Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Bubble Tea

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why bubble tea is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Bubble tea, known for being a drink, famous for containing boba or being called boba. A lot of people don't think much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why bubble tea is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie!

Yes! What is your relationship to or opinion of bubble tea? I actually live down the street from a bubble tea place. I don't actually like bubble tea, unfortunately. I don't like those little tapioca balls coming up the straw, you know? Yeah. I'm the same. And I hope listeners bear with us.

It'll be a little of an outsider perspective because the rest of the beverage is delicious and I don't like tapioca very much in anything. And then also the kind of jellied bursting balls, I'm not that into either. Same. It's funny because I actually like with roe, like salmon roe, I do actually like that. So you'd think that I would like boba, but no, somehow I don't. And the sort of like swallowing a liquid and then having an unexpected orb in there is unwelcome for me, if that makes sense.

Same. And I also drink all kinds of caffeine, love a coffee, love a tea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like milk teas and stuff, great, really good. So this episode's pretty specific to the bubbles because like tea could be a whole separate, at least one episode, but the bubble kind

is very exciting to learn about. It's something I absolutely can drink It's just not my favorite and I'm also like way into say black coffee and stuff so, you know, I've had it and enjoyed it for what it is and Also, thank you to lots of folks on the discord for suggesting this Thank you to sell the abjurer for the suggestion support from Jeff B support from Chris support from lots of other people On every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics for the suggestion, support from Jeff Bees, support from Chris, support from lots of other people. And on every episode, we lead with a quick set

of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, Stats Today in the Park, the number is a four in July. Yeah. Golf Club. Chicago. That name was submitted by Artie Polmer. Thank you, Artie.

We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian, wacky, and badass possible. Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. We got a Chicago Pope now, which is great. I was so excited. We were chatting about this. Yeah. Yeah.

I was so excited when I heard the news about the Chicago Pope. I'm not Catholic. Alex is a lax Catholic. And I was like, Alex, Chicago Pope. Yeah. My dad says Chicago Catholics, and then also they're White Sox fans. And there's footage on the national telecast of the Pope sweating out the end of game one of the 2005 World Series,

when the White Sox won a World Series. And it's basically my best sports memory in baseball possible. And I think he's, it's like uncanny. Like he's more of a White Sox fan than I am. It's a level of connection and I never expected ever. I'm getting so much street cred now that the Pope is American because now everyone's Chicago. Tell me about Chicago. I'm getting so much street cred now that the pope is American because now everyone's Chicago. What? Tell me about Chicago. I want to know about Chicago. Yeah, I can give you some things to say that'll sound right, you know? Yeah. The bean. The bean. But not to the speaking of beans, Bobas. Yeah, the first numbers and takeaways will help define what this is at all. Because it's well known, but also the media in particular is often fumbling just describing Boba.

And the first quick number is two, because there are two modern meanings of the word Boba. Because Boba literally means ball in languages like Cantonese. The word's also been spread and borrowed across most world languages within the last few decades because of this drink. Then the word can mean both the bubbles in bubble tea and the whole bubble tea drink. It's used for both. It's a synecdoche, right? I'm using that word, right?

Synecdoche. Yeah. Okay. I'm pretty sure. I's used for both. So it's a synecdoche, right? I'm using that word, right? Synecdoche. OK. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure too. Yeah, it means the whole drink and then it can also specifically mean the bubbles. And it's like how you can say wheels to mean the wheels or check out my wheels to mean your whole car. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's fun languages that way. Going into this I was curious like is there a more

correct name like what do I name the episode in podcast feeds and I couldn't find a solid answer it seems like bubble tea and boba are both very good names for this drink. Both accepted I see great. Great. And when you say bubbles, can you kind of just for people say like on a Canadian reality television show who might not know what a boba is or a bubble is in bubble tea, describe what that is. Yeah, I had Katie watch one clip before we taped and we'll get to Canadian reality TV. But yeah, the first two whole takeaways will be about the bubbles.

And in general, there's a few things that can be, the two biggest ones are either a solid ball of tapioca or a sphere with liquid inside. That's like a jellied sort of situation. I guess just to clarify to any audience members who live under a rock, it's not like a bubble, like a soap bubble or even a bubble in champagne or something.

It's an actual spherical, a spheroid. It's a spheroid, a colloidal spheroid. Yeah, yeah, the outside or the whole thing is solid. And yeah, you also might have seen it's often in a plastic takeaway cup. Sometimes it has a plastic sheet as a lid and then you pop a straw through it and usually a very wide straw so that entire boba bubbles can go up the straw. Big straw. I said the media often doesn't do well describing this beverage, so it's why we needed to find

a lot. One amazing number there is 2017, the recent year 2017. That's when the New York Times published an apology for their trend piece about bubble tea. Oh, boy. Business editor Ellen Pollack wrote, quote, the reader complaints have merit. In retrospect, we wish we had approached the topic differently, if at all. Wow.

Jesus. How did they mess up so bad? They're like, we regret ever covering this. Right, right. The New York Times, they run corrections and stuff, but this was an entire full apology. They've never done this about, say, leading us into Iraq or anything, you know?

Right, right. But they wrote such a wild bubble tea piece. What did they say? Bubble tea? Is it made out of rat poop? Nearly. So the piece is still online with significant revisions and a note that they revised it a lot. The new headline is, quote, bubble tea purveyors continue to grow along

with drinks popularity. Okay, what's the OG one? Come on. The OG headline is, quote, the blobs in your tea, they're supposed to be there. Oh wow. Oh no. Oh geez. Wow. And there was also a lot of wild phrasing in the piece. They describe bubble tea as something

that was beginning to be mainstream and grow beyond a quote niche following. In 2017, eh? Yeah, 2017. Yeah, I think that happened quite a bit before then. And probably the worst line is that they said bubble tea was growing in the United States after it, quote, washed ashore a few years ago.

