NOT such a cup of tea

During a time last year, I found myself tuned into a daytime re-run of the documentary series, Oz and James Drink to Britain. It was the season finale where the host James May (a popular British figure) and his fellow beverage expert Oz Clarke had concluded after their journey all over Britain that the best drink which speaks for modern Britain was simply a ‘cup of tea’. This image of James and Oz celebrating tea as a national English treasure was one of the many examples that had contributed to the pervading assumption that tea belonged to Britain. And I had never questioned it…

In a sense, tea has become recognized as quintessentially British through popular images and media. Tea had registered into my own personal discourse as definitively part of the British culture. Therefore I assumed the brew was harvested there. But critically theorists' Michael O’Shaugnessy and Jane Stadler recognized these popular images fail to show the plantations and cheap labour behind the mass production of the brew in South America and Asia. The fact that tea is something considered distinctive to Britain but is produced outside of Britain has left me in quite a conundrum where I am struggling to comprehend how I have been readily convinced that tea is owned by Britain.

Tea originated in South and East Asia, and only arrived in Britain in 1660. It was not until the nineteenth century it became a mass consumed product in Britain. Around this same period the Western discourse of ‘racial superiority’ justified Europe’s imperial exploits of indigenous resources and people for their own benefit. Therefore tea had been exploited by the British for their own benefit.

In the twenty first century western superiority is less noticeable but the hegemonic power still persists as the media greatly benefits the West. The East is exploited and suppressed. In this instance, tea an Eastern originated and manufactured product has become popularized as a British national pastime.

Reference:

O’Shaugnessy, Michael and Stadler, Jane (2002). Ethnicity, Ideology and the Media. In Media and Society: An Introduction. Second Edition. (pp. 2260-83). London and New York: Routledge.

History of tea: Tea origins. YKM. 2007. web. 9 August. 2011.