Yerba mate

• 1. Introduction

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  Yerba mate is a South American plant whose accented spelling, maté, means something very different in Spanish: "I killed." That is pure coincidence, since the Spanish word is an unrelated form of the verb matar. The plant behind the drink is Ilex paraguariensis, a species of holly native to South America. The French botanist Augustin Saint-Hilaire gave it its scientific name. So who first cultivated this holly, long before Europeans arrived? Why do friends in several countries still pass one container and one straw around a circle, following strict customs about who may speak and when? How did the leaf travel from the forests of Paraguay to places that seem to have no connection to it? And what happens to a drink that has been loved for centuries when researchers ask what it does to the body?

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• 2. Words and Names

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  In the Guaraní language, the plant is called kaʼa, a word that simply means herb. Portuguese speakers have congonha, a term that covers several herb species. It comes from the Tupí expression kõ'gõi, which means something like "what keeps us alive." People rarely use it nowadays.

  The word mate itself comes from the Quechua mati. That single word means a container for a drink, an infusion of an herb, and a gourd. Modern Spanish and Portuguese both use it.

  Yerba is Spanish for herb, a variant spelling of hierba found throughout Latin America. It can also mean grass or weed, and some speakers use it for marijuana. In Argentina, however, yerba refers only to the yerba mate plant. Taken apart, the name means the herb one drinks from a gourd.

  English writers use both mate and maté. The accent was probably added by analogy with French-origin words such as café. It signals that the final e is pronounced, unlike the silent e in the English word mate, meaning a friend or partner.

  In Brazil, most people casually use the single word mate for both the plant and the drink.

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• 3. Plant and Plantation

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  A mature Ilex paraguariensis can stand 15 metres tall, though it begins as a shrub. Its evergreen leaves have serrated edges and run from 7 to 110 millimetres long and 30 to 55 millimetres wide. The flowers are small and greenish-white, with four petals. The fruit is a red drupe, 4-6 millimetres across. A researcher named Junqueira reported in 2001 that the leaves carry extrafloral nectaries, glands that produce nectar outside the flower.

  The sex of the plant shapes the harvest. Flavor, caffeine levels and other nutrients differ between male and female plants. Female plants tend to taste milder and carry less caffeine. They are also relatively scarce in the regions where mate is planted.

  The people who grow it are called yerbateros in Spanish and ervateiros in Brazilian Portuguese. Their fields lie in Paraguay, in Misiones and other northern parts of Argentina, in Uruguay, and in southern Brazil. The Brazilian states named in the source are Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Mato Grosso do Sul.

  Growers collect seeds once they have turned dark purple, typically between January and April. The seeds are then submerged in water so that the floating ones, which cannot grow, rise away with twigs and leaf debris. New plants are started between March and May. Potted plants are transplanted from April through September, while bare-root plants go into the ground only in June and July.

  Plantations face enemies that are hard to control. Gyropsylla spegazziniana is a true bug that lays its eggs in the branches. The beetle Hedyphates betulinus weakens the tree and leaves it open to mold and mildew. The moth Perigonia lusca has larvae that eat the leaves, and several species of mite add to the damage. A biopesticide based on a nuclear polyhedrosis virus can control the moth, and it was first applied in 1992.

  At harvest, the branches are often dried over a wood fire, which gives the leaves a smoky flavor. That smoke carries more than flavor, a point that matters when the health questions arrive.

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• 4. Guaraní, Jesuits, Producers

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  Two departments of present-day Paraguay, Amambay and Alto Paraná, were the original home of mate drinking. The Guaraní and some Tupi communities there cultivated and drank it before any European colonist arrived. Nobody outside those two regions shared the habit at first.

  In the late 16th century, Spanish settlers in the colony of Paraguay took it up alongside the Guaraní. Mate soon became the colony's main commodity, ahead of goods such as tobacco. The labour of indigenous people was used to harvest wild stands. Once the Jesuits saw its commercial potential, mate spread across the province and to other parts of the Spanish Crown.

  In the mid-17th century, the Jesuits succeeded in domesticating the plant. They set up plantations within their Indian reductions in Misiones, in what is now Argentina. That created fierce competition for the Paraguayan harvesters of wild stands, and it was also the start of mate's move into territories beyond Paraguay. After the Jesuits were expelled in the 1770s, their plantations fell into decay and their domestication secrets were lost.

  The War of the Triple Alliance, fought from 1864 to 1870, struck Paraguay next. The mate industry had stayed vital to the Paraguayan economy after independence. The war devastated the country economically and demographically, and further development for the benefit of the state stopped. Some mate-growing regions of Paraguay became Argentine territory.

  Brazil then became the largest producer. Brazilian and Argentine projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries domesticated the plant again and opened the way for plantation systems. In the 1930s, Brazilian entrepreneurs turned their attention to coffee. Argentina, which had long been the prime consumer, took over as top producer, and the move revived the economy of Misiones Province, where the Jesuits had once kept most of their plantations.

  The lead has swung back and forth ever since. Today Brazil produces 53 percent, Argentina 37 percent and Paraguay 10 percent. A 2012 count from the Food and Agriculture Organization put Brazil at 513,256 tonnes, or 58 percent, Argentina at 290,000 tonnes, or 32 percent, and Paraguay at 85,490 tonnes, or 10 percent.

  In Campo Largo, in the Brazilian state of Paraná, the state government funded a Mate Historic Park called Parque Histórico do Mate. It was meant to teach sustainable harvesting methods that protect the oldest wild mate forests in the world. As of June 2014, the park was closed to visitors.

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• 5. The Shared Gourd

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  A brewