Most Recent Posts

Coffee and tea both landed in the British isles in the 1600s. In fact, java even got a head start of about a decade. And yet, a century later, tea was well on its way to becoming a daily habit for millions of Britons — which it remains to this day.

So how did tea emerge as Britain's hot beverage of choice?

The short answer: Tea met sugar, forming a power couple that altered the course of history. It was a marriage shaped by fashion, health fads and global economics. And the growing taste for sweetened tea also helped fuel one of the worst blights on human history: the slave trade.

The Princess And The Tea

i

Catherine of Braganza was an early celebrity endorser of tea. After she wed Charles II, the fad for tea took off among the British nobility. Kitty Shannon/Corbis/Lebrecht Music & Arts hide caption

itoggle caption Kitty Shannon/Corbis/Lebrecht Music & Arts

Catherine of Braganza was an early celebrity endorser of tea. After she wed Charles II, the fad for tea took off among the British nobility.

Kitty Shannon/Corbis/Lebrecht Music & Arts

Tea was practically unknown in Europe until the mid-1600s. But in England, it got an early PR boost from Catherine of Braganza, a celebrity who became its ambassador: The Portuguese royal favored the infusion, and when she married England's Charles II in 1662, tea became the "it" drink among the British upper classes. But it might have faded as a passing fad if not for another favorite nibble of the nobility: sugar.

In the 1500s and 1600s, sugar was the "object of a sustained vogue in northern Europe," historian Woodruff Smith wrote in a 1992 paper.

Sugar was expensive and relatively rare, making it a perfect object of conspicuous consumption for status-chasing elites. Shaped into elaborate sculptures, mixed into wines, sprinkled on tarts and on glazed roasted meats — sugar was a much noted feature of upper-class life, says Smith, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston who has studied the history of consumption. Cookbooks of the late 16th and early 17th century even treated sugar as a sort of drug to help balance the "humors" — energies that were believed to affect health and mood.

Then came the backlash: In the late 1600s, doctors started warning about the perils of sugar — it was blamed (correctly) for rotting teeth and (incorrectly) causing gout, among other ills — and it began to fall out of style among the rich and fabulous, Smith tells The Salt. Suddenly, sugar was the demon du jour. By around 1700, the word on sugar was no longer ostentation but moderation.

Clean Eating, Circa Late-1600s

i

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, 1632. Here, Tulp explains musculature matters. Elsewhere, the good doctor was promoting the health virtues of tea. Rembrandt/Wikimedia Commons hide caption

itoggle caption Rembrandt/Wikimedia Commons

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt, 1632. Here, Tulp explains musculature matters. Elsewhere, the good doctor was promoting the health virtues of tea.

Rembrandt/Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, lots of people were writing about the health benefits of tea, Smith says — including Nicholaes Tulp, a famed, well-connected Dutch physician immortalized in Rembrandt's painting The Anatomy Lesson. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Smith notes, Tulp "probably served on the board of directors of the Dutch East India Company" — which was, of course, importing tea.) Some enthusiasts suggested tea could induce the "constant sluicing of the body by drinking tens or hundreds of cups daily," Woodruff writes. Tea detox, anyone?

It turns out that self-help books were popular back then, too, and one of the most influential practitioners of the form was an English writer named Thomas Tryon, who had lots of theories on nutrition. (His followers included a young Benjamin Franklin.)

Tryon had a love-hate relationship with sugar. He'd been to plantations in the West Indies and was horrified by the system of slavery under which sugar cane was grown. But he also believed that anything that made people feel as good as sugar does must have some intrinsic health value. A dollop of sugar in a nonalcoholic, herbal infusion was a good way to get a hit of sweetness without going overboard, he thought. While Tryon didn't specify which infusion to use for this healthful concoction, "tea was the most obvious one," Smith says.

Such health notions, Smith says, help explain why, by the 1720s and 1730s, the custom of taking tea with sugar had taken hold among the British upper and middle classes.