Which is some racist fresh off the boat stuff, straight up. Yeah, this strange exotic tea is meant to be weird. Yeah. And there was a lot of criticism of the piece. There was also a few funny jokes pointing out how weirdly exoticizing it is. Because again, the headline is the blobs in your tea, they're supposed to be there. And the post is gone because the user no longer uses x.com,

but they did a very funny headline where they posted a picture of meatballs and wrote the blobs in your spaghetti, they're supposed to be there. Yeah. Just a great joke, really good. It's pretty incredible. I do, you know, it is, I know it I know it is racist, but it's one of the funnier examples of racism because it's like, here's

a food and then you can see the writer's monocle falling off their face like, but I beg your pardon. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so they really quickly and openly walked this back and fully apologized. They weren't trying to dodge. So they're not blobs, they're spheres. They're very actually neat little spheres. Yeah, and if I wasn't weird, I would like them.

It's my fault, I'm strange. Yeah, it's perfectly fine not to like it, but you know, it's something where I tried it because it looked good. It looked intriguing and I didn't like the sensation. You know, it's a... Yeah, yeah, right. That's it. I think bananas are sort of Satan's implement. The smell is horrible to me. The texture is very wrong. But you know, when I see someone eating a banana, I don't attack them as strange and exotic eating some sort of strange oblong blob.

Yeah. And I'm that way with the texture of whole tomatoes, even though I'm, you know, I'm wrong. Everybody's tomatoes. So yeah. And I wouldn't write this piece about tomatoes or boba. And one reason this reporter, they really should have been on top of it in 2017, but a lot of American media are surprised by bubble tea because it is a relatively new invention in general. The quick number about that is 1986, because the year 1986 is the approximate year when bubble tea was invented. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I mean, that's a few decades ago, but yeah, recent. Yeah, like they should at least describe it without being weird, but it is invented in some people's lifetimes. It's not from centuries ago. And we'll double back a lot more to that in another takeaway. But in general, we're real clear on where and when this came from. In general, it's tea shops in Taiwan in or around 1986 invented the bubble tea, the specific bubbles and orbs in the tea.

I mean, I'd imagine that before then it would be pretty hard to get, I guess I don't know how they make, I have a guess on how they make the ones that have the fluid inside. I don't know how they make the tapioca ones, but yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, and both starting with the solid tapioca kind

were put into tea starting in 1986. In less than 40 years, it's gone global and it could grow a lot more in the next decade or so. The Guardian cited a market research that says that in 2023, the global bubble tea business was worth $2.46 billion US dollars. They think by 2032, so less than a decade later, it'll about double to $5 billion. Wow, that's quite a lot. Yeah, it's massively growing all over the world. And there's about 100 times more sales of coffee versus bubble tea. So like, it's both a large global business and a new growing thing, bubble tea.

It's kind of a perfect combination for a New York Times trend story because it's lucrative and growing, but also not everybody is super familiar with it. If it was sort of a novelty thing, right? It wouldn't last far beyond 1986. It would have just been, you know, sort of like, I mean, because think about there's other, like Dippin' Dots kind of didn't have the clear staying power that Boba has. And they tried, you know, like here we can make ice cream into orbs. I've always enjoyed Dippin Dots, to be honest.

It's not, but it is kind of it doesn't really enhance the ice cream eating experience. It's just kind of fun. Right. I'm weird. I'm pretty neutral about Dippin Dots, too. I don't know. Yeah. You know, yeah, I'd just rather have ice cream eating experience is just kind of fun, right? I'm weird. I'm pretty neutral about Dippin' Dots too. I don't know. Yeah. You know, yeah. I'd just rather have ice cream. I think I would also rather just have ice cream,

but yeah, it seems that with the bubble tea though, offers a genuinely unique and different beverage drinking experience that is pleasant, that has staying power beyond it just being gimmicky. Exactly. Yeah, so many little food trends will come and go or little extra toppings and something. This has persistently massively grown ever since 1986. It's never dipped. It's just been up and up and up and up. People love it. Never dip and dot.

Never dip and dot. And one more number before we talk about the Bobas. The last number is 13 regions. 13 regions? Yeah, 13 regions. That's the number of specific tea growing regions in the mountains of Taiwan. Like kinds of tea leaves that have been demarcated. That's a lot of different types of types of tea leaves.

Are they all different species? Are they these subspecies of teas? It turns out all tea anywhere comes from one species of plants. Whoa. And that would probably be a takeaway in a whole tea episode that we could do in the future. But the short version is that the plant Camellias sinensis has been cultivated and harvested and also then the leaves dried and processed in all sorts of ways by humans to make all the different teas.

Right. Like black tea is a more oxidized leaf than green tea, for example. There's no variance in terms of the plants. It's all in terms of the process of how it's harvested and dried. A little plant variance sort of the way there are like different apple trees and so on. You know, like you can vary that. But yeah, Camellia sinensis. Got it. And we'll link Smithsonian Magazine for a whole rundown of that. And one key source for the episode, it's a book called The Food of Taiwan, Recipes from the Beautiful Island. And that's a cookbook in cultural history by food writer Cathy Erwe. And she says that Taiwan has a unique history of growing teas specifically in their mountains, because most of the regular farmland there is used for rice and

for sugar cane. All three crops came to Taiwan with people. There's indigenous groups of Austronesian people in Taiwan and then many centuries of migration from all over East and Southeast Asia, in particular, Fujian province of mainland China. And then around the 1700s, Chinese settlers realized the mountains of Taiwan were excellent for growing specific oolong tea leaves, like growing and processing that. And she says, quote, unlike most garden crops, tea develops character from growing in difficult conditions,

such as mountainous terrain. So like you gotta do some intergenerational trauma for these tea trees, tea leaves. Yeah, the less they're okay with their parents, the better the tea is. Those leaves need to be mad. Yeah, yeah. You should tell the tea leaves

that they can't go to art school. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money and time. For the topic of this episode, bubble tea, you can use pretty much any variety of tea to make bubble tea. And all the Taiwanese varieties can become bubble teas. There's also a huge flexibility in what milk is used. Some people say condensed milk is traditional.

Others say they want to use a non-dairy milk or regular cow milk. And lots of cultures also combine their tea with milk from Tibet to Malaysia to Pakistan. So like the tea and the milk are not the essential part of this topic today. It's the bubbles and then also how people put that together in Taiwan. Let's start talking orbs, Alex. I'm so, please tell me we're ready to start talking orbs. I'm so excited to talk orbs. We are.

