is suddenly turning to matcha because they learned about it on TikTok. There are insinuations that because these young adults and teenagers want to look cool on social media, they are desecrating an ancient tradition of Japanese tea. 

Full disclosure, I'm a Millennial, though born in the last year that divides us from Gen Z, so I guess I've got a foot in both camps. But! I am also a former history major, and older generations bashing on the disrespectful ways of the young is a tale as old as time. So, let's set some things straight. 

The Japanese Tea Industry

First thing's first: the Japanese tea industry was dying. Farmers are getting old, and younger generations have not been all too keen on continuing the rural lifestyle. Meanwhile, Western tastes have been exported to Japan, and more and more of these young people are drinking coffee. This was already a trend in the 19th century; it's why we have hojicha, because tea sellers wanted something that would smell as nice as roasting coffee beans! Furthermore, when Japanese people (in Japan) do drink tea, it is rarely matcha. Matcha has long been the purview of the Japanese tea ceremony - not a drink drunk by the average person on a daily basis. 

Make no mistake: were the Western World not so interested in matcha, it would continue to be an industry in decline. Matcha itself might have ended up like Diancha, the milled white tea of Song Dynasty China that fell out of fashion. It may have become nothing more than a historical relic, enjoyed by the select few who are willing to pay crazy money for something exceptionally obscure. 

So no, this "trend" is not desecrating the spirit of matcha. If anything, it is giving it new life, and assuring that this style of tea has its place in the future. 

How should a drink become popular?

One of the gripes of many of the articles is that people are hopping on the matcha bandwagon because of social media...as though that's an inherently bad thing. But let me use my love of history a bit more here so we can assess this claim. 

Many famous Chinese teas are famous and popular today because they were grown as tributes for the Emperor. They were not consumed by the common people of China. The elite deemed the teas of high quality and kept them for themselves, until gradually, over centuries, enough was made to trickle down to the lower classes as well. 

Black tea is widely consumed in the Western World because colonizing  Europeans wanted something that would withstand the long ocean voyage back home. It also appealed to their taste preferences more. Britain's insatiable demand for black tea led to the import of Opium into China in exchange for tea. When China cracked down on this, the British responded by going to war to force China to accept opium as payment. Eventually, to get around the limits of working with the Chinese government, the British sent Robert Fortune to conduct one of the most significant cases of corporate espionage in history and steal tea bushes from China to plant in India (itself belonging to the British through conquest). This literally created the Indian tea industry - yet would we dare criticize someone in India for drinking tea today? I certainly wouldn't. 

Ooh and here's another one that might hit closer to home. We have coffee in the West because wars of Ottoman conquest brought armies, death, and destruction as far West as Vienna. When Vienna and the surrounding area was secured by Christian soldiers, they found coffee beans in the camps of the fleeing/killed Ottomans. Pretty quickly, the first coffee houses opened up in Vienna, and the drink spread like wildfire. 

And these are just drinks! Tomatoes, potatoes, corn - staples of European cooking - are only in Europe at all because of colonialism in the New World - a particularly bleak colonialism that included no shortage of genocide. 

So, is this how a tea should become popular? Imperialism, elitism, colonialism, theft, and war? TikTok seems pretty benign by comparison. 

Is it just a trend?

Another concern in the articles I've been referencing - that this matcha trend might be only a trend and nothing more - seems to refer back to some strange pitying fear that poor Japanese farmers will ramp up tea production only to suddenly have no one to sell to once the kids move on to the next big thing. 

Frankly, I don't think that's likely because there is a sort of dark side undergirding matcha's modern popularity. For starters: drugs. Caffeine is a drug to which most of the world is happily addicted. Caffeine plus L-Theanine (as in matcha), is an even more pleasant drug than caffeine on its own. Once someone has found a drug on which to rely, it is rare they simply stop.

Furthermore, the generations that are turning to matcha are the generations that have the highest rates of mental illness. They have inherited a world they are told may be inhospitable by the time they have children. They are tasked with paying off massive amounts of debt from schooling that is required to obtain jobs that, for the most part, do little to get them out of debt and into a state of financial stability. In short, they have to work fiendishly, with no promise of relief or peace. To help with work, we have caffeine. That's been our way for generations now. As for peace? That's where switching from coffee to matcha helps, at least a little. So, of course it's popular! 

The other thing that these articles don't consider is this: high quality matcha just tastes really good. It's not going to stop tasting good just because something new blows up on TikTok. Furthermore, people in the West have been falling in love with Japanese culture for decades now. Sushi, anime, video games, samurai movies, all the shows coming out that take place in Japan, the (to me) annoying trend in publishing where if a "self-help" book mentions that its methods are somehow Japanese, it seems to become more popular...Our adoration of Japan is not a trend at this point, it's a cultural resonance that has been growing over multiple generations. 

So no, I don't think this is just a trend! 

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Have my words gotten bitter, too? I hope the takeaway from all this is a sweet one: do what you enjoy, and if you enjoy drinking matcha, drink matcha - regardless of how you learned about it! 

Thanks for reading and happy sipping,

Simon