Tea: The Splendid Elixir, Part 1

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history, mythology, culture and nature of tea. So start a kettle and prepare to listen with your favorite cup… 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
The first cup caresses my dry lips and throat. The
second shatters the walls of my lonely sadness. The third
searches the dry rivulets of my soul to find the
stories of five thousand scrolls. With the fourth, the pain
of life's grievances evaporates through my pores. The fifth relaxes
my muscles and bones become light. With the sixth, I

(00:25):
find the path that leads to the immortal ancestors. Oh,
the seventh cup, better not take it. If I had it.
The only feeling as the fresh wind blowing through my
wings as I make my way to pung Lie. Welcome
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio.

(00:53):
Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And today
we're going to begin a series on t Yes, t
the beverage and the plant that it comes from. Now, Rob,
you began today's episode by reading a uh, is this
a poem or a song? This is a poem by

(01:14):
Lu Tong from the Tang dynasty titled Seven Bowls of Tea,
and it's it's pretty widely cited. I I ran across
various like tea blogs talking about and sometimes saying that
this is overly cited in the literature of tea, uh
you know, especially in the West. Um and I think

(01:34):
with good reason because it's it's amazing, it's a It
captures this just intense enthusiasm for tea. And also it's
essentially about a man drinking way too much tea during
the course of the day that brings him to the
to the very brink of like blinking out of physical
reality and going to uh uh to ping lie the

(01:54):
mystical mountain where you have fantastic creatures and immortal beings.
So you don't want to do the Seventh Cup because
that will just essentially you will leave your body in
the place where you currently reside. Right. But it's not,
it doesn't seem to be a case where you have
to worry about like crashing with that seventh Cup. It's
just the seventh Cup is one pleasure beyond that which

(02:16):
you should grant yourself. You should you have to show
restraint because you still have stuff to do here in
the mortal realm. Well, I like the way that the
poem escalates because at the beginning it's more just about
the uh. Like the first line is about the sensory
experience caresses dry lips and throat. It's it's happening in
the mouth. And then after that it's like mood, you know,

(02:37):
shatters the walls of my lonely sadness. That's mood stuff.
That's level two. But beyond that, you're like talking about
communing with other beings, the path that leads to the
immortal ancestors. Yeah, it gets very spiritual towards the end, transformative.
Even I've never gone six cups in on caffe aated t,
but I don't doubt it. Yeah, I, um, my wife

(03:00):
and I probably have, but only through re steeps. We're
big into um having a picking out a good tea
that you can resteep several times. So um, I could
probably write a similar poem about, like, you know, steeps one,
one through four or five on a particular tea that
I like, because sometimes you get to get the you

(03:22):
get an interesting tea and it changes like cup Cup
one might actually not be the best cup. It's your
second or third steep where things maybe become a little
more nuanced, a little less sharp. I found I found
that to be the case with some of the poor
teas that I really like. I assume just the caffeine

(03:42):
content become less powerful as as you go through multiple steeps.
That is my understanding, and I believe that is my experience. Uh,
and that's one of the reasons I tell myself that
it's okay to have so many cups of tea during
the course of an afternoon because I'm getting decres east
returns on on that cup from a caffeine standpoint. But yeah,

(04:04):
we've touched on tea in the past, we've, but we
I don't think we've ever done a proper deep dive
on this most splendid beverage US and not just splendid,
but really one of the most popular beverages in the world.
You could probably make a case for it being the
most popular. Uh. There's a great deal of variety to
how it's cultivated, prepared, brood and consumed. And yeah, there's

(04:26):
no denying its appeal um, and it's importance weaves in
and out of global history, various cultures that factors into mythology, literature, politics,
and much much more. Yes, And to clarify something here,
I guess we should do this at the beginning. Uh,
there's a little bit of confusion in English. I don't
know if it's like this in other languages, but at

(04:47):
least in English, there are a lot of things that
we call t that are not made with the T plant.
So we use the word tea as like a generic
synonym basically for an infusion. Anytime you you take a substance,
herbal or otherwise, you expose it to hot water in
order to extract some kind of flavor or chemical compounds

(05:07):
into the water, and then you drink the water. People
will call this a tea no matter what it is.
So you've got herbal teas made from everything from like
camera meal, to turmeric to mint, or even cases where
people will will refer to meat based broths as like
beef tea, but there is no really, But there is
also the specific tea plant, uh, the leaves of which

(05:29):
are used to make tea proper. And it is this
plant and it's eponymous infusion that we're going to be
mostly focusing on in these episodes. And obviously there are
various blends that have taken place. There's so many teas
available now, especially loose leaf teas where you'll have like
little bits of dried um um flavor bits that are

(05:49):
not tea, but still the primary ingredient is the dried tea. Now,
I think one of the other exciting things about this
is and this is gonna be a fun one to
hear from listeners because I know everyone out there you
have your own individual story with tea. You probably have
your own cultural story with te um. For my own part,
I've come to like a number of different teas. I

(06:10):
want to also throw out an important caveat that I
would not say that I'm like a t super nerd.
You know, I'm not like I'm not a connoisseur of tease,
so I'm not going to be speaking from that vantage
point in these episodes. But I've grown particularly fond of
these poor ties, which will discuss in due course. UM.

