From the Vault: Tea, Part 1

the seventh cup, better not take it. If I had it, the only feeling is the fresh en blowing through my wings as I make my way to Pung Lai.

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 toping lie the mystical mountain where you have fantastic creatures and immortal beings.

more nuanced, a little less sharp. I found that to be the case with some of the poorer teas that I really like.

a case for it being the most popular. There's a great deal of variety to how it's cultivated, prepared, brewed, and consumed, and yeah, there's no denying its appeal. And it's importance weaves in and out of global history, various cultures. It factors into mythology, literature, politics, and much much more.

Anytime you take a substance, herbal or otherwise, and you expose it to hot water in order to extract some kind of flavor or chemical compounds 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 camomal to turmeric to mint, or even cases where people will refer to meat based broths as like beef tea, but there is no really. But there is also the specific tea plant, the leaves

of which are used to make tea proper. And it is this plant and its eponymous infusion that we're going to be most focusing on in these episodes.

For my own part, I've come to like a number of different teas. I want to also throw out an important caveat that I would not say that I am like a tea super nerd, you know, like I'm not a connoisseur of teas, So I'm not going to be speaking from that vantage point in these episodes. But I've grown particularly fond of these pooh Air teas, which we'll discuss in due course. I like several things about them. Obviously,

I like the various tastes. They often have this kind of dark, earthy or sometimes there's lighter, but there's often an earthy tone to them sometimes compared to hay, and that is a flavor profile that I find it works. You get interesting results when you do re steeps on it, 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 specialized knife, and I like the ritual of that. I also like it when it's a little puck that's already been prepared, often circular, sometimes heart shaped 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.

also love how tea is like anything else. 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 obviously these are just the labels given to these and these are the English I think that these are translations though, of what they're actually called 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 not only enjoying an afternoon cup of tea, but I'm engaging in something possibly supernatural.

We're going to touch on some of the tea cultures as we proceed through these episodes. But how about you, Joe, what's your personal story with tea?

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, and now I cannot handle that much caffeine. It just wrecks me. So after I've had my daily coffee, I do not have tolerance for anything else, no tea proper, no second or third cup whatever. So in order to do caffeinated 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 occasionally I do enjoy non tea teas. I like some herbal teas, lemon ginger infusions and stuff, and I guess they do make decaffeinated tea, but I've just never gone down that path.

worth keeping in mind when thinking about the caffeine. Now, this is just general, and this maybe can't be applied completely across the board, but generally speaking, a cup of coffee, a standard cup of coffee is gonna have somewhere between one hundred, one hundred and 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, who's excellent book A History of Tea is one of the sources that I'm going to keep coming back to in these episodes.

the mystic mountain. So it's always always a possibility. And everybody's different, you know, And I think our relationship with caffeine 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 high tea to Southern sweet iced tea, Taiwanese bubble tea, to things like Senegaluese tea and their Tibetan 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 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 in just purely mythic and I think mostly Chinese mythological origins for this splendid beverage.

He's said to have invented various farm tools and musical instruments, So there's a lot that this mythological figure is attributed with. And you know, obviously as a mythological figure, he is sort of summing up and condensing a lot of the 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 ox like characteristics, often kind of wide set eyes, 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 a hornet deity. But generally it's these kind of nubs where he looks just again, very very bovine.

There are various tales about his birth, including some traditions that relate his incredible rate of maturity. One version said that he could talk at three days old, he had all of his teeth, etc. And in some accounts his father was an actual dragon.

it to humanity. Okay, but the basic story with Shin own 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 which ones were poison And he did this, of course, by testing them all himself. In some tellings, he's not actually eating them. He's thrashing them with a reddish brown whip, like a whip that is. 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. Other times he has a cauldron. So yeah. In some cases he says to have some tools that he's using. But in many tellings and certainly many artistic interpretations, he's testing all these various botanicals out by eating them, and then afterwards he passes judgment. He's okay, this this is a plant that would be good for medicine, so I'm going to put it into

my right hand bag. This one is good for food, so it's going into my left hand bag, and he sorts it generally like that.

that's when 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 we've talked about this version of the story with Shinong before, but as Yang'an and Turner point out, in Chinese mythology, some versions also state that Shinnong 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 of his own internal organs as he's digesting things.