We have two orb takeaways, starting with takeaway number one. Ah, heck yes. The solid tapioca boba in bubble tea are made from a somewhat poisonous plants that feeds nearly 1 billion people Huh? It's called cassava also called manioc or yucca and It's a tuber that people had to do a lot of cultivating in South America to make less poisonous over generations hmm in South America to make less poisonous over generations. Hmm.

It's funny because I think we don't think about these things a lot with a lot of our agricultural food that a lot of them were just either bitter or toxic or just not plain old nasty tasting until we were like, maybe, well, this one tastes kind of okay. So what if I grow this one a lot? Yeah, yeah. This root and potatoes and a few other things, folks in South America, especially around modern Peru in the Andes, they really, really did a lot of work to make it more of a thing we eat.

Humanity benefited. This is really interesting. Kusava comes from South America, from the new world. Yeah, right. In order for it to be used in Taiwan, like this, that's maybe part of the reason that this is such a recent thing, right? Because this would not have been possible until after global trade. That's right. Yeah, it took the Columbia Exchange, it took cassava spreading across the tropical world and going

on to feed approaching one billion people as of 2025 as like a staple crop for all sorts of things. It's not only for making balls of tapioca. The sources here are a piece for JSTOR Daily by Julia Fine, a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Museum and a piece for the New York Times by Tejal Rao. This is a better piece than the one about blobs. And a piece for the online magazine Taste Cooking by Max Falkowitz as well as Kathy Airway's cookbook. Yeah, this starts about 6,000 years ago, the Cassava story. According to agronomist Mabroruk A. El-Sharkawi. Agronomist. I love that word.

Continue. Yeah. There's one, I think it's the carrots episode we talked about Soviet agronomists. Thrilling. Just a great job. Such a great name. I love it. Agronomists.

Yeah. And they say cassava is a perennial shrub which may have been domesticated for its starchy roots before 4000 BC on the Peruvian coast and in other parts of the Americas. So starting about 6,000 years ago, people said this wild poisonous plant, maybe it can be food later. Let's do it. I mean, but we love starch. Starch is so good. Potatoes. You know, starch is such a good thing to put in our bellies that I'm not surprised we had the tenacity to be like, ah, this plant is trying to poison us.

Go on. Yeah. And it is just sitting there full of poison because it is extremely resistant to pests and resistant to plant diseases, partly because it contains compounds such as cyanogenic glucosides. Hmm, cyanogenic. There's a lot of CIF episodes where we say like the long chemical name, it doesn't mean it's bad, but cyanogenic glucosides can cause cyanide poisoning in a substantial way. If you try to eat raw cassava, especially a kind called bitter cassava, you could poison

yourself. And so don't do that. And generations of Andean people figured that out. They refined the starch into a flour, they made it edible, and then that can be made into breads, other staples. It fully keeps people alive. That's fantastic. So it's a combination.

Did we breed out any of the toxicity of the cassava or is it all in the processing of it? Great question. It's both. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Like we bred some out and apparently other kinds besides bitter cassava have less of the toxicity. Right. Yeah. The processing can involve like washing it, grating it, mashing it into a pulp and then you hang it out and dehydrate it, then bake the dried pulp. It's a lot of steps to make an edible cassava flower. But then you have it. Wow.

Yeah. And along with that ability to repel predators and pests by being poisonous, cassava is one of the toughest and hardiest crops we have. It can tolerate variations in temperature, it can tolerate a lot of heats, it can tolerate uneven rainfall or a lack of rainfall, it can grow in bad soil. For that and other reasons, it might be not only one of the most important crops in the world, but an increasingly important crop. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, they say that more than 800 million people around the world depended on cassava for a meaningful amount of their calories. And that was a few years ago, that estimate.

Also a lot of people have probably eaten it, who are listening. It's also called yuca. And if you go to Peruvian restaurants, they often have yuca fries or yuca side dishes. It's great. I really like it. Yeah, I've had that, yeah. They're kinda like, just like potato fries. Yeah, yeah.

And it also gets turned into tapioca. I just don't like tapioca puddings and stuff, but most people do, you know? But I like that it's kind of all over and we don't think about it as much as potatoes or something in the United States. But most of us have eaten that sooner or later. And According to JSTOR Daily, some climate experts think that if the world gets hotter and soils get worse, we'll grow more cassava. Because sure, but even if that doesn't happen,

cassava is a good thing to grow. It's going to be with us either way. Okay. Which countries have this as like a staple crop, would you say? Apparently, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, the many countries out there. That's so interesting. But it really, across the tropical world, it's grown. And especially, you'll grow it in places with worse soil or drier conditions and then other crops in your better soil. So that's also a huge benefit to a community. Yeah. So it's actually really, really important. It keeps people fed in a lot of countries. But what does this have to do with boobas?

And so one thing this got turned into besides cassava breads and stuff is snacks. It got turned into tapioca balls that existed before bubble teas. We'll talk later about the origins of the drink, but one story claims that a teahouse was making everything except the bubbles in the boba, and then they just saw them for sale as a snack at a local market and thought of putting it in as a topping. That's the likely progression of the solid tapioca boba in boba tea. There's not like this fun, cute sort of Powerpuff Girl like story of they're mixing the tea and then they knock over the box of tapioca pearls and then it gets in the tea and they're

like, wait a minute. One of the girls is named Bubbles, right? That's fun. That's right. Her name is Bubbles. Total coincidence. Are you more of a Bubbles or a Blossom, Alex? I think you're more of a Blossom.

I think I'm more of a Blossom, yeah. Yeah, I think we got me pegged. Yeah, I think I lean more Bubbles than Buttercup, to be honest. Buttercup's cool, but yeah. Yeah, that's more aspirational I think, yeah. Yeah, I know. We all want to be Buttercup, but we're probably either Blossom or Bubbles.

Yeah, that's brilliant. Tell us in the comments what we are. And yeah, these solid tapioca balls can involve lots of ingredients. They can also be as simple as cassava flour, brown sugar, and water. That's it. You can also make it at home at a small scale. The main thing people had to figure out is how to make it at a large scale at consistent sizes and quality.