(06:31):
I like several things about them. I obviously I like
the various tastes. They often have this kind of dark
earthy or sometimes there's lighter but something There's often an
earthy tone to them um sometimes compared to hey and
and that is a flavor profile that I find it works.
You get interesting results when you do re steeps on it,

(06:52):
because the hay taste might be a bit strong in
that first cup, but then cup two or three is
generally the comfort zone for me personally. I also really
love how so many of these particular teas are preserved
in bricks or pucks. Sometimes you have to break up
the brick with a little a little specialized knife, and

(07:13):
I like the ritual of that. I also like it
when it's a little puck that's already been prepared, often
uh circular, sometimes heart shaped uh today and that can
be a lot of fun as well, and also makes
it a little handy easy to get into the tea bag. Rob,
I seem to recall you getting very into the idea of, uh,
some kind of disgusting nineteenth century way of preparing coffee

(07:35):
that involved like brick or puck based concentrate, and I
am I remembering that right. Oh no, no, no, I
think I was interested in the study of like Civil
War era instant coffee, but none of it sounded like
anything I wanted to even experiment with. Okay, no, no, no,
I just meant that you were interested in the idea,
and not that like you talking it's virtues as great coffee. No, no,

(07:59):
it's just it's interesting history, like and It kind of
speaks to the importance of of caffeinated beverages to the
people who consume them. Uh, you'll have situal like war
situations where people realize, Hey, these soldiers need coffee, these
soldiers need tea. How do we get that to them?
What is the most cost effective means of doing so?
What happens when the product is bad? How do the

(08:21):
soldiers in the field relate to this additional indignity. I
also love how tea is like anything else. Uh, there's
nothing like great branding. I love some of the names
of the teas that I have enjoyed, Like there's one
called the Bewitched Emperor, there's one called Evil Snake King,
and so yeah, I'm I'm obviously these are just just

(08:42):
the labels given to these and these are the English
I think these are translations though of what they're actually
called in in the case of these two in China
as well. But I just love the idea that is
wrapped up in the branding for these as well. It
makes me feel like I'm I'm not only enjoying an
afternoon up with tea, but I'm engaging in something possibly supernatural.

(09:04):
M Well, I would say that I sense no other
beverage to have as rich an array of supernatural associations
as tea. Yeah, I think so, Like there's just there's
there's so and it's one of the things that's interesting
but also could probably be intimidating at times as you
get into not just ta culture, but various tea cultures

(09:27):
that all have various practices of uh, how you're supposed
to prepare it, how you're supposed to consume it, and
so forth. I mean Macha from Japan is of course
a great example of this um and uh and just
on its own can be a wonderful tea. Uh. Yeah.
There there's just so many, so many fascinating teas out there.
We're going to touch on some of the tea cultures

(09:49):
as we proceed through these episodes. But but how about you, Joe,
what's your your personal story with tea? Well, I am
not really a t drinker, not because I dislike tea.
I mean, and when I have it, I enjoy it.
But I think it's because for me personally, there is
simply not room for additional caffeine in my life. I
have my my morning coffee routine, and I have to

(10:11):
be very careful even with that, because if I have
too much coffee, I will spend the rest of the
day and night having visions of the doom of all
and just hear the screams of a dying planet like
I get the fear bad. And it's strange. I wasn't
always like that. I can think years back, I used
to hang out with my friends and drink cup after
cup of coffee and I was fine. Something happened to me,

(10:33):
and now I cannot handle that much caffeine. It just
res me. So after I've had my daily coffee, I
do not have tolerance for anything else. No no tea proper,
no no second or third cup whatever. Uh So, in
order to do caffeine eated tea, I think I would
have to do a full switch out and have it
instead of coffee, which I've never tried to do. But

(10:55):
occasionally I do enjoy non tea teas. I like some
herbal teas, lemon ginger and fusions and stuff, and I
guess they do make decaffeated tea, but I've just never
gone down that path. M hmm. Yeah, yeah, I'm like you,
and that I can't quite put aside the morning coffee
I've gotten it down to just two cups of coffee,
my initial wake up cup, and then the second cup

(11:17):
of coffee, and then everything after that for me is key.
Generally it's one tea bag, multiple steeps of set tea bag.
And it's worth keeping in mind when thinking about the caffeine. Now,
this is just general, and this is maybe maybe can't
be applied completely across the board, but generally speaking, a
cup of coffee, standard cup of coffee is gonna have

(11:38):
somewhere between a hundred and hundred twenty milligrams of caffeine. Meanwhile,
a cup of black tea is gonna have forty milligrams
of caffeine. Green tea's gonna have thirty. Green and white
tend to have the least amount of caffeine, followed by oolong.
These numbers are pointed out by Laura C. Martin, whose
excellent book A History of Tea is one of the
sources I'm gonna keep coming back to in these episodes. Okay,

(12:00):
so even if I did try to incorporate uh some
tea into my daily routine, it would not be equivalent
to drinking the same volume of coffee. Yes, that that
seems to be the case. Now that that being said,
there are so many ways to prepare tea, and certainly
you could drink enough tea, you could drink those six
fresh steeps of tea and risk transporting yourself to the

(12:24):
mystic mountains. So it's always always possibility, and everybody's different,
and you know, and and I think our relationship with
Katheine does change as we age, so naturally, yeah, you
don't have to be a total tea nerd or immerged
to any degree within an Eastern culture of tea to
be into TV, because tea has spread around the globe
by this point. Tea culture now encompasses everything from British

(12:45):
high tea to Southern sweet iced tea uh Taiwanese bubble
tea to things like Senegalese um tea and they're you know,
they're Tibetan um uh tea preparation methods that are also
rather distinct, and again we'll come back to some examples
of these later on. But I thought an interesting place

