The accounts of tea growing, manufacture and connoisseurship encountered in Taiwanese lifestyle media offer not only an introduction to one of the island's most iconic agricultural products but also instruction in particular ways of thinking about the world. As they recount tasteful encounters with tea in its various manifestations from field to factory to cup, these texts delineate a shared discursive space traversed by tea farmers, tea manufacturers, tea drinkers, writers and readers. In this article, I consider how, in tracing each tea's path through this imagined space, these texts question the relationship between the human and the non-human, and evoke ways of living and feeling that are thought to reconnect humanity with its others. Here, cultivating a taste for tea is conceived as a way of inducting tea drinkers and readers into a way of living by which anxieties born of the industrial food system might be overcome. This way of living is one in which cultivating a form of felt engagement with the taste and materiality of each tea is believed to offer a means of directly apprehending the larger constellation of human and non-human agencies from which both taste and life are thought to emerge.
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