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

From the publisher: 

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 Río 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.

About the author:

Rebekah Pite '95 is a historian, writer, and food scholar. She’s the author of numerous articles and three books, most recently, Sharing Yerba Mate. Her first two books focus on the fascinating story of Argentina’s most important culinary legend. Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food (UNC Press, 2013) won the Gourmand and Chile-Río de la Plata LASA prize. Three years later she published a deeply revised version directed to an Argentine audience called La mesa está servida. Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo y la domesticidad del Siglo XX (Edhasa, 2016).  She is currently a professor and the head of the History department at Lafayette College.