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.

phonetic sound but a different Chinese character. So the story becomes later on that Shinong 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.

This occurs 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. He dies, and the plant that does this to him becomes known as the intestine breaking weed.

is attributed to Shinong, likely based on oral traditions. It includes a passage on tea, telling us that it's bitter and share some details about when, how and where it grows best. But as Laura C. Martin points out in a History of Ta, references to T in this book were probably not original to it, as the character for Ta itself didn't come into usage until seventh century. But more on the timeline of tea in a bit, because we're still for now in the mythic.

beginning of humanity. Now there's another one. This is a 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 a little known or used in India prior to the sixth century.

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 it was waning a bit, and he said to end up becoming the founder of Chan Buddhism in the process. But while he's in China, after visiting the emperor on this trip,

he retreated. He eats to a shovelin temple and here he begins a long period of devoted meditation and asceticism. So depending on the tail, and again there are different versions with this. With most of these stories, he either stares at a wall for nine years in meditation, or he gives up sleep for nine years so that he

can really double down on his meditation. In one 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, this plant is tee and it really does perk him up because it we'll discuss it a bit, it contains a stimulant. There's another version of this tale, and this one I got in trouble for sharing at the Venner 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, oh, heavy eyelids, they keep shutting. I'm trying to meditate, but I keep falling asleep. So he just pulls the eyelids off, throws them on the ground, and then a tea plant grows from where the eyelids fall. So, in either case, according to this legendary account, he discovers tea and passes it on to the other monks to assist them in their meditation.

All right, So there's just a taste of some of the mythological stories involving the origin of ta, this spectacular plant that is either discovered or perhaps even created out of some sort of inspired inside by a legendary or semi legendary individual.

you're talking about the T plant itself. Previously thought that the 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.

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 oolong, et cetera. And so either variety of tea leaf processed the same way will basically be similar. But at the same time, we don't want to discount traditions surrounding particular teas. It's one of those things. It's kind of like, you know, wine tastes or any kind of

like cultural food tradition. There's a lot tied up in knowing where something comes from as well, and some of that translates into the taste for the average consumer. Sometimes it's something that translates into the connoisseur's taste experience, and sometimes you're getting into an area where yes, you're being primed that this particular I don't know, you know, this wine stems from this vintage versus this vintage, this winery versus this winery, etc. Yeah.

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.

Like why is there caffeine in the leaf? Like what is there? Well, why is that substance that, for us humans is a stimulant that kind of manipulates us as a consumer of the plant, Like why is it even there?

Has Her Mother's Laugh, which is a fantastic book. And so Carl Zimmer had an article in twenty fourteen 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. 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 a genus of flowering plant called Caffea or Coffea in the family rubiaishi. These plants are native to tropical Africa and tropical Asia. There is of course tea. Tea again is made from the leaves of the evergreen shrub Camillias and ensus, which

is native to East Asia. There's mate made from the urbamate plant, which is a holly shrub native to South America scientific name Ilex paraguariensis. And then you've even got chocolate. Chocolate also contains caffeine. Chocolate's made from the seeds of the cacao tree or theobroma cacao. Theobroma, by the way, means food of the gods. Theo roma and historically was not 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.

Coffea canaphora. The study is by France. Oh, I do not know how to pronounce this last name, Deneud is how the name is spelled at all, and the title is the coffee genome provides insight into the convergent evolution of caffeine biosynthesis. Again, that's in the journal Science twenty fourteen. 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 xanthozine, and the coffee plant

manufactures several enzymes that act 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 xanthezine into caffeine, and the enzymes involved in this multi step transformation are called in methyl transferases. They are found in all plants, and they do generally this sort of work, building specific compounds, many of which

plants use to defend themselves against predator or parasites. And one example of a compound manufactured with the help of in methyl transferases that zimbercites in the article is salicylic acid, which is a compound produced by willow trees, which actually turns out to be a potent pain reliever in animals like us. Salicilic acid is the chemical basis for aspirin.