The Birth Of A Global Economy

Interestingly, Smith notes, there's evidence that much of the same health claims about tea — that it cleared the head and improved spirits, without the debauchery of alcohol — were also being made about coffee around the turn of the 18th century. But coffee came from countries like Yemen and Eritrea — "places beyond European control and with little capacity to expand production," Smith writes. So when demand for coffee rose, prices did, too.

Tea, on the other hand, came from China — which had in place a sophisticated commerce system that could respond quickly to rising demand, Smith says. That demand was coming from the British and Dutch East India companies, which were already in China buying spices, silks and other goods for trade. As interest in tea grew back home, Smith says, the companies were in good position to ship large, reliable quantities at affordable prices "and therefore make tea a popular fad — and beyond a fad."

"What you're seeing is the global economy being constructed," Smith says. "It's these two companies as the vanguard of modern capitalism."

As Lord Beckett, the villainous, tea-and-sugar-sipping agent of the British East India Company in the Pirates of Caribbean movies might have put it, "it's just good business." (Such good business, of course, that, in the 19th century, the company went on to steal the secrets of tea production from China to establish a tea empire in India.)

http://simplify-your-vibrations.tumblr.com/post/49217897598

Fuel For The Industrial Revolution

Tea and sugar proved good for business in another sense: as a cheap source of calories for the working classes.

Beer and cider had long been the drink of choice for the working poor, notes food historian Rachel Laudan. With good reason: The drinks were calorific, and the alcohol was mildly analgesic — both necessary when your days were filled with grinding labor. "Of course, that came at the cost of alertness," Laudan says.

But as the Industrial Revolution got underway beginning in the mid-1700s, the working classes gave up the plow and headed to the factory, where showing up tipsy wasn't exactly a way to get ahead.

Tea sweetened with a strong dose of sugar was an affordable luxury: It gave workers a hit of caffeine to get through a long slog of a day, it provided plentiful calories, and it offered the comfort of warmth during a meal that otherwise often consisted only of bread.

Paying For Empire In Tea And Sugar

The rise of tea and sugar as a power duo was a boon for British government coffers. By the mid-1700s, tea imports accounted for one-tenth of overall tax income, says Laudan, a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

i

The Warley, a ship belonging to the British East India Company at the turn of the 19th century Robert Salmon/Wikimedia hide caption

itoggle caption Robert Salmon/Wikimedia

The Warley, a ship belonging to the British East India Company at the turn of the 19th century

Robert Salmon/Wikimedia

As for sugar? According to one analysis, Laudan notes, in the 1760s, the annual duties on sugar imports were "enough to pay to maintain all ships in the navy." A great deal of that sugar, historians say, was being stirred into tea.

Those tea-and-sugar monies helped supply the British navy with better foodstuffs, Laudan says, including vegetables when available. And that navy was key to spreading British might across the globe.

"It's this dominance of the British navy that allows Britain to become the major colonial power in 19th century," Laudan tells The Salt.

But all this growth came at a terrible human price.

As Smith notes, the fad for tea came in just as sugar was under attack and had started to fall out of favor. By creating a new and lasting use for this sweetener, tea helped buoy demand for sugar from the West Indies. "And indeed, it continued to support the expansion of slavery there," Smith says.

So the next time you finding yourself sipping a nice warm cup, consider how something as simple as a drink can shape events half a world away. Even today, our edibles aren't just about appetite — the palatable is political.

Tea Tuesdays

tea

British food

food history

With his head of silver hair and stylish black blazer, Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli looks younger than his 77 years. He's been called the father of modern Iranian sculpture, but he hasn't had a major museum show in the U.S. in almost four decades. Now, Wellesley College's Davis Museum is giving viewers a chance to see 175 of Tanavoli's sculptures and drawings.

While leading a tour of the Massachusetts school's gallery, Tanavoli stops in front of his curvaceous sculptures known as "Heeches."

