Steeped in Tea

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Tea and coffee have long represented a great yin-and-yang duality. In The World of Caffeine (Routledge, 2001), authors Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie Bealer lay out these opposing aspects: Coffee is male; tea is female. Coffee is boisterous, hardheaded, and down-to-earth; tea is decorous, nurturing, and elevated. While coffee is associated with work and passion, tea reflects spirituality and contemplation.

In light of coffee's historic associations, it comes as no surprise that it became the symbol for the defiant American revolutionaries. More than two centuries later, a kinder, gentler revolutionary spirit continues, playing out-naturally, as goes America-in the marketplace. 'An impetus for me in designing Numi's packaging was to infuse the most mundane activity, walking through a grocery store, with the sublime and rich in self-reflection,' says Numi Tea co-founder Reem Rahim. 'What other way to subversively create a revolution-in this sense, a spiritual revolution-than through art and tea? I believe that tea, and art, are part of a feminine energy that is starting to permeate through our shift in consciousness.'

Rahim's desire to redirect society sounds markedly similar to another cultural creative's mission for his own company. 'Our secret and subversive agenda,' Mel Ziegler wrote about founding the Republic of Tea, 'was to bring Americans to an awareness of 'tea mind,' in which we would all come to appreciate the perfection, the harmony, the natural serenity, and the true aesthetic in every moment and in every natural thing.'

But as Schor, Ray, and others point out, American society is evolving to that place anyway, becoming a little more yin, a little less yang; a little more feminine, a little less masculine; a little slower, a little less fast. The course tea has taken in this country-rejected one brisk evening in Boston, regarded as 'unmanly' and 'un-American,' and now embraced, at least in part, as a backlash to the dominant social paradigm dating from that historic event-may reflect a young society maturing. 'Perhaps the exercise in moving from Banana Republic to the Republic of Tea,' Mel Ziegler pondered, 'is all only a projection of my own slow process of growing up.'

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