Japanese Green Tea Once Fueled the Midwest
ON MAY 11, 1869, AMERICA’S first transcontinental freight train set out from California. On that momentous day, its cargo was a load of Japanese green tea. Today, only 15 percent of the tea drunk annually in the United States is green, and the vast majority of that is produced in countries like China and Vietnam. But in the last decades of the 19th century, America’s tea of choice was green, and Japan was the major supplier. “It’s just so amazing how something like this can be so quickly forgotten,” says Robert Hellyer, a professor of history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “And this is the challenge of a historian: trying to figure out why. There’s no documents that tell us ‘This is why we really [liked] green tea.’” In his book Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Teacups, Hellyer sheds light on this little-known fact. “Green tea was the most popular tea in the U.S. since right after the Revolution, but there’s different theories about wh