Tasting Qualities

"Refreshingly focused on spaces 'in between' plantation production and restorative consumption, Besky incisively details the expert work of blending, tasting, evaluating, and auctioning that regularizes every bag of 'regular' black tea to deliver a 'nice cuppa'—producing qualities, she argues, that also reproduce India’s plantation form of monocrop agriculture."––Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America

"A ‘nice cup of tea’ may be a small thing; the making of that ‘niceness’ is as big a subject as any taken on by anthropologists or historians. Tasting Qualities is an impressive account of the complex networks of expert practices and sites––plantations, auctions, blending rooms, scientific laboratories––in which qualitative judgments are made and then transformed into a priced product on the market."––Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

"From plantation to laboratory to digital auction, Sarah Besky has drawn from the modern history of ordinary black tea to create something much more extraordinary: an ethnography of quality. Her attention to the diverse experts and experiments behind quality’s production makes for a book rich in ideas, imagery, and ultimately humanity."––Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History