(13:06):
to start might be too. Instead of starting with the
familiar or even anything in the actual real world, we
might start off by getting into the mythological origins of
tea even before we get into the botanical realities of tea,
we might start and just purely mythic and I think
mostly Chinese mythological origins for this splendid beverage. Oh wait

(13:29):
a minute, Wait a minute. If we're getting into a
myth about a psychoactive substance and its ancient Chinese myth,
are we going to meet the divine farmer once again? Yes,
yes we will, because of course, if it involves something
that you should eat or shouldn't eat, and is a
plan of some sort, then yeah, the divine farmer Shinnong

(13:51):
has to show up Shinnong putting things in his mouth
for everybody's benefit. That's right. Yes, we've We've talked about
Chinong before on the show. He's a pretty important figure
in Chinese mythology and he's tied to myths concerning various
botanical substances. Um. His name literally means divine farmer. He's
a culture bear, a god um. He's attributed with the

(14:14):
invention of agriculture and the introduction of agriculture to human beings. Uh.
He's an important name in Chinese medicine. He's said to
have invented various farm tools and musical instruments. Uh, So
there's a lot that this mytholological figure is attributed with.
And you know, obviously as a mythological figure, he is
sort of summing up and condensing a lot of the

(14:36):
things that actual human beings did over the course of generations.
Figuring out which plant has a medicinal property or seems
to which plant is good to eat, which plant will
kill you, that sort of thing. You should definitely look
up some images of him because he's He's often depicted
as this kind of squat older man with bovine or

(14:58):
ox like characteristic, often kind of wide set eyes and
and even one of my favorite things about him is
he often has these kind of nub like horns. Now
I have seen depictions I think these are more modern,
but it could be wrong where he has like full
blown horns, like like a hornet deity. But generally it's
these kind of nubs where he looks just again, very

(15:18):
very bovine. Would you call him buds? Are those called buds? Yeah?
They kind of look like like buds. Yeah. Like, if
you don't know what you're looking at, you might say, well, well,
why does that man have two bumps on his head? Uh?
And it's because it's invoking this kind of ox like characteristics, Uh,
characteristic of the character. And in some tales he was
said to have had the head of a dragon, others

(15:41):
the head of an ox. And so we do have
to remember that he is a god, of course, so
it's natural that he might have some qualities like this.
There are various tales about his birth, including some traditions
that relate his incredible rate of maturity. Uh. Once version
said that he to talk at three days old, he

(16:01):
had all of his teeth, etcetera. And in some accounts
his father was an actual dragon. Wait when you said
had all of his teeth, he meant he was like
born with all of his teeth, or he had all
of his teeth when he was three days old. His
memory serves, and I believe this is related in the
book Chinese Mythology by yang On and Turner. Uh, there's
tales it's like, all right, at three days he had this,

(16:22):
At four days he had this. So he's just maturing
at a rapid rate, where at like three months old,
he knows everything about agriculture and he's able to teach
it to humanity. Okay, but the basic story with Shinnong
concerning plants is that he not only gave humans the
knowledge of agriculture, he also sussed out which plants were
useful in medicine and which ones were food, and also

(16:45):
which ones were poison. And he did this, of course,
by testing them all himself. Uh. In some tellings, he's
not actually eating them. He's thrashing them with a reddish
brown whip, like a whip that is um. And there's
a lot you can get into with the symbolism of it.
I've seen that it's there's something to it that this
is kind of the color of dried blood. Um. Other

(17:08):
times he has a cauldron. Uh so yeah. In some
cases he says to have, you know, some tools that
he's using. But in many tellings and certainly many artistic interpretations,
he's testing all of these various botanicals out by eating them,
and then afterwards he passes judgment. He's like, Okay, this
this is a plant that would be good from medicine,
so I'm going to put it into my right hand bag. Uh,

(17:29):
this one is good for food, so it's going into
my left hand bag. And he sorts it generally like that.
What about the ones that are poisonous um. He there's
one tale where if something's poisonous, he just wants to
stop it. Like, I think there's a story that's related
about Ginger where originally Ginger was said to be poisonous

(17:50):
and she took a look at each he like he
checked it out and he's like, yeah, this is horrible.
I want to stomp on it as well. And then
Ginger had to change in order to be accepted, and
that's and Ginger went underground. Oh beautiful. Yeah, so yeah,
I want to explore that one more at some point
because I don't really understand all the meaning going on there,
but it's it's it's interesting. Now. I don't know if

(18:11):
we've talked about this version of the story with Schino before,
but as yang On in Turner point out, in Chinese mythology,
some versions also state that Shinong is particularly good at
figuring all of this out because he has a crystal
stomach and he can see everything that's going on inside

(18:31):
of his own internal organs as he's digesting things. He's
like tobor He's they open up his his stomach and
they can look inside and see see all the parts working. Yeah. Yeah,
I just I love, I definitely picture this is kind
of like almost some sort of an android body that
he has going on underneath his his robes here that
he can pull it up and yeah, it's just crystal

(18:54):
organs under crystal skin, and he can observe all every
little detail going on in digestion. So in some versions
of the story, the first plant he was said to
taste was a green leaf, which once he put it
in his mouth and swallowed it, it went on a
grand tour of his insides, cleaning up everything along the way.
And again, crystal stomach, so he gets to watch it go. Okay,

(19:17):
so it's kind of like a dryer sheet or something. Yeah, yeah,
I guess. Um. This particular plant was referred to as cha,
which means to inspect, which eventually got confused in later
tellings with cha, which is the exact same phonetic sound
but a different Chinese character. So the story becomes later

(19:40):
on that Chinong was poisoning himself upwards of seventy times
a day, testing out the world's plants to determine which
ones we could use for various purposes, and if something
got on top of him, he got some poison going
around in his system, he would turn to the cleansing
power of tea to detoxify himself. Oh so, by the way,
you should not derive actual use value for from that.

