“What makes a good cup of tea?” anthropologist Sarah Besky asks, in the introduction to her latest book, Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press). “Ask consumers in different tea-loving places, from London to Lucknow to Louisville, and you’ll likely get different answers.” Tea, like so many everyday foods found at the grocery store, has a long history of commodity, globalization, and trade. And despite its natural variability in taste and scent that, much like wine, can be attributed to seasonality and terroir, modern industrial food science has led to a host of standardized proprietary blends that obscure their sources of origin, often in the name of marketability.