Right. How do you make it into a nice little sphere? To do it at large scale, you need relatively specific machinery and expertise. And this good New York Times piece from 2018, they covered a US chain founded by two Asian American entrepreneurs called Boba Guys. It was founded by Andrew Chow and Bin Chen. And they became one of the first businesses outside Taiwan to manufacture the bubbles for bubble tea in 2018. Wow. OK. There's apparently been a like semi trade secret of Taiwanese bubble makers for a while. I don't need all the secrets.

I just need the general. Are they using like a mold? Are they pouring tapioca into a mold? Do they roll it in some kind of rolling machine or is it something where you drop it into, oh, it's the rolling machine? Yeah, it's like, it's a series of mostly rolling machines. And Boba Guy's just shared with the New York Times, take pictures of all our machines. We had to reverse engineer some of this, it was a lot of trial and error. But the general steps are mixing, beading, tumbling, and sorting.

I know folks need to hear it again because they're listening. Mixing. Mixing. The mixing first step, you have like a big base of flour and sugar and maybe other binding agents. And then you put that in a huge drum at kind of a 45 degree angle and then somebody lightly sprays that with

water in a very specific rhythm and pattern to let that form into beads. The next step is beading after you mix. Okay. Mixing, then beading. And then you move all of that to another machine, which tumbles the beads, tumbling the third step. Then tumbling. And the tumbling gets them into a spherical shape, almost like tumbling rocks. I see. So mixing and beading and tumbling.

Yeah. And then last sorting where there's another giant conveyor belts with other machines moving the balls into that. And there were a bunch of people monitoring it. And that's kind of maybe the hardest part because the boba need to be not too big and not too small to go up the straw. So are there people sitting there with their straws doing sort of a testing? Suck it up and spit it back out.

Yeah. No, this one's too big. Yeah. The boba guys said that for their boba to be right, it has to have a diameter between 9.5 millimeters and 10.5 millimeters. That's pretty precise. You have a maximum of one millimeter of wiggle room. Otherwise it's either too small or big.

So there's no way people are just eyeballing this. Are there sorting tubes? What are they doing? Yeah, it's monitoring the machine as it sorts. And they're hoping that the previous steps get the size right, especially the tumbling and the beating. They want it to assemble. But yeah, it's basically big drums and people

both carefully monitoring and adding water and then also making the machine work right. Right, so to review, first you gotta mix it, then you gotta beat it, then you gotta tumble, and then you gotta sort it. That's right. Those are the steps. Right. I'm excited for people to look at this piece. There's pictures of all of it. And apparently it's kind of the first time anyone has shown this to the media. Like it wasn't a secret secret, but they had to sort of reinvent it because facilities in Taiwan kept it to themselves a bit. This feels sort of momentous. I want to do an interpretive dance of what it feels like to be a boba being processed. Like what it feels like to

be mixed, mixed and then beaded and then tumbled and then sorted. And what that's like, the journey of a little boba. Act three, tumbling, act four, sorted. And we're all in like black jumpsuits in a theater, you know? Yeah. Oh my God, we need to do this for next live show, Alex. Guys, this is why it's so important to support the show is so that you could experience something like a live show where Alex and I pretend to be Bobas.

We interpret the life cycle of the Boba through dance, through physical poetry. That's our true passion. This is just paying the bills until we can do our poetry through motion, the life of a boba. And then we have another takeaway about another kind of bobas because takeaway number two, the popping kind of bubbles in bubble tea are a fascinating combination of chemistry and seaweed. Okay, so this I actually might know a little bit about. I think there's some kind of like, Algin extract from seaweed that is used. I actually take Algin as a thing for my tummy because I have a lot of reflux issues. And it forms this film on top of my stomach acid

because with gastric reflux, the lower sphincter of your esophagus doesn't work right because it's stupid. And so your acids come up your esophagus and it causes all sorts of problems. So the algin extract sort of forms this protective layer. Similarly, if you mix the algin with some other thing, which I'm sure Alex is going to explain to us shortly, and you drop it in, I think, cold water or some other sort of substrate, you can form little drops that

encapsulate some other fluid. Yeah, that fits this whole thing. Because it's a lot of what you said. This is a process called reverse spherification. Sphere. Peace Forces here are a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Jacqueline Germain, a piece for Mental Floss by Michelle Dubchak, and an episode of SciShow on YouTube hosted by Hank Green. Oh yeah, Hank Green. Oh yeah, Hank Green. Popping boba are a sphere of gel around a liquid. And like you said, sodium alginate is a gel made from a seaweed extract, usually

from giant kelp or other brown seaweeds. And the liquid inside, it can be all sorts of juices or purees. But the simple trick that people do is they combine sodium alginate with whatever they want as a liquid inside of the boba. And then you put that one drop at a time into another solution called calcium lactate. And nobody needs to know what these are, but what happens is ions displace each other in the calcium lactate and the sodium alginate.

And the calcium also chains together physically. And the upshot is an interwoven gel of calcium and sodium surrounding the liquid. And if you leave that all together too long, it dissolves. But if you take the balls out and put them in cold water, they stay balls. Wow, that's really cool. I remember during the pandemic, there were many weird thoughts that I would have during the pandemic. Like, what if I learned how to play the violin? And then I tried for like a few days and then I realized I need to sell this garbage student

violin to someone else because it's not good. It's not being put to any use in my hands. And then I was like, well, maybe I could learn chemical gastronomy and make little boat, like those little bubbles, like make a sort of a pesto version of it, or it's the combined, this is like something you can do. You can combine sort of like the alginate,

the sodium alginate with a sauce or something, and then create an interesting dining experience. And I briefly entertained that for a bit until I realized, oh yeah, I'm not actually a chef. I'm not actually good at this. You did, you found the thing though. Yeah, like the two famous uses of this now are popping boba and interesting molecular

gastronomy at fine dining restaurants. Yeah. Chefs making edible bubbles of things. Right. Yeah, the missing ingredient for me is the ability to be a chef, like to cook. I was just like, oh, I could learn how to do these bubbles and that seems fun. But yeah, I do like an orb, but I'll leave it to the professionals. Yeah, apparently the most famous example is a chef named Ferran Adria who made what looks

like a green olive and then it bursts in your mouth and it's at like a The Bear type restaurant where it's plated fancily. The other thing with these in bubble tea is the technology and idea is older than bubble tea but also sort of newer because the chemistry is old. Hank Green says there's patent records about it dating back to the 1940s. We also think that these spheres were regularly added to Boba after Boba was invented with the solid tapioca kind in it. Okay.