(20:04):
But yeah, so in this version of the story, tea
is like a universal antidote, right. And my understanding too
is that older versions of the story are not referring
to tea, but it becomes tea, and later tellings of
the story. Uh, though though there is this eventually catches
up with him. Um. I was reading in the in

(20:25):
that book that one day he has said to have
tried a yellow flower, and upon trying the yellow flower,
it broke his intestines into pieces. So I guess he
sees this through his stomach, his crystal stomach. Uh. This
occurs the just the moment he swallows it, and he's
quickly trying to, you know, get himself some tea so
he can cleanse everything up, but it is too late.

(20:47):
He dies, and the plant uh that that does this
to him becomes known as the intestine breaking weed. That
is brutal in so many ways, especially because it imagines
the testines as brittle rather than elastic. I mean, I
guess you could think of them that way. Uh, well again,

(21:09):
it makes me personally think of Shinnong's crystal organs as
being like glass. And then the shattering is kind of
like when a cartoon character bites on on something that's
too hard in their teeth. Do that that cartoon shattering thing?
That's what I picture in my mind happening to Shino
here portion on, Yeah, thank thank Now. There's a book,

(21:39):
Shinnong's Herbal Classic, a later Han dynasty book that includes
a great deal of knowledge related to various botanical substances,
and this book is attributed to Shinno, likely based on
oral traditions. It includes a passage on t telling us
that it's bitter and share some details about when, how
and where it grows best. But as Laura C. Martin

(22:01):
points out in a History of Tea, references to tea
in this book were probably not original to it, as
the character for tea itself didn't come into usage until
uh seventh century. But more on the timeline of T
in a bit, because we're still for now in the
mythic timeline. Okay, But talking about this book attributed to Sinong,

(22:21):
the idea is that, uh, probably there were earlier versions
of the book that did not have the tea passages,
and then recopying through the year's tea passages were inserted
by some editor or copyist exactly. Yes, Now there are
a couple of other tea related myths here. This is
one that young on In Turner point out. It's a
creation myth of the the young ethnic people known outside

(22:44):
of China as the Poloang people in your non province.
And it said that in this creation myth, a hundred
and two tea leaves went around and around in the
air for thirty thousand years and then transformed into fifty
one young men and fifty one young hmen. That's the
beginning of humanity. Now there's another one. This is uh

(23:05):
This is a tea myth that largely emerges from India
rather than China. As Martin points out, the early history
of tea centers around China, but the plant is indigenous
to the Assam region of India in addition to southwestern China.
Yet it seems that it was little known or used
in India prior to the sixth century see heat and

(23:25):
if you don't know where it is, a psalm is
located in northeastern India, so the the area of origin
for the tea plant we think is basically southwestern China
northeastern India. Yeah yeah, though it does seem like it
was better known in China as opposed to India. But

(23:45):
of course we see a fair amount of cultural exchange
between India and China, and of course the most famous
example of this is of course Buddhism, and this particular
story does involve Buddhism as well. It's the story of Bodhidharma,
who was a fifth century semi legendary Indian prince who,

(24:06):
much like the Buddha himself a thousand years earlier, came
to see the emptiness of wealth and abandoned all of
it in the quest for enlightenment. He became a Buddhist monk,
and after many years of study, he travels to China
to reintroduce Buddhism and found Buddhism had been introduced into
China previously, but this most period where maybe he was
waning a bit, and he said to end up becoming

(24:28):
the founder of Chan Buddhism in the process. But while
he's in China, after visiting the emperor on this trip,
he retreats to a Shaolin temple and here he begins
a long period of devoted meditation and asceticism. So depending
on the tail, and again they're different versions with this
says with most of these stories, he either stares at

(24:50):
a wall for nine years in meditation or he gives
up sweep for nine years so that he can really
double down on his meditation. In version of this story,
he grows so sleepy that he reaches out and he
grabs a leaf, like a random leaf, and he just
shoves it in his mouth to chew it as a
way to perk himself up. And his luck would have it,

(25:11):
this plant is tea, and it really does perk him
up because it's we'll discussing a bit it it contains
a stimulant. Uh. There's another version of this tale, and
this one um I got in trouble for sharing at
the dinner table in my post research excitement. But in
this other version, he's getting sleepy and he pulls off
his own eyelids because it's like heavy eyelids that keep shutting.

(25:33):
I'm trying to meditate, but I keep falling asleep. So
he just pulls the eyelids off, throws him on the ground,
and then a tea plant grows from where where the
eyelids fall. So in either case, according to these these
this legendary account, he discovers tea and passes it on
to the other monks to assist them in their meditation.

