Currently browsing tag

Culture

Kombucha Starter Culture

Brew delicious organic kombucha at home and save money! Commercial kombucha sells for $3+ per bottle. Using our kombucha starter culture, brew your own kombucha for $2 per gallon or less. A kombucha starter culture consists of yeast and bacteria existing in a symbiotic relationship (SCOBY). When combined with sweetened tea and fermented for 7 to 30 days, the resulting kombucha beverage has a slightly carbonated zing and is packed full of B vitamins. Each box contains one dehydrated, live kombucha starter culture (also known as a SCOBY, mushroom, or mother) and 10 pH strips. Dehydrated cultures are easy to use, safe to ship, and will rehydrate in just 30 days. The culture is reusable and with proper care can be transferred from batch to batch-one is all you need! Only a few ingredients are needed: Simply add tea, sugar, vinegar, and water to get it started. The initial batch requires a 30-day culturing period; subsequent batches are ready in 7-30 days. Kombucha starter ingredients: Organic sugar, organic black tea, live active cultures. Non-GMO, gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan. Allergen Information: Our Kombucha Tea Starter Culture is a gluten-free product (less than 5ppm). It is manufactured in a facility that produces products containing soy and dairy. All lots are tested by an independent lab for for gluten content (below 5ppm) as well as pathogens to ensure a safe product for our customers.

The Rise of Tea Culture in China: The Invention of the Individual (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives)

This distinctive and enlightening book explores the invention and development of tea drinking in China, using tea culture to explore the profound question of how Chinese have traditionally expressed individuality. Western stereotypes portray a culture that values conformity and denigrates the individual, but Bret Hinsch convincingly explodes this facile myth. He argues that although Chinese embrace a communitarian ethos and assume that the individual can only thrive within a healthy community, they have also long respected people with unique traits and superior achievements. Hinsch traces how emperors, scholars, poets, and merchants all used tea connoisseurship to publicly demonstrate superior discernment, gaining admiration by displaying individuality. Acknowledging central differences with Western norms, Hinsch shows how personal distinction nevertheless constitutes an important aspect of Chinese society. By linking tea to individualism, his deeply researched book makes an original and influential contribution to the history of Chinese culture.

Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic (Culture, Place, and Nature Series)

Puer tea has been grown for centuries in the “Six Great Tea Mountains” of Yunnan Province, and in imperial China it was a prized commodity, traded to Tibet by horse or mule caravan via the so-called Tea Horse Road and presented as tribute to the emperor in Beijing. In the 1990s, as the tea’s noble lineage and unique process of aging and fermentation were rediscovered, it achieved cult status both in China and internationally. The tea became a favorite among urban connoisseurs who analyzed it in language comparable to that used in wine appreciation and paid skyrocketing prices. In 2007, however, local events and the international economic crisis caused the Puer market to collapse. Puer Tea traces the rise, climax, and crash of this phenomenon. With ethnographic attention to the spaces in which Puer tea is harvested, processed, traded, and consumed, anthropologist Jinghong Zhang constructs a vivid account of the transformation of a cottage handicraft into a major industry—with predictable risks and unexpected consequences.

Coffee Culture: Local Experiences, Global Connections (Routledge Series for Creative Teaching and Learning in Anthropology)

“The Anthropology of Stuff” is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each “Stuff” title is a short (100 page) “mini text” illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world. From the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands, here is a commodity that ties the world together. This is a great little book that helps students apply anthropological concepts and theories to their everyday lives, learn how historical events and processes have shaped the modern world and the contexts of their lives, and how consumption decisions carry ramifications for our health, the environment, the reproduction of social inequality, and the possibility of supporting equity, sustainability and social justice.