But what about the enzymes that manufacture caffeine specifically in coffee. Well, the authors determine that some time ago, in the evolution of the coffee plant, a gene for creating one type of in methyl transfer 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 Zimber's articles. This is by Victor A. Albert saying they're all descendants of a common ancestor enzyme that started screwing around with xanthezene 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 was created by the action of in methyl transferrass in cocaw trees and in the tea plant, so similar molecular frameworks are going on within coffee plants, within the tree that makes chocolate or cocow, and within tea plants. However, the researchers also found that the enzymes for making caffeine in these different plants did not all 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. So you can think of a million different examples of this. One is wings. Birds and bees both evolved flapping wings independently for flight. They didn't get them from a common ancestor that had wings. They 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, you see different streams of evolution converging on the same trait or the same solution to an environmental problem. It's usually a sign that that trait or solution is pretty good. It's a powerful adaptation,

and there's a big survival and 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 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 cope plant, but high levels of caffeine are toxic to them, and this relationship can be seen further in the fact that the fruit fly Drosophila drosophala 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 These are called seven transmembrane goostatory receptors or goustatory receptors are grs and goustatory meaning taste. So these goustatory 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 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 humans and other animals, effects ranging from you know, all your standard types of poisoning and death to psychoactive effects such as the stimulant effect of caffeine. So bitter taste often

causes animals to reject a food source. So I think it's kind of reasonable to put all this together in wonder if the sensation of bitterness when 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 fruitfly has the ability to taste and reject caffeine, though with a different evolutionary backstory.

because it is bitter. And also we have to think about the fact that that the chocolate unsweeten has a very bitter taste to it as well, though of course in both cases coffee and chocolate, there is of course a process involved here we're not going to really get into with coffee and chocolate between plant and even the unsweetened food product, but that's something we can come back to in the future. I love to do something on chocolate, say in the future.

learned response. I mean maybe naturally people don't like bitter stuff in any quantity, but if culturally they learn to appreciate it, I don't know, maybe maybe that's what's making the difference there.

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 bitter concoction, which is not for me, but I assume it's for some people who have developed a taste for all of those bitter components.

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 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 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, in addition to deterring insect or animal predation and perhaps limiting competition from nearby plants, the psychoactive and drug like properties of caffeine on animals might be not only an unintended byproduct or side effect of their

physiological activity as a deterrent. They might actually be in part 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 incentive for insects to spread their pollen. So the insect gets sugar from the plant, it gets a meal, and the plant gets help with reproduction and

dispersal when returning it's 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 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 often and thus spread its pollen more effectively.

So maybe out of just one compound, this one molecule that the plant creates, it can be getting multiple completely different 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 insect, which boosts the insect's memory and allows it to return to the 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. 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 as a stimulant to improve their brain function.

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 largely involve pollinator tolerance or manipulation to the benefit of the plant, not the removal of these compounds from pollen or nectar. The T plant Camilli s. Senensis is famous for the caffeine and

T polyphenols that it produces in its leaves. However, these compounds are also found in its nectar, which honeybees readily collect. So to summarize here, the authors tested the effects of these two different products of the tea plant, of the caffeine and the T polyphenols, 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 T polyphenols over a control 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 T polyphenols increased memory retention and showed influences on other behaviors as well, such as response to alarm pheromones. So it seems that the T plant may well be adapted to give pollinating insects small doses of caffeine and T 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, it's a more complex relationship than I usually imagine between plants and the alkaloids that they manufacture and the animals that they target, because I usually think of the relationship as a pretty simple one way way interaction, like 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 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 analog of an addiction, but one with I don't know, survival benefits for the bee as well, because it allows them to keep returning to a food source.

plant 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 used bag bomb or seen a container of bag bomb?

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 the evolution of this, but then this other use, the other way that it can enhance the survivability of the plant emerges as well, and so you have these sort of dual forces driving it at that point.

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 it limits competition when the leaves fall into the soil. And then later something like this relationship with pollinators emerges using the same compound.

it right in. We want to know about your individual or cultural differences and appetite for tea. If there are other myths or legends or folk tales that you've heard about about the origins of tea, write in. We would love to hear from you. In the meantime, will remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail. That's that's when we will

read the messages that come in about these episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and then on Fridays it's Weird House Cinema time. That's when we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.