So like late nineties, early two thousands chefs start doing molecular gastronomy with it. And also the new bubble tea shops have yet another idea of what if there's popping Boba as another option besides the solid tapioca. Awesome. Yeah, I mean that kind of makes sense. You just you have these parallel, right? Both of the types of boba we talked about, but especially these popping kind, there's so many flavors you can do because if the inside is a juice or puree, it can be almost anything you can invent. Like this just opened up a whole new flavor world for people on top of the texture. It's like gushers, but actually kind of a better texture than that.

Gushers also a little, I think I just have a thing. I don't like jelly and donuts. I'm weird. I'm not normal to talk to about food. Yeah. At least you're consistent. I don't know what's going on with me. Hop in the comment section and call me consistent.

It'd feel great. And tell us which Powerpuff Girl we are. Oh, yeah, yeah. And yeah, folks, this is such a vast topic. That was a ton of numbers and two takeaways about primarily the bubbles. That one meeting of the word boba. We'll be back with more takeaways about the invention of the drink

and also a Canadian controversy after a quick break. ["The Best Idea Yet"] Folks, support for today's show comes from the Best Idea Yet podcast, which is about the weird, wonderful origin stories behind the products that you were obsessed with. You probably didn't know the Super Soaker Water Gun was invented by a NASA engineer, or that Taco Bell once used a paint sprayer to coat taco shells in Dorito dust, or that peeps, marshmallow peeps, are from an upstart

candy factory that was right down the road from Milton Hershey. Yes, that Hershey's. Again, the show's called The Best Idea Yet. You can follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Folks, we are back and we're back with takeaway number three. Two tea shops in Taiwan invented bubble tea in 1986 and then sued each other for a decade to get sole credit. Well, you know what they say about bubble tea? I was really hoping you would know. This could go any direction.

I'm so curious. I was really hoping you would know what they would say about bubble tea. So that seems pretty, so how close were these restaurants? Were they neighbors? Different cities. And then Taiwan is sizable, but not huge. One in central Taiwan, you know, Taiwan is sizable, but not huge. One in central Taiwan, one in southern Taiwan, the city of Taichung and the city of Tainan.

Man, is it possible that they really did both come up with it at the same time? It is. And also this litigation doesn't seem super bitter. It's mostly a professional rivalry with some friendliness. So it's that fun, goofy kind of litigation, you know, the sort of like, hey, gotcha, ooh, I just served you, haha, you know, that kind of like fun, happy-go-lucky kind of litigation. Exactly. It's still litigation. Okay. It's also, I really like the origin story of this drink because that's as big as the controversy or debate gets.

This was invented in Taiwan in that year. It's truly a drink of Taiwan. The only debate is which of two shops invented it, and it could have been both of them. What do you think, Alex? Are you going to take a stand? I truly don't know. They're both so plausible. Oh, you're going to be a cowardly fence sitter?

Yeah. You're just going to, oh, you're above it all, huh, Alex? You can't formulate your own opinion about which one of the tea shops invented Boba? And key sources here are National Geographic and CNN, and then also a Gastro Obscura interview with Luke Tsai. Luke Tsai is the food editor for KQED Public Radio in the Bay Area. The two shops that might have invented this, there's Chun Shui Tang in central Taiwan and another shop called Hanlin Tea Room in southern Taiwan. The stories are pretty similar that they claim, which makes me think probably just parallel invention

because they both follow the same trends. Apparently, iced tea in general was relatively uncommon in Taiwan until the later 1900s. The local tea traditions came from hot tea ceremonies in China and also Japan. Okay. I mean, I think that's sort of, I don't know if this is the case everywhere, but I thought like in China, Taiwan, Japan, often hot, like hot water drinks are a little more common than maybe in the US. Yeah, apparently Americans especially put ice in beverages in a way that really the rest of the world says, what are you doing? No, even in Italy, I do once in a while get asked if I want ice in a drink and now I feel

attacked by that because to me it's them saying, I see that you're American. You don't belong here. You want ice in your drink. Do you want ice and a cheeseburger and a baseball game? Yeah. That's what it feels like. And yeah, and then we said earlier, tapioca balls, the solid kind of what's now boba balls,

they were a common sweet treat on their own. They would be sold in markets, kind of candy dessert shops and stuff. Those trends are both what influence one or both of these shops coming up with it. The other trend is that in the 1980s, Taiwan's economy starts booming. And so there's huge opportunity and also huge competition. And these two shops both wanted to differentiate their teas.

And so as they added iced tea to the menu, they also experiment with the level of sweetness and with toppings. And so they were in the market and said, oh, balls, we can add it as a topping. Yes. Whichever shop started this, it was like, like I said, immediate constant growth, hit across Taiwan within a few years and then quickly spread across more of East Asia, also across the global diaspora of Taiwanese people. Luke Tsai says says bubble tea reached California

within 10 years of its invention, mainly because of Taiwanese immigration. We have dates and locations for it first popping up in the US. There was a shop called Fantasia Coffee and Tea in Cupertino, California in the north. Cupertino! Also a mall food court in Arcadia in Southern California.

They both opened boba shops in the late 90s. But Tsai also says that was years after Taiwanese owned dessert shops and candy stores in the US, like improvised and home brewed bobas as one offering. So probably as soon as the earlier mid 90s. It was in the US. That's interesting because when you had said that there was this article claiming that Boba was rising in popularity in like 2017. 2017, yeah. That was so strange to me because I had thought, I remember it being a lot earlier and I grew up in Southern California so I probably encountered this, lot earlier. And I grew up in Southern California, so I probably encountered this quite a bit before

20. I don't remember it in the 90s, but I also was supremely uncool in the 90s. One of my favorite things about that 2017 New York Times piece is one place they could have learned about Boba is the New York Times, which covered it as early as 2001. They had a much better trend piece about boba shops in Chinatown in Manhattan. Amazing. Fantastic. It was here a while ago, and at the same time, some people are just discovering it, which is fine as long as you're not weird about it.