(25:55):
All right, So that that's just a taste of some
of the mythological stories and involving the origin of tea,
this spectacular plant that is either discovered or or perhaps
even created out of some sort of inspired inside by
a legendary or semi legendary individual. Now, when it comes
to the t plant itself, I uh, there were a

(26:16):
few things that I actually did not know until recently.
I don't know if I should be embarrassed about not
knowing these, but I was just pretty much in the
dark about tea. But one thing I discovered was that,
apart from the issue of things being called t just
actually being an infusion of anything, even when you're talking
about the tea plant itself. I previously thought that the

(26:37):
main varieties of tea you hear about, like green tea
and black tea, or maybe oolong tea, were from different plants.
But actually these are all from the same plant as
far as I can tell, They're just different preparation and
curing methods. Correct. Yeah, Yeah, they're essentially we're talking about
one single species of plant. Camelias sinensis camilius and insus

(27:02):
is an evergreen shrub or tree and uh, you know
asterix there, we'll get to that that produces small, white
petaled flowers. In the wild, it will eventually reach tree size,
but in in situations where it's been cultivated, generally they're
kept at a shrub size via pruning. Uh. They're typically

(27:23):
kept at like a meter or three feet in height,
as that's an ideal height for picking. Yeah, and so
you have these top layers of leaves that come out
and I think they refer to those as flushes, like
the leaves keep uh protruding, and then the top young
leaves are harvested. Yeah. And while we're essentially talking about
one species, there are two varieties. There's Camillia sinensis. This

(27:46):
is the one that's indigenous to western Yunahan and China.
And then there's a variety of that Camillia sinensis assamica.
This is indigenous to the Assam region of India as
well as parts of Myanmar Island, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and
southern China. Now, these two varieties, they cross pollinate easily,

(28:07):
so they're also blends of the two, but Martin stresses
that they're they're actually not that different in taste either.
So the varying tastes and colors of different teas they
stem from the way we process them, whether you're talking
about black or green or along, et cetera. And so
either variety of tea leaf process the same way will

(28:28):
basically be similar. But at the same time, we don't
want to discount traditions surrounding particular teas. Um. It's one
of those things. It's kind of like, you know, wine
taste or any kind of like uh, cultural food tradition.
There's a lot tied up in knowing where something comes
from as well, and some of that trans translates into

(28:48):
the into the taste for the average consumer. Sometimes it's
something that translates into the the connoisseur's taste experience. And
sometimes you're getting into an area where yes, you're being
primed that this uh, this particular I don't know, um
uh you know that this wine stems from this vintage
versus this vintage, this winery versus this winery etcetera. Yeah, yeah,

(29:10):
I mean, I think there are a lot of different
foods that maybe you actually couldn't tell the difference in
in a blind taste test. But then again, it might
be cool to enjoy an authentic version of something knowing
the history behind it, like knowing where it comes from
and being able to think about that and so forth.
Exactly so. In the wild, tea plants are generally going

(29:31):
to thrive in an open woodland area or on the
edge of the woodlands where they can benefit from the
shade of larger trees. As such, when cultivating tea plants,
they're generally grown alongside shade trees. Uh. These, as Martin
points out, not only provide shade, but also, uh it
keeps weeds away and enriches the soil. And uh generally

(29:54):
the leaves and the buds are or what are harvested
fresh leaves generally contain about four percent caffeine. I'm reading,
And I was wondering about this because I had read that,
uh it is maybe we can get more into this
when we do some of the cultural history. But I
had read that tea leaves were traditionally treated as a

(30:15):
food plant in China. More so than a beverage plant
and the beverage uh stage came later. And so apparently
you can eat tea leaves like you can just prepare
them like a green and chew them up and eat them.
People do this sometimes and it's fine, though you need
to be careful about how much you eat, obviously, because
you don't want to overdose yourself on caffeine right right,

(30:36):
because most of us don't have crystal clear guts that
we can look at and and determine what's happening. Um,
you know, by the moment. But yeah, that'll be fun
to get into and subsequent episode. Um. The the history
of tea as a beverage is also the history of
a food. Uh so, yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

(31:05):
But coming back to the caffeine, this is a question
that applies of course to tea, but also to other
caffeine eated beverages or at least ones that have a
natural origin, Like why is there a caffeine in the leaf?
Like what? What is there? Why? Why is that substance
that that for us humans as a stimulant that kind
of manipulates us as a consumer of the plant, Like

(31:28):
why is it even there to begin with great question.
So as a jumping off point to answer this, I
wanted to refer to an article I was reading on
the subject by previous show guest Carl Zimmer, who is
one of our favorite science writers. He's he's been a
guest on the podcast before. Maybe we'll get him back
again someday. But he came on to talk about his
book on jeans and heredity called She Has Her Mother's Laugh,

(31:51):
which is a fantastic book. And so Carl Zimmer had
an article in The New York Times called how Caffeine
evolved to help plants survive and help people wake up?
And he begins by pointing out some rough stats about
the popularity and power of coffee and caffeine, saying the
world consumes roughly twenty six thousand cups of coffee per second.

(32:12):
That's a lot. That caffeine is probably the most widely
used psychoactive substance in the world. But there's an interesting
thing about caffeine, which is that it has a number
of different associated plants that it comes from. So, for example,
there are coffee beans. Coffee beans are the seeds of

(32:32):
a genus of flowering plant called Caffea or coffee a
in the family ruby Ashi. These plants are native to
tropical Africa and tropical Asia. There is, of course t
tea again is made from the leaves of the evergreen
shrub Camelius and insis, which is native to East Asia.
There's mate made from the yurba mate plant, which is

(32:53):
a holly shrub native to South America. Scientific name Ilex
paraguari insis and and you've even got chocolate. Chocolate also
contains caffeine. Chocolate is made from seeds of the cacao
tree or theobroma cacao. Theobroma, by the way, means food
of the gods, theo roma uh and historically was not

(33:15):
always used as an ingredient in sweets and desserts. The
main way we in the United States consume it today.
It was often consumed as a bitter, hot, or cold beverage,
kind of similar to how we consume coffee, which of
course would have carried a punch of caffeine, and chocolate
does have caffeine. I think our Invention episode where we
talked to Jeff Beach Bonberri, we talked a little bit

(33:36):
about ancient recipes for hot chocolate essentially, but It's kind
of interesting to look at this geographic distribution and say,
how do all of these different plants that are not
closely related to one another independently make this same compound.

