Tea News and Biz Insight - May 21, 2021

HEAR THE HEADLINES – International Tea Day | Assam Forbids Tea Workers to Isolate at Home
| Nepal’s First Flush is Delayed | Kagoshima May Soon Outproduce Shizuoka

| GUEST – Author Chitrita Banerji, a chronicler of food history and culture

| NEWSMAKER – Eva Lee, founder of Tea Hawaii, a tea farm and wholesale venture in Volcano, Hawaii

| FEATURES – Tea Biz this week travels to the slopes of the Kilauea Volcano where Tea Hawaii Founder Eva Lee describes the ongoing tea harvest as unusually wet and seven weeks later than normal …and then to Massachusetts to learn how a simple beverage transformed Indian culture.

Uniquely Hawaiian Tea

Eva Lee pioneered modern tea cultivation in Hawaii, establishing with her husband, a tea garden and nursery in the town of Volcano. The farm supplied growers with hearty cultivars first introduced in 2000 by researchers at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Hawaiian tea is grown on farms producing less than 100 kilos a year. Small amounts of premium tea are exported, but most is purchased by local restaurants and tourists. In this conversation, Lee describes how the “modest but very strong tea industry” adapted during a difficult year. - By Dan Bolton

Tea is Both Cultural and Personal

Humans readily adapt to new foods and drink, most with little affect “we make them our own by accepting them and enjoying them” says distinguished food and culture author Chitrita Banerji. But some are transformative: “It’s interesting that a foreign drink brought in by a foreign colonial power became such an important thing. We don’t think of tea as a foreign drink anymore,” she tells Aravinda Anantharaman during this International Tea Day interview. - By Aravinda Anantharaman 

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