Yeah, that's okay. as long as you're not weird about it. You know? Yeah, that's okay. It's cool. And then a few other things spread it to, for one thing, some people did a broader claim that boba is some kind of Chinese thing in various places where it arrived. That's certainly not awkward to do when it comes from Taiwan. Yeah.

And there's a great piece about it for The Guardian by writer Clarissa Wei, and she points out that that's both erasure of Taiwanese identity, but also probably helped spread boba faster as an item, because if people already liked what they think of as Chinese food, they were more ready to try it. So it's kind of a mixed blessing. Yeah, okay. And the other thing that's spreaded is you can make a boba shop a very low overhead business. Luke Tsai says that a lot of chains used inexpensive boba bubbles.

They might even use flowers besides cassava. If you premix the rest of the tea, if you have a tiny retail space, you have really low overhead. And so a lot of these could just pop up wherever there was space. As this grew into a global phenomenon, these two shops back in Taiwan belatedly said, if we call ourselves the inventor of bubble tea, we will be globally famous. We should start doing that. Yeah. Especially if it's true. We both think it's true.

Right. Do you think the litigation is just sort of part of the PR thing of, hey, look, this is fun, isn't it? Litigation. Everybody loves that. That sells papers. Yeah, almost. Yeah. Like, there was an interview with the founder of one of the shops. Two Song is the founder of Hanlin Tea Room. And he described the lawsuit as more of a professional rivalry than an attempt to control all bubble tea.

He said, quote, we're all old friends in the tea industry. The lawsuit with Chun Shui Tang is a must fight battle for truth, but nothing personal. We will let the people who drink our tea be the judge. This is for truth. Nothing personal. Nothing personal. Nothing personal. And they're really doing both vibes at once. Yeah.

I'm just imagining them meeting in a street, but instead of sort of snapping their fingers like the sharks and the jets, they have the little bubble straw that they're going like, eer, eer, eer, eer, eer, pop, pop, eer, eer, eer. That would be fun. Yeah. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,

pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, maybe we want this title. And after 10 years of litigation in 2019, Taiwanese courts said that there wasn't enough evidence for any shop inventing it. And CNN says, quote, the court decided that bubble tea was a drink that any person or shop could make. It was therefore unnecessary to debate who created it. So yeah. Right. Or okay, but you know, that's the boring way to settle it. I think the fun way would be to have a boba battle. Battle bobas. That we have a boba battle. South Central Taiwan story. Like West Side story. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. Like this drink is both representative of Taiwan and also neither of those shops is trying to be like the king of it and the only seller of it. That would be cool though, like to have a boba king. Because then he could have a scepter with a giant boba on it. Yeah, that's almost definitely the name of like a dozen shops too. Boba King? Right. Gotta be.

If I Google it right now. It's gotta be. Yeah. Let us know in the comments if there's a Boba King near you. And then we have one more takeaway for the main show, which is about another conflict over the boba business. Because takeaway number four, Canadian television featured a bizarrely out of touch bubble tea brand pitch where Simu Liu was the only reasonable person.

Okay, so yeah, I did watch some of this. And so I assume it's not called Shark Tank. What's the Canadian version? It's called Dragon's Den? Yeah, it's not called Shark Tank. What's the Canadian version? It's called Dragons Den? Yeah, it's called Dragons Den. Why not like Moose House or something? Because Shark Tank, you know, I get it, but Dragons Den, that's your Canada. You don't have dragons, but you do have moose. And moose are actually really scary. Oh sure. I think the answer is it's the same name

as the British format. They got it from Britain. Oh. But Britain does, I guess Britain does have dragons there, you're right. They pretend to, yeah, yeah. Right. It is, it's just kind of a side thing.

I guess the original, original TV format is a Japanese show called Money Tigers. Okay. And then the UK and Canada made it Dragon's Den and the US made it Shark Tank. It's a reality show where people pitch to investors and investors can bid on pieces of their business. Right. Alex, our show's got to be called Wise Weasels and you have to present your...

Ooh, Weasels Warren. Weasels Warren. Welcome to the Warren. Yeah. Welcome to the Weasels Warren and you've got to present your idea to the weasels and we decide if we give you any seed money And I'm like as a weasel if I intentionally delay my pregnancy by nearly a year Does your business fit that that's the thing weasels can do fact? So do. Fact. So yeah, this story is about an episode of Dragon's Den that aired in Canada in October 2024. So very recently.

2024! Yeah. And I was able to watch a clip of it on the Facebook page of CBC Gem. I don't know if all countries and markets will let you see it, but I'll link that and also link write-ups about it from the BBC and CNN. This episode is brought to you by Weasel's VPN. We get you in there and we get you out like a weasel. And we'll also talk about this kind of thing in the bonus show, but this one episode of Canadian TV accidentally illustrated a key tension in the future of bubble tea, which is that it's one of the fastest growing products on earth and people who are not Taiwanese want

to make money on it. And is that good? Is that bad? What do we do? Yeah. The thing that struck me the most about this was that they were acting as if Bubble Tea was novel. And the wild thing, the wilder thing is that most of the judges also were acting as if they had never heard of Bubble Tea.

And I think that they were sincere. So I think that these, what are they, dragons, mooses? Yeah, they were like, whoa, what do you mean? There's an orb in your tea. Exactly. And the other wrinkle is this show, the dragons, the sharks, whoever is the investors, it's usually a set of business people and occasionally it's a celebrity who has some money. On this one episode, they had kind of a guest dragon of Simu Liu, who is now a famous action movie star. He's Shang-Chi in the Marvel movies. He was on a sitcom called Kim's Convenience. He's a relatively famous performer. Also, he was born in Harbin, China. His parents are from Beijing. He's not from Taiwan, but he has East Asian

experiences and heritage and Right when these two people from Quebec showed up to present a boba startup He initially jokes in the clip about like has anyone heard of Boba? Ha ha ha and then most of the dragons are like I haven't had Boba. What is that? so Ha ha ha ha. And then most of the dragons are like, I haven't had Boba. What is that? So oh my God. Oh my God. How are you a dragon if you haven't had Boba, Alex? See, weasels know what Boba is. We're much better investors. Yeah, we're lower to the ground. We're in touch with the people, you know, we're not flying over a castle. We know how to noodle around and get inside those straws. Yeah, and to me, this pitch is not just innocently appropriating.

