Cha Chat Episode 1.3: Global Tea Club

Listen to the Episode

3rd podcast for the Global Tea Initiative, we are sitting with the Global Tea Club, comprised of UC Davis students interested in tea. Join us as we discuss the origin and direction the tea club as well as a tantalizing teaser of conversation and debate on hot topics in the tea industry.  Joining us are past presidents of the Global Tea Club, Lydia Chin Yi Kao and Tait White-Rasmusson.

Recorded: March 11, 2019

About the Episode

I met with Lydia and Tait of the Global Tea Club at Hutchison Hall Rm 50 at UC Davis. This is the site of the e-Learning studio created by ATS. There we sat at the podcasting studio to discuss the Global Tea Club.  Lydia is the current president of the Global Tea Club and Tait was the first president of the Global Tea Club. Lydia was with the tea club since the beginning and found inspiration in a mutual interest of the topic of labor inequality and her academic interest.  Tea has always been of cultural importance to her because she is Taiwanese.  Tait and his family in Kansas enjoyed tea and the way they stay connected. After introductions, Tait started discussing how the Global Tea Club formed.  Tait utilized his own resources to get the tea club started, including bulk tea he purchased in LA from Wing Hop Fung.  Tait also created his own pottery for the club at UC Davis’ Ceramics Studio which has a great kiln and wheels with many glazes which is accessible with a quarter (3 month) pass.   Tait’s pottery has also been commercially successful by selling his pottery at local tea shops.

The origin of the Global Tea Club began at the request of the Global Tea Initiative to pursue tea in areas the Initiative did not.   They had a great deal of feedback with requests to join, and wound up with a regular group of six.  They teamed up with graduate students in the program to answer a lot of health questions about tea.  Particularly, one graduate student was very helpful and was doing her own research on colon cancer rates and tea consumption as well as looking at the role of tea in the microbiome of the gut. 

The 4th colloquium of the Global Tea Initiative in 2019 had a lecture from Dr. Yu-Jui Yvonne Wan:

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Tait went on to discuss how the Global Tea Club then started tackling issues outside of the current bandwidth of the Global Tea Initiative by starting a discussion on labor inequality.  They also provided tea after the defacement of the mosque in Davis, CA, during a rally to support the mosque in 2017.

Tait and Lydia discussed how the tea club has had quite a few successful efforts including setting up pop-up exhibits in the Arboretum and a lecture series started in 2017 called, “Tea and Conversations” which has been successful and still going.   The attendance of these events had many from the community as well as students.   These tea events can get 150 – 200 people coming through their exhibit. Tait started by paying out of pocket and getting a discount at Tea Cozy to buy tea for the club. Lydia says that the Global Tea Club continues to get financial support and tea from a number of donors.   The events keep coming and getting planned which include painting tea cups, and more events at locations on campus.

We then discussed the making of tea, is there a right way?  Tait and Lydia discussed that there is a lot of education still needed in how to prepare tea, and expectations of how tea should taste.

Global Tea Club Events

We got a sample of the types of discussions in the Global Tea Club when discussing labor issues in the field.  Tait then discussed his interest in looking at tea and labor worldwide.  Tait stated that the Fair Trade labels on tea are most likely not representative of fair treatment of laborers and suggested purchasing machine cut tea.  Below is a video from 2018 that discusses the labor shortage in the tea industry:

Lydia felt that with improvement of labor treatment and this becoming an avenue for women to have empowerment in many countries, hand-picked tea should be purchased to support those laborers.  This was a small piece of a larger and very interesting debate.  While Tait and Lydia were speaking specifically of Taiwan, Debarati Sen discussed this very topic in context of India:

The Global Tea Club has been very successful at creating a new avenue of pursuing tea interest and has many interesting new avenues to explore.  They continue to have great speakers lined up like representatives from Peet’s Coffee and Mighty Leaf and Mike Fritz who is a local grower (but couldn’t attend due to the fires that really damaged his tea farm).