Sharing Yerba Mate: How South America's Most Popular Drink Defined a Region

by Rebekah E. Pite

Drinking yerba mate is a daily, communal ritual that has brought together South Americans for some five centuries. In lively prose and with vivid illustrations, Rebekah E. Pite explores how this Indigenous infusion, made from the naturally caffeinated leaves of a local holly tree, became one of the most distinctive and widely consumed beverages in the region. Latin American food and commodity studies have focused on consumption in the global north, but Pite tells the story of yerba mate in South America, illuminating dynamic and exploitative circuits of production, promotion, and consumption. Ideas about who should harvest and serve yerba mate, along with visions of the archetypical mate drinker, persisted and were transformed alongside the shifting politics of class, race, and gender.

This global history takes us from the colonial Rio de la Plata to the top yerba-consuming and producing nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with excursions to Chile, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, where yerba mate is now sold as a "superfood." For readers eager to understand South America and its unique drink, Sharing Yerba Mate is an essential text that delves into an everyday ritual to expose systems of power and the taste of belonging.

Genres: Food History

310 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 2023

Reviews

[Catie Duckworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The perfect book to explore food studies from every lens: the indigenous roots of the beverage, the gendered and racial dynamics of work, the impacts of colonialism, national identity, indigenous right and labor movements, and it looks at these things through examples of visual culture. It’s a well-researched, well-written book and an interesting historical read.