"Any Iranian could easily read this," he says, referring to the sculptures. "It's composed of three letters: H, the head is like H; then the center part is like I or double E; this curve is like CH at the end." On paper, the Heech is a slender piece of calligraphy that's popular in Persian poetry: It means "nothingness" in Farsi.

"The other advantage of this word is all the meanings behind it," Tanavoli says. "... All the great poets like Rumi, they deal with this word; they question about it. What is Heech? I mean, is there nothing?"

Tanavoli has crafted hundreds of Heeches over the past 50 years — in ceramic, bronze, fiberglass and even neon. They are graceful, almost human forms that connect with viewers and helped revive sculpture as an art form in Iran.

i

Parviz Tanavoli, Neon Heech, 2012. John Gordon/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli hide caption

itoggle caption John Gordon/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli

Parviz Tanavoli, Neon Heech, 2012.

John Gordon/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli

"He's definitely the pride of the Middle Eastern art scene," says Ali Khadra of the contemporary art magazine Canvas, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Khadra flew to Boston for a 24-hour visit just to see Tanavoli's new exhibition. He calls the sculptor "a beacon of hope" for aspiring artists in his politically tense region and he hopes this show will help bring a little of the culture behind the headlines to Western audiences.

"It's like a chain reaction," Khadra says. "When a museum is interested, an education program takes place and the interest keeps growing. And this is how the West will know about Middle Eastern art."

The 'Good Days' In Iran

Sculpture died off as an art form in the region now known as Iran after the Arabs conquered Persia in the 7th century. At the time, visual depictions of the human body were at odds with the Muslim belief that art is a representation of the divine. But after studying sculpture in Italy in the 1950s, Tanavoli returned to Tehran and opened a studio that became a magnet for young artists.

i

Fiberglass Heech sculptures by Parviz Tanavoli. Charles Mayer/Courtesy of the Davis Museum hide caption

itoggle caption Charles Mayer/Courtesy of the Davis Museum

Fiberglass Heech sculptures by Parviz Tanavoli.

Charles Mayer/Courtesy of the Davis Museum

"It was very exciting for [me]," the artist says. "I was young and I thought I was doing something and I worked very hard for it. And when I look at it today, I'm proud of it. They were good days."

But they were also challenging.

"There weren't that many people trained for art, and there weren't that many followers or fans and collectors," he says. "People weren't familiar with the modern art I was producing."

In 1965, authorities shut down Tanavoli's gallery show in Tehran because it merged materials and imagery from the East and West. Things got more complicated for the artist with the 1979 revolution and the taking of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. He ultimately left his teaching job at Tehran University and moved his family to Toronto.

A Cultural History Lesson Through Art

i

Parviz Tanavoli, Hands in Grill, 2005. Charles Mayer/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli hide caption

itoggle caption Charles Mayer/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli

Parviz Tanavoli, Hands in Grill, 2005.

Charles Mayer/Courtesy of Parviz Tanavoli

Shiva Balaghi is a Middle Eastern culture historian at Brown University and co-curator of the Davis Museum's show. She says you could teach a seminar on modern Iranian history through Tanavoli's work. "You see the common art of the streets of Tehran represented in his work; you see Iranian folklore; you see ancient Persian myths. But you also see that within Iranian society and culture there is this poetic and lyrical spirit and this sense of humor that withstands regardless of the day-to-day political situation."

That situation is reflected in some of Tanavoli's mor e brutal, confining imagery of cages, locks and jail cells. Still, Balaghi thinks Americans will be surprised to see how optimistic this Iranian's work is.

Related NPR Stories

Books

'Heart' Of Iranian Identity Reimagined For A New Generation

Middle East

At The Met: A Middle East Transition, Centuries Ago

The Picture Show

Iranian Street Art Finds Its Way To L.A.

"There is this sense of gratitude for the simple things in life — like the image of a bird flying, like the shape of a letter in the alphabet," she says.

