Looking Beyond and Behind Tea
Cheryl Zhang
Tea is the most consumed beverage in the world, just after water. Tea drinkers are on the rise as they begin to see numerous benefits in tea. More people are including tea as part of their daily routine. However, as a tea drinker, I have noticed that people often only see how wonderful and tasteful tea is. We rarely hear and talk about the opposing side of tea as the truth is that not only tea production is violating human rights, destroying our environment, and causing loss of biodiversity, but tea has also widened social classes and triggered conflicts in history. Every story has two sides to it. Same for tea. When we look beyond to recognize our experiences with tea, we should also look behind to acknowledge some of the harms tea has brought now and in the past.
The book will allow people to reflect their journey with tea through reading survey responses I collected. It also emphasizes the destructive impacts of tea and its severity so that tea drinkers as a collaborative group can adjust daily trivial acts to avoid directly funding the concerning issues and to prevent the ways people used tea in the past. Tea is more than a beverage. It is a subject that can urge self-reflection, evoke senses, and spark conversations. This project is aimed to push people to explore the other side of the story and to make trivial changes as a collective group for the bigger causes behind.