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Review of: 
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea 
Sarah Besky. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. 236, index, bibliography.  
 
Review by Susan Eleuterio  
 
In this interesting and sometimes challenging book, Sarah Besky, an assistant Professor of 
Anthropology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, documents her 
ethnographic exploration of quality in terms of tea, or, as she states: “What makes a good 
cup of tea?” (1) with the focus on “what is good?” Her work led me to examine the tea boxes 
and bags in my cupboard and to think—I am embarrassed to admit—for the first time in 
decades as a tea drinker, about the people who grow, harvest, judge, package, and sell tea.  
 
I suspect, like many Americans, I was much more aware of the political, environmental, and 
cultural practices connected with coffee production; taught to at least wonder about the 
quality and origins of coffee by corporations such as Starbucks and by commercials dating 
back to my childhood in the 1950s. Other than learning about the Boston Tea Party during 
the American revolution, I never thought to think much about the production of tea.  
 
Besky notes that she began with trying: “to understand how international agricultural 
certifications like organic, fair trade, biodynamic, and Rainforest Alliance affected the way 
that tea was valued,” (3) in Kolkata, India. Discovering that these factors weren’t 
meaningfully impactful, she set about to observe the tasting and auctioning practices for a 
variety of teas. Along the way, she witnessed the computerization of tea auctions beginning 
in 2008. She divides the results of her ethnographic work into chapters on the production 
and science of quality, tasting, valuing, auctioning, selling, marketing, and blending tea, in 
particular the cheap black CTC (Cut-tear-curl) tea favored in India for chai. In her final 
chapter, she examines the enduring nature of both the search for quality and India’s tea 
plantations, which began under British rule.  
 
Referred to in this text as Tea 2030, I discovered several of the teas in my cupboard (Photo 
1) advertised their producers’ membership in the  Ethical Tea Partnership 
https://www.ethicalteapartnership.org/mission/  (accessed February 7, 2022) whose 
mission is to achieve its “vision of a thriving, socially just and environmentally sustainable 
tea sector through its 50 members.” Besky has also written The Darjeeling Distinction: 
Labor and Justice on Fair Trade Tea Plantations in India, which she references at times in 
terms of the people who grow and harvest tea. In further examining tea in my kitchen, I 
realized that Bigelow makes an attempt at personal connection by naming the person, 
“Judy M,” who packed the tea, along with encouragement to recycle. (Photo 2)  
 
As a folklorist, I was most interested in what Besky describes as the “embodied” (and as she 
notes, gendered) practices connected with tea production; the frequently female (and 
essentially indentured) workers who grow and pick the tea, the male tasters who value the 
tea, and the (primarily) men who, until just a decade ago, brokered and bought the tea at 
outcry auctions in person. Using both archival research and field work, she narrates the 
sometimes discouraging but also fascinating history of tea production in India beginning 

https://www.ethicalteapartnership.org/mission/


Eleuterio, Review, Tasting Qualities    Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:1 (2022) 76 

during England’s domination during the height of colonial power and ending with the 
contemporary digital revolution, which is still ongoing. Through this, she explores the 
changes over time to how tea is grown and sold in India.  
 
I began reading this book expecting a comfortable tale. Besky herself lures the reader in her 
introduction with the visuals of a nice cup of tea,” but quickly dives into her thesis that the 
“dependable and standardized” expectations of tea drinkers (and consumers) are the result 
of a “hidden, complex process that traverses the history of European colonialism, 
postcolonial economic debates, and the development of modern industrial food science” (1-
2). She notes that the concept of quality in food and beverage production (and 
parenthetically adds that “quality matters in a variety of contexts ”) depends on 
standardization, power relations, markets, and  “materials as more than passive objects,” 
pointing out that “substances like tea (and sugar and milk , for that matter) play an active 
role in their own qualification” in terms of such physical concepts of bitterness, sweetness, 
and what is considered to taste “good,” using artisanal cheese and pork as examples  (10-
12).  
  
In a surprisingly compact volume, Besky reviews decades of history, including 
experimental, scientific, economic, and agricultural research and changes in all aspects of 
the tea industry in India. Beginning with the practices of the East India Company, which 
held its first auction sale in Calcutta in 1861 (5), she thoughtfully examines the role of 
Indian tea plantations, stating “the plantation has endured well beyond its colonial origins 
in large part because quality has also endured as a subject of experimentation” (183). Her 
description of “sick” plantations, where workers have literally starved, makes one shudder 
to think about the true costs of our desire for a “good cup of tea.” At the same time, her 
conclusion that “experiments with quality do not always lead to destruction, but they do 
not easily lead to liberation either,” (183) sums up the tricky nature of change in food and 
beverage production. This is not a comforting book, but it provides a significant 
contribution to not only the issue of quality in terms of tea but a thorough documentation 
of how tea has been grown, processed, sold and packaged in India and for much of the 
world market.  
 



Eleuterio, Review, Tasting Qualities    Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:1 (2022) 77 

 
Photo 1:    Ethical Tea Partnership Caption on Bigelow Tea Box. February 2022. Photo by 
Susan Eleuterio 
 

 
Photo 2:   “Packed With Pride by Judy M.”  Bigelow Tea Box. February 2022. Photo by Susan 
Eleuterio 
 