It's pretty insulting to the whole drink. People can disagree. It kind of seems. No, no, I mean, I agree with you, Alex, because they're acting as if this is a new thing. And it doesn't even seem like they have a new, like, it just seems like they're just trying to sell boba, which is fine, I guess. You can sell a food, but they're acting as if this is, oh, this is like, this is kind of, it gives the vibe of, back before basically we were all connected through

trade and the modern world and the internet where some British guy or French guy or whoever would go to an exotic country and bring back this is something called firecrackers and they would act as if they had actually done something really fantastic and they were kind of the inventor because they brought it back from some country. That's the vibe I'm getting from these two individuals who are trying to sell this tea, which is wild because we have the internet now Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and and this drink has been in North America for at least like 30 years when they're doing this pitch I look and believe it or not believe it or not. Canada is a part of North America Yeah shocking but true. Yeah, and there's like several just insults toward the basic drink in the pitch.

But this pitch is from two entrepreneurs from Quebec City named Sebastian Fisse and Jessica Frene. Their startup is called, very hard to express this on audio, their startup is called Boba. It's spelled B-O-B-B-A. So there's an extra letter. But it is pronounced exactly like Boba. Oh, you mean Boba. No, no, Alex, you mean boba.

Not boba, boba. No, they just straight up pronounce it like boba. Oh, okay. It would be so hard to be these guys' lawyer. It's a prepackaged and canned boba. And the segment, Seemulliou gently mentions that it's sort of hard to package boba for a long period of time. You have to kind of mix it fresh.

And then their immediate start of their pitch is to say that most boba shops sell an unhealthy product. They summarized bubble tea as, quote, that trendy sugary drink you queue up for and you're never quite sure about its contents. Okay, now hang on there. Yeah, that's giving, that is really giving that sort of very not so subtle racism where it's like, oh, if I go to a Chinese restaurant, who knows what meat I'm eating? Exactly, yeah, exactly. Oh, if I go to a Chinese restaurant, who knows what meat I'm eating.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then later they said they're allowed to sell boba because it's no longer a, quote, ethnical product. And then they also claimed that... Hey, rewind. Rewind! Stop, Alex. And what? An ethnical? I think it's partly because they're French speakers as a first language, but still. Ethnical! Okay, so like they're saying it's no longer an... There's more issues here to get into.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry. I'm... keep going. Drag me along this, Alex. They also claim that they have a totally novel thing nobody's done before because they have popping bobas. But that is! Right. And then the dragons try to give them opportunities with questions like, hey, why'd you get into the boba business?

You know, like if there's some cool reason you're doing this. But when they asked the entrepreneurs why they got into it, the guy said that he saw data saying that Boba was getting more popular and making a lot of money. So that's why he got into Boba. I mean, fair, right?

That's kind of like when someone asks, why do you want this job? And you're like, uh, cause I need money. You know? Yeah, like we all need money. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

But yeah, no, oh, that's wild. I'm still stuck on, first of all, ethnical. I don't know that that's a word. And secondly, the idea that it's not like, are they trying to say that it has a broader appeal now or something? But that's so strange. Such a weird kind of curveball of casual racism that is hard to comprehend. And then a little later somebody presses them on like, are there any Asian people involved

in your company? Like Taiwanese people, let alone Asian people. And the entrepreneur does say their biggest partner is in Taiwan. Asian people involved in your company, like Taiwanese people, let alone Asian people. The entrepreneur does say their biggest partner is in Taiwan, and in the show segment said a person in Taiwan makes their recipes. But then CNN checked the brand's website and found it only credits Taiwan as a source of pearls and boasts that the recipes and the drinks are quote, crafted in Canada. Okay.

So, either he said something not true or they need to fix their website or something. Yeah. And it seems like they probably just import pearls and have no other connection to Taiwan, especially because pearls are made there primarily. And I hope this isn't too controversial, but I think it's okay for people who are not from a certain country to make food from that country. And I even think it's okay to sell that food, right? Yeah, yeah. For instance, say you are really into sushi and you study how to make sushi and you make sushi

and you're not Japanese and you're not from Japan. And so you start like a sushi shop and you make it and you're not from Japan. And so you start like a sushi shop and you make it and you're good at it. I don't think that's necessarily a problem. If you were like pitching it, like, well, all these other weirdos are giving you gross dead fish. I do it in the good way. Then that like goes from being like, hey, you know what?

Yeah, we learn from other cultures, that's fine. You're basically dissing an entire culture to try to sell your own appropriated version of that culture's culinary history. That's very strange to me. I agree. And so did Simu Liu. I think he's a real gentleman throughout the segment, but also when the Quebec City people say you're never quite sure about its content, he does pipe up and say, hang on, hang on,

I'm quite sure about its content, but go on. He gently said, you're being racist. It's a tapioca, let's see, water, milk, tea leaves, and it could be sodium alginate. Yeah, you know, pretty sure. That's just such a sort of dog whistle of that kind of like, oh, you never really know what's in Chinese food. It could be dog meat or something. That is a very racist way to make Chinese food or Asian food seem not just different,

but dangerously different. Like, oh, this is creepy and unclean or something. So to me, that goes from sort of these more oblique Racisms that's happening in this clip to being a very direct like that is like a super direct Uh, yeah sort of xenophobic comment I agree and and then the other way this shook out in a very xenophobic way is

about half of the dragons were also just fully on board with this Quebec perspective on it. Because throughout Simu'lu'yu occasionally politely bringing up problems with it, he gets criticized by the dragons. People can watch it. There's a part where they're like jovially like, whoa, pretty heavy, pretty heavy, whoa. Oh my God, that's such an annoying thing when someone's saying something really off the wall

and weird and offensive and you're politely kind of pushing back of like, ah, maybe that's, hey, like that's not cool to basically say that every other boba maker is just including random garbage in their boba because they're Asian. That's not cool And then I was like like hey, why are you harshing the vibe here? You know seemingly who says no a couple other dragons say no But three of them competed to bid for this company at their requested amount of 1 million Canadian dollars for an 18% share. And the dragon who won the bid consistently interrupted and disagreed with Simu Liu and said, quote, not everything has to be traditional.