(33:57):
We know why humans like caffeine, but what does caffeine
do for the plants and how did all these diverse
different species evolved to make it well. This article looks
at a study published in the journal Science in where
researchers detailed an effort to sequence the genome of a
species of coffee plant responsible for many of the world's

(34:17):
coffee beans. This remember, coffee comes from the genus Caffea
or coffea, and this is a coffee a Caniphora. The
study is by uh France um Oh. I do not
know how to pronounce this last name d E n
O e U d is how the name is spelled
at all. And the title is the coffee genome provides

(34:39):
insight into the convergent evolution of caffeine biosynthesis. Again, that's
in the journal Science. So one thing this study looked
at is how caffeine is actually synthesized in coffee plants,
and it turns out it is a multi stage transformation
of molecule that it begins with a compound called xant zine,
and the coffee plan it manufactures several enzymes that act

(35:03):
on this compound. So one enzyme removes an arm of
the molecule, another enzyme adds a new arm. Two more
enzymes come in and add two more clusters of atoms,
and after all these transformations, you finally have transformed xantha
zine into caffeine. And the enzymes involved in this multi
step transformation are called in methyl transferraces. They are found

(35:24):
in all plants and they do generally this sort of work,
building specific compounds, many of which plants use to defend
themselves against predators or parasites. And one example of a
compound manufactured with the help of in methyl transferraces that
Zimmer sites in the article is salacilic acid, which is

(35:45):
a compound produced by willow trees which actually turns out
to be a potent pain reliever in animals like us.
Salacilic acid is the chemical basis for aspirin. But what
about the enzymes that manufacture caffeine, specifically in coffee. Well,
the authors determined that some time ago in the evolution

(36:06):
of the coffee plant, a gene for creating one type
of in methyl transfer ace enzyme underwent a series of
mutations to produce a variety of enzymes which would eventually
create caffeine. And so one of the co authors is
quoted in Carl Zimmer's articles. This is by Victor A.
Albert saying, they're all descendants of a common ancestor enzyme

(36:28):
that started screwing around with zanta zine compounds. So the
plants are just kind of like doing all these little
variations on this originator molecule and producing these derivative molecules
that in many cases are physiologically active or psychoactive on animals.
And it turns out scientists had already discovered that caffeine

(36:48):
was created by the action of in methyl transfer aces
in cocaw trees and in the t plant, so similar
molecular frameworks are going on within coffee plants with in
within the tree that makes chocolate or cocao, and within
ta plants. However, the researchers also found that the enzymes

(37:09):
for for making caffeine in these different plants did not
evolve from the same ancestors, so this would be a
case of convergent evolution. Different branches on the tree of
life evolving the same solution, the same phenotype independently. Uh
So you can think of a million different examples of this.
One is wings. Birds and bees both evolved flapping wings

(37:32):
independently for flight. They didn't get them from a common
ancestor that had wings. They you know, their last common
ancestor did not have wings, and they independently, separately came
up with the same solution. Now, when you see convergent evolution,
when you see different streams of evolution converging on the
same trait or the same solution to an environmental problem,

(37:53):
it's usually a sign that that trait or solution is
pretty good. It's a powerful adaptation and there's a big
survival reproduction payoff. So it would seem, based on the
evidence of convergent evolution, that producing caffeine is definitely good
for something for the plants. So what is it really
good for. Well, there are a few things we can
talk about. One is activity in poisoning or deterring predation

(38:17):
by insects. So, like so many of the plant based
compounds that humans ingest on purpose for their psychoactive properties,
caffeine seems to be at least in part useful for
deterring predation by insects. Insects would of course naturally like
to eat the leaves and the seeds of the coffee plant,
but high levels of caffeine are toxic to them. And

(38:39):
this relationship can be seen further in the fact that
the fruit flied Drosophila drosoft la has the ability to
taste the presence of certain compounds. I was reading about
how they have an array of at least sixty eight
known um These are called seven transmembrane goostatory receptors or
gustatory receptors. Are g ours and uh gustatory, meaning taste.

(39:03):
So these gustatory receptors allow the fly to sense the
presence of compounds that could kill it or harm it
and avoid eating them. Caffeine is one of those compounds.
Fruit Flies appear to have a suite of receptors, including
one called g R sixty six A, that work together
to sense the presence of caffeine in whatever they're they're

(39:24):
eating and allow an avoidance response to take over. Now,
I think it's interesting to put that together with the
fact that in the human experience, most alkaloids taste Bitter
alkaloids are a broad class of nitrogen bearing organic compounds
that plants make, many of which have physiological effects on

(39:46):
humans and other animals, effects ranging from uh, you know,
all your standard types of poisoning and death too, psychoactive
effects such as the stimulant effect of caffeine. So bitter
taste often causes animals to reject act to food source.
So I think it's kind of reasonable to put all
this together in wonder if the sensation of bitterness when

(40:06):
ingesting plants rich in alkaloids is perhaps a protective response
that tells us to stop consuming these plants and reject them,
similar in effect to the way that a fruit fly
has the ability to taste and reject caffeine, though with
a different evolutionary backstory. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean,
it makes me think of, you know that the obvious
of example of say, a child being introduced to coffee

