There are tons of bubble tea cafes in Toronto, including the ones just steps from my apartment. Still, it took a while for me get why bubble tea seems to have exploded out of nowhere.
The drink of cold sweet tea or coffee has little balls of tapioca suspended in it. Bubble tea is an Asian confection, but tapioca comes from my part of the world. So down the rabbit hole I went to figure out how a Caribbean food became a staple food on the other side of the world.
Tapioca is the starch from the cassava plant. The name comes from the Indigenous Tupi language of Brazil, though the plant has a lot of other regional names. Anyway, in the Caribbean cassava is turned into starch or flour.
Cassava left the Caribbean in 1492 on the Ark of the Apocalypse. It was taken to Europe by the Spanish who then spread it across their vast maritime empire. So cassava is another example of the Grand Exchange, where plants and animals were shuffled around the globe, by imperial trade, when the world became one.
In Jamaica, we eat cassava bread. In England, I ate cassava in the form of tapioca pudding which was on rotation in the school dinners in my village and later small-town. In Nigeria, I ate cassava flour in the form of garri and eba. Cassava is a staple in many African countries, thanks to the transatlantic trade in slavery and genocide. It was a staple food for sailors and enslaved people on those dreadful voyages as the cassava could keep long without spoiling
Today the biggest producers of cassava are Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thailand, Ghana and Indonesia. I sipped the bubble tea and thought of the long journey the tapioca pearls had made from the Caribbean to the rest of the world.
© Jacqueline L. Scott. You can support the blog here.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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