So then after this aired, big outcry in Canada where it's on TV and also the dragon withdrew their investment and did an Instagram apology. The startup did a public apology. Aww. That was ironic. Aww. Just want to point that out. And I also, I watched the dragon's apology. I feel they only semi-apologized. And the main thing they talked about was that there were apparently online threats toward the startup people. They mostly focused on people shouldn't say this kind of thing and media could not independently

confirm that there were any threats. And then the startup people also claimed, quote, at no point did we mean to insinuate that our Boba bubble tea brand name is better than traditional bubble tea in any way." But their words directly are the opposite of that. No, you're right. You didn't insinuate it. You stated it. Yeah, just straight up.

You just straight up said it. Like you said with the vibe of a colonizer bringing something back to Europe and saying, look what I invented by putting it on my boat. Like this is going to be a tension in the global growth of boba. And I don't know how it'll shake out, but it made me wonder about coffee. Like what if coffee had begun to spread around the world

in a time when we were all thoughtful? Like maybe it would still belong to some group of people or place, but coffee really doesn't now. And I'm curious what'll happen with boba. It could go a lot of ways. Yeah. I am totally open to people disagreeing with me. I mean, I'm white, so I don't necessarily have the ability to be the ultimate judge of this, but I really feel like it's kind of about respect for something, right? So sharing culture with each other in our world that's so connected through internet, travel, trade, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I don't think there's anything really wrong with liking something from another culture so much that you want to make it or you want to do,

you know, have your professional life be making that thing. I think that's actually really cool. Like it's, I think that it's a great thing to recognize that there are so many different types of cuisine, different kinds of drinks and that's great. It's about the respect for that though, right? And learn about it with an open mind, right? Not just go in and be like, well, I probably know better than people who've been doing this for much longer time than I have.

I think that it shifts into something a lot more sinister when it's, oh, that's your thing? No, it's my thing now. And also I'm better at it because I'm more civilized than you. That's when it's sinister and gross and weird. And I don't know, I don't really like that. Yeah, not being the arbiter of this, I still agree. Yeah, there's a way to do it respectfully

probably and it's amazing that these Quebec City folks did it so disrespectfully in public on television. Usually we don't have footage of this kind of thing happening to a product or tradition. Yeah, it's especially the whole thing when someone's like gently trying to push back against it and then it's like, whoa, buddy, wow, ruining the vibes here. It's nuts. I hope people can see the clip. It's like nine minutes. It's It's nuts. It's a, I hope people can see the clip. It's like nine minutes. It's, yeah, it's astonishing.

Yeah, it's wild. That's really wild. And at the end of it, when he's saying no to the brand, Simu Liu, it's critical, but also fair. They all are holding the product and he's like, I'm looking at your can, I can't find one word about Taiwan or like where this drink comes from. Yeah.

And he also says that his specific investing is intended to lift up minority people. It would truly be the opposite if he invested in this. Just kind of making them more invisible. I mean, that's also kind of an inconsistency, right? Because often, for instance, for the coffee that you're talking about, right? People are really excited to talk about like, oh, this is coffee from Italy, like espresso from Italy, right? And like using that as a selling point.

And so to me, it's kind of weird if some countries get to be seen as like, oh, this is a big selling point, whereas other countries are like, oh, that sounds a little like too foreign. So I'm not going to even mention that it comes from there. That's off-putting to me. Same. Yeah. Yeah, being from Taiwan is novel and interesting. You can mention it. It's weird. It's weird not to. That is a branding fail. And also naming your boba company Boba with just one letter, but the pronunciation doesn't change. It's just very confusing. It's just poorly formatted. I don't care. Like beyond the very confusing. It's just poorly formatted. I don't care, beyond the appropriation it's stupid.

That's like, Taiwan should retaliate by opening a burger chain called Burger with two Gs. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, two Gs, you don't know how to say it. It's burger, yeah. Burger. You know, you don't know how to say it. It's burger. Yeah, burger. You know, like you don't know what's in them in America, but here you know it's beef. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week.

Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the solid tapioca boba in bubble tea are made from cassava, a somewhat poisonous plant that feeds nearly 1 billion people. Takeaway number 2, the popping kind of bubbles in bubble tea are a fascinating combination of chemistry and seaweed doing a principle called reverse spherification. Takeaway number 3, two tea shops in Taiwan invented bubble tea in 1986 and also sued each

other for a decade for the surprisingly lucrative title of First to Invent It. Takeaway number four, the Dragon's Den show on Canadian TV featured a bizarrely out of touch bubble tea brand pitch where Simu Liu was the only reasonable person in the room. And then a lot of numbers this week about surprising media failures to describe bubble tea, also the origins of the whole beverage and where the words come from, and the tea growing regions of Taiwan. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is three stories involving Starbucks and Emma Chamberlain and shipping shortages all about selling bubble tea in North America. Visit sifpod.fun for that loaded bonus show for a library of more than 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members.

Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a wonderful cookbook and cultural history. It's called The Food of Taiwan, Recipes from the Beautiful Island, that's written by Kathy Erwe. The Food of Taiwan, Recipes from the Beautiful Island, written by Kathy Irway. Also excellent science writing from JSTOR Daily, by Julia Fine, a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Museum. A piece for Smithsonian Magazine by Jacqueline Germain.

An episode of SciShow hosted by Hank Green. And then tons of journalism about the present and future of bubble tea, that's from The Guardian, The New York Times, the online magazine Taste Cooking, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also, KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode.

And join the free CIF discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episodes through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 87. That's about the topic of the color orange. Fun fact there, the character Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street He was introduced with orange fur and canonically his fur is orange and covered in a bunch of green stuff So I recommend that episode I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more.

Our theme music is Unbroken Un-Shaven by the B, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shaven by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.