(40:30):
and finding it disgusting, um because it is bitter uh
and um, you know, you know, And also we have
to think about the fact that that the chocolate unsweetened
has a very bitter taste to it as well, though
of course in both cases coffee and chocolate. Uh, there
is of course a process involved here. Uh, we're not
gonna really get into with coffee and and chocolate between

(40:51):
plant and and even the unsweetened food product. But that's
something we can come back to in the future. I
don't have to do something on chocolate saying a few
it too, absolutely, And yeah, it's interesting to think about
are the complex human reaction or response to bitterness that
it seems bitterness is probably primarily biologically relevant in getting
us to reject foods. You know. It's like this has

(41:14):
something in it that I don't want to get too
much of, so I probably don't want to eat too
much of this. Yeah. So many of the naturally occurring
pesticides that we consume, h yeah, they have some sort
of a strong flavor that would tend to convince most
humans to avoid them, certainly, and in many of the
cases with our various spices, avoid them in larger quantities

(41:34):
than we traditionally use them. And yet we can really
get a taste for them. I mean, I like the
bitter taste of coffee and of chocolate and of tea
and so forth. It might have to do with like
it's a level of bitterness that doesn't reach kind of
a threshold at which you would find it disgusting, like
it's like below the bar for rejection. Or it could

(41:55):
be a totally it could be a learned response. Maybe
naturally people don't bitter stuff in any quantity, but if
culturally they learned to appreciate it, I don't know, maybe
maybe that's what's making the difference there. Oh, I mean
in cocktail culture, for example, you you know have a
you know, a whole spectrum of bitter drinks. You know,
sometimes you're just adding a little bitter taste via bitters

(42:18):
in many cases to u to to offset sweetness and
give you a certain flavor profile. But some people go
especially hard for those those bitter drinks. They're like, I've
never tried one of these, but you have these recipes
floating around for mixed drinks that contain like multiple bitter
components to try and create like some sort of uber

(42:40):
bitter concoction, which is not for me, but I I
assume it is for some people who have developed a
taste for all of those bitter components. Well, I mean,
I do think about how many of the bitter food,
almost all of the really enjoyable bitter foods and beverages
I can think of or psychoactive in one way or another.
I mean, I it's not like, you know, bitter greens

(43:02):
or you know, I like greens that can be better.
But I think of coffee which has caffeine. I think
of chocolate which has caffeine. I think of tea which
has caffeine. Or I think of alcoholic beverages that are bitter,
like you know, like hoppy beers and so forth. Yeah.
So it's almost like on some level of our bodies
saying this tastes bad, but something good is happening. Yeah,

(43:33):
but okay. So caffeine one of its roles within a
plant might be to deter insects or other animals, maybe
from eating the leaves of the plant. They got enough
caffeine in there. One way or another, the toxicity of
the caffeine will drive the animal away. Another interesting idea
that Zimmer races in this article is that caffeine in
coffee plants is suspected to work also by inhibiting the

(43:57):
growth and germination of other plants. He writes that when
coffee leaves die and fall off of a coffee plant,
they fall down to the soil below, the caffeine content
seeps into the earth and interferes with the ability of
other plant species in the soil nearby to germinate. So
this helps limit competition for soil resources and sunlight in

(44:20):
the area. Now, I didn't find anything specifically about whether
or not that's true with tea plants as well, but
it could also be the case if if it works
for the coffee plant. But one thing where I did
find a parallel between how they think caffeine is working
in coffee plants and tea plants is its role in pollination.
I thought this was the most interesting of all. So

(44:42):
in addition to deterring insect or animal predation and perhaps
limiting competition from nearby plants, UH, the psychoactive and drug
like properties of caffeine on animals might be not only
an unintended byproduct or side effect of their physical logical
activity as a deterrent, they might actually be in part

(45:03):
the point of the compound, or at least one of
the points of the compound, and it would work like this.
So coffee and flowering plants that produce caffeine in their
leaves also produce lower doses of caffeine in their nectar. Now,
plants make nectar as a food for insects as an

(45:24):
incentive for insects to spread their pollen. You know, So
the insect gets sugar from the plant, it gets a meal,
and the plant gets helped with reproduction and dispersal when returning,
gets help spreading its genetic material. Now here's the really
interesting thing. Research has shown that when insects feed on
plant nectar containing low doses of caffeine, they seem to

(45:47):
become more disposed to remember the scent of the flower
where they consumed that nectar, and researchers believe this may
cause the insect to return to that flower more off
fen and thus spread its pollen more effectively. So maybe
out of just one compound there is one molecule that
the plant creates, it can be getting multiple completely different

(46:10):
effects depending on the dosage in the different part of
the plant. So maybe higher levels in the leaves will
deter insects from trying to eat the leaves, but lower
levels in the nectar will be more like a cup
of coffee for the insects, which kind of like boosts
the insects memory and allows it to return to the

(46:31):
same plant more frequently and spread that plant's genetic material
toxic and high concentration, but beneficial to some types of
brain function at lower doses. Uh. And it's funny that
caffeine has the same dual effect on humans. I mean,
if you have too much of it, it will kill you.
But if you have these low doses of it that
people consume in beverages and stuff, people use it directly

(46:52):
as a stimulant to improve their brain function. Yeah. I mean,
coming back to Shino the mythical um story here, it's
basically a uh an individual god figuring out to what
degree one should consume the world of poisons around us,
like how much of this poison is appropriate for desired outcome? Um,