Tanavoli keeps a foundry and studio in Iran and lives there part of the year, but he admits that politics have hindered his country's ability to share its culture. He says, "We used to be very well connected with Westerners ... but now it's unfortunate because so much has been happening in Iran in [the] last 35 years in culture — music, film and all of that — a lot of people are not even aware of it."

They'll get a chance to learn a little more through two other U.S. shows of contemporary Iranian art — one at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and another at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, Tanavoli says he's honored to have his work act, for now, as something of an ambassador.

"Iran has a long culture, millenniums of culture," he says, "but for today I think this represents Iran pretty good."

In New York City, police rarely talk on the record at all, especially about a touchy subject like quotas. But Officer Adhyl Polanco is an exception.

"The culture is, you're not working unless you are writing summonses or arresting people," says Polanco.

One of the dirty secrets in law enforcement that no one likes to talk about is quotas. Police departments routinely deny requiring officers to deliver a set number of tickets or arrests. But critics say that kind of numbers-based policing is real, and corrodes the community's relationship with the police.

"I can tell my supervisors that I took three people to the hospital and I saved their lives. That the child that I helped deliver is healthy. I can tell them that. But that's not going to cut it."

- Adhyl Polanco

Polanco joined the force in 2005, and pretty quickly, he says, it became clear that his supervisors only cared about two things: tickets and arrests.

"I can tell my supervisors that I took three people to the hospital and I saved their lives. That the child that I helped deliver is healthy," says Polanco. "I can tell them that. But that's not going to cut it."

Polanco says he encountered an unwritten rule that officers are expected to bring in "20 and one." That's 20 tickets and one arrest per month. But it was tough to get anyone outside the department to believe him, because NYPD officials would always deny there were any quotas. They still do.

"There is no specific target number that we go for," said NYPD Commissioner William Bratton at a press conference in January. "There are no quotas, if you will."

Since taking over the department last year, Bratton has insisted he's more interested in the quality of arrests than the quantity. The NYPD declined to comment for this story.

Back in 2008, Officer Polanco was determined to expose the NYPD's alleged quota system. So he secretly recorded conversations inside his precinct house in the Bronx.

"Next week, it could be 25 and one. It could be 35 and one," says a man Polanco identifies as a sergeant. The man heard in the recording is pushing his officers to get their numbers up. If they don't, he threatens, it could get even worse: The quota could be 25 tickets a month, or 35.

"Until you decide you're going to quit this job and become a Pizza Hut delivery man, this is what you're going to be doing until then," the man says.

Now Polanco is suing the NYPD, one of several whistle-blower lawsuits over alleged quotas at the department. Arrest and ticket quotas are illegal in several states, including New York, Illinois, California and Florida. But even former law enforcement officials will tell you they still exist.

"Does it happen in some places? Yeah, I'm sure it does," says Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. Wexler says some of the 18,000 police departments across the country probably do have quotas.

"On the one hand, there is an understandable desire to have productivity from your officers," says Wexler. "But telling them that you want to arrest x number of people, you have to cite x number of people, it just encourages bad performance on the part of officers."

Wexler says the problem can get especially bad if officers start to view the community they're policing as a source of revenue. That, according to the Justice Department, is exactly what happened in Ferguson, Mo. As NPR and others have reported, the largely white police there wrote huge numbers of tickets for the city's black residents, collecting millions of dollars in fines every year.

DOJ: Ferguson Police Routinely Discriminate Against African Americans March 4, 2015

Code Switch

What Policing Looks Like To A Former Investigator Of Misconduct

Around the Nation

NYPD Disciplinary Problems Linked To A 'Failure Of Accountability'

"Our view is that this is not solely a Ferguson problem," says Laurie Robinson, co-chairwoman of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She's also a former assistant attorney general and a professor at George Mason University. The task force concluded that numbers-based policing sends the wrong message to the public.

"If citizens believe that tickets are being issued or arrests are being made for reasons other than the goal of law enforcement, which is about public safety," says Robinson, "then their trust in the legitimacy of the system is really eroded."

