{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028965517241379312, 'fraction_numerical': 0.001379310344827586, 'mean_word_length': 5.6082004555808656, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Tasting Qualities: The Past and the Future of Tea

How do commodities and objects of desire acquire value and identity— indeed “qualities”—that render them worthy of exchange? Do these qualities rest only in consumer preference and market economics, or do other material and nonmaterial infrastructures produce and co-sustain them? What are the processes that inhere in products that we do not see, touch, or feel but are nonetheless crucial in making them desirable? Besky’s book seeks to provide answers to these questions by focusing on the story of Camellia sinensis (tea) in the Indian subcontinent. Straddling the disciplines of anthropology, food science, historical sociology, and ethnographic research, Tasting Qualities examines the multifaceted sites, strategies, individuals, and mechanisms through and with which quality and value—indeed, taste—of Indian teas were generated, ranked, reinforced, and circulated from colonial times to the contemporary period. Besky characterizes this process as inherently contradictory. Although the quality of a commodity arises from its singularly distinctive identity (Assam tea versus Darjeeling, for instance), that attribute involves a complex regulatory process of standardizing discrete sites and processes of production and exchange—the blending of tea varietals, price valuation by auction houses and brokerage firms, the input of tea tasters, a plant’s biochemical attributes and manipulation, climate and soil typology, and historical imaginaries of pristine plantation monocultures and laboring bodies. To that end, the second analytical burden of this work is to show that quality is not a stable end product of market capitalism and consumer choice. It evolves from an ongoing process of experimentation and regulation at every step of the product’s life—from teacups to test tubes and plantations to pesticides. Tasting Qualities consists of six thematically based chapters bordered by an introduction and conclusion. The first two chapters focus on the interlinked discursive and institutional rituals and practices of tea tasters, the tea auction house and its archive in Calcutta (now Kolkata), and brokerage firms, who determine tea’s value and its idioms of quality (“malty,” “brisk,” “sweet,” etc.). Chapters 3 and 4 show how debates since the colonial period about tea’s biochemical composition and blending, its scientific field experiments, and its impact on human biophysical health produced another set of indexes and markers of the product’s quality. These debates generated the sensory, aesthetic, botanical, chemical, and market logics that set tea’s quality and price in the national and international market. In Chapters 5 and 6, Besky discusses tea markets both in the material sense, as a space of commodity exchange, and as the abstract constellation of consumer and industry-dictated expectations and standards. These