(47:13):
and in which poison should we not mess with at all? Exactly.
So I found this so interesting. But anyway, this was
all about the coffee plant. I was trying to find
is the same thing true of the tea plant? And
I did, in fact find. A study from just a
couple of years ago, was from one published in the
Journal of Insect Physiology. It was by g Win Gong
at All, and it was called Floral t polyphenols can

(47:37):
improve honey bee memory retention, and olfactory sensitivity. So the
background on the study is to read from their abstract quote.
Animal pollinated plants face a common problem how their defensive
anti herbivore compounds may impair or alter pollinator behavior. Evolution
has tailored multiple solutions which will largely involve pollinat or

(48:00):
tolerance or manipulation to the benefit of the plant, not
the removal of these compounds from pollen or nectar. The
tea plant Camillia sinensis is famous for the caffeine and
te polyphenols that it produces in its leaves. However, these
compounds are also found in its nectar, which honeybees readily collect.

(48:21):
So to summarize here, the authors tested the effects of
these two different products of the tea plant, the of
the caffeine and the tea polyphenols UH, and they tested
it on the forging behavior of honeybees. And what they
say they found is that honeybees preferred simulated nectar from
a feeder when it contained te polyphenols over a control

(48:42):
feeder that did not contain them. And they also found
that bees that were fed on a feeder laced with
caffeine showed small improvements in learning, Both caffeine and te
polyphenols increased memory retention and showed influences on other behaviors
as well, such as like response to alarm pheromones. So
it seems that the tea plant may well be adapted

(49:04):
to give pollinating insects small doses of caffeine and tea
polyphenols for a reason. It could mean, among other things,
that the pollinating insects are more likely to keep returning
to the same plant and spreading its genetic material. And
I thought this was so interesting. So if this is
in fact the case, Uh, it's it's a more complex
relationship than I usually imagine between plants and the alkaloids

(49:29):
that they manufacture and the animals that they target, because
I usually think of the relationship as a pretty simple
one way interaction, like the the plant alkaloid causes some
kind of negative physiological response or reaction in the animal,
and then the animal is deterred from eating the plant again,
or the animal is driven to evolve like gustatory receptors

(49:51):
or taste that make the plant taste nasty from the
first spite, because you know, it's ancestors that didn't have
that may have died. But this is a more complex
implied relationship. I don't know exactly what to compare it to.
I mean, it's almost like the cultivating of an of
an analog of an addiction, but one with UH. I
don't know. Survival benefits for the bee as well, because

(50:12):
it allows them to keep returning to a food source.
So before we we got into all this year, I,
if I were put to the test, I would have
just said, well, caffeine implants is just about keeping some
things from eating them, and we've managed to manipulate that
situation for our own benefit. But yeah, it sounds like
the reality is a lot more complicated. Of course, you

(50:32):
can't really think about purpose and design and desire in
the literal sense when it comes to the evolution of
something like this in various plants species. But I am
kind of reminded of how some products in the human
world will end up with more than one purpose, Like,
for instance, I think of bag bomb. Have you ever

(50:53):
used bag bomb or seen a container bag bomb? I
don't think so. Explain it's like a little greenkin and uh,
I believe it dates back to her about eight and
it was it's a salve to put on cow's utters
after milking. But people started using it because they realized that, hey,
you can put this on dry cracked skin, and so uh.

(51:14):
I It's one of these things where it ended up
being there's this whole additional application of the product, an
entire different consumer base that kind of spraying out of it.
It's more complicated, obviously with the case with caffeine and plants,
but it's almost it almost feels like that where there
may be one purpose that's kind of driving, uh, the
evolution of this, but then this other use, this other

(51:36):
way that it can enhance the survivability of of the plant,
uh emerges as well, and so you have the sort
of dual forces driving it at that point. Oh yeah.
Evolution loves to repurpose pre existing morphology. Is so like
a structure or a chemical capacity, or something that evolved

(51:56):
initially for one reason can always be repurposed when a
new opportunity presents itself. Yeah. And I don't know specifically
what the order would have been in any of these cases,
whether you're talking about coffee plants or tea plants, but
you can imagine a compound Initially there is evolutionary pressure
favoring the enzymes to produce that compound because it I
don't know, because it deters predation by animals, or because

(52:19):
it limits competition when the leaves fall into the soil.
And then later something like this relationship with pollinators emerges
using the same compound, and then eventually this relationship with
with human beings who start cultivating it. So it's it's
fascinating to think about all of these relationships. All right,
we're gonna go ahead and wrap up this episode, but

(52:39):
we'll be back in the next episode with more discussion
of tea. In the meantime, of course, we'd love to
hear from everyone out there. You might be thinking to yourself, well,
I have some tidbit I want to share about tea.
But but surely Robert and Joe don't want to hear it. No,
we want to hear it. Right in. We want to
know about your individual or cultural uh differences and um
and and app tied for tea. If there there other

(53:02):
myths or legends or folk tales that you've heard about
about the origins of tea. Right in, we would love
to hear from you. In the meantime, we'll remind you
that stuff to blow your Mind is primarily a science podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we
do listener mail. That's uh, That's when we will read
the messages that come in about these episodes. On Wednesday's

(53:24):
we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode,
and then on Friday's It's Weird How Cinema Time. That's
when we set aside most serious concerns and just talk
about a strange film. Huge thanks to our audio producer
J J. Pauseway. If you would like to get in
touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff

(53:45):
to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my Heart Radio, I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.