So why does numbers-based policing seem to persist in some departments?

Maybe because it's an easy way to track officer productivity. Tim Dees, a retired Reno, Nev., police officer who has also taught criminal justice, says it's the quality of police work that counts, not the quantity.

"That's a much more difficult metric to gauge," says Dees. "The satisfaction of the citizen, very difficult to put a value on that. And it's much easier for, frankly, lazy administrators to make it into a numbers game."

But some rank-and-file officers say the numbers game can actually make their jobs harder. NYPD Officer Adhyl Polanco says that in order to be effective, he needs the trust of the community.

"Nobody in the community wants people selling drugs in their building," Polanco says. "Nobody in the community wants shootings, so if we work with the people who don't want that, together we can identify who the criminals are. But what happens when you start harassing innocent people because I have to come up with my 20 [tickets]?"

Those tickets might look like productivity on paper, says Polanco. But he argues they're not actually making anyone safer.

policing

traffic tickets

New York City

Police

nypd

Clementine Lindley says she had a great college experience, but if she had it to do over again, she probably wouldn't pick an expensive private school.

"I could actually buy a small home in Helena, Montana with the amount of debt that I graduated with," she says.

"Removing my driver's license, you just created one more barrier for me being a productive citizen in my community."

- Clementine Lindley, Montana resident

Fresh out of school, Lindley says there were times when she had to decide whether to pay rent, buy food, or make her student loan payments.

"There was a time where I defaulted on my student loans enough that, I never was sent to collections, but just long enough to, honestly, ruin my credit."

That was motivation enough for Lindley to figure out ways to make her payments. But had she defaulted longer, the state of Montana could have revoked her driver's license.

In 22 states, defaulters can have the professional licenses they need to do their jobs suspended or revoked if they fall behind in their student loan payments, licenses for things like nursing or engineering. The percentage of Americans defaulting on their student loans has more than doubled since 2003. That's putting a lot of peoples' livelihoods at risk.

But Montana, where Lindley lives, is rolling those sanctions back.

When Democratic State Rep. Moffie Funk learned that that was a potential consequence, she says she felt embarrassed.

"I think it is demeaning," she says. "I think it is unnecessarily punitive."

Not to mention, she says, counterproductive. If the goal is to get people to make loan payments, taking away their ability to drive to work just makes it harder for them to make money, especially in rural states.

"There isn't public transportation, or very little," Funk says. "You know people need cars in Montana."

So Funk wrote a bill ending the state's right to revoke professional or driver's licenses because of student loan defaults. Dustin Weeden, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures says a lot of states passed license revocation laws for student loan defaulters in the 1990s and early 2000s, back before the federal government started taking on a bigger role in lending to students.

NPR Ed

Activists Stop Paying Their Student Loans

The Howard Project

Education May Be Priceless, But A College Degree Isn't

The Two-Way

Student Tuition Now Outweighs State Funding At Public Colleges

"Because states were essentially the direct lenders to students, many states had large loan portfolios," he says.

Weeden add that tying student loans to licenses which often have to be renewed every couple of years, created a process to find people when they defaulted.

"The state loan authorities would report anybody who had defaulted on loans to all the licensing entities around the state," he says. "Then it's a way for a state to identify that person and really help them get into repayment."

But some policymakers want to retain consequences for defaulting. Like Republican State Sen. Dee Brown.

"I think that this is one of the sticks that we can use over a kid who is not paying their student loans," she says. "It's a stick to get their attention. And what a better way than their driver's license?"

There are plenty of sticks already, like having your wages garnished and your credit ruined says Clementine Lindley, who's been in student loan default.

"Removing my driver's license," she adds, "you just created one more barrier for me being a productive citizen in my community."

The Montana bill to take away license revocation as a consequence for student loan default passed with bipartisan support. That wasn't the case in Iowa. An attempt to repeal a similar law there failed earlier this year.

driver's license

student loans

student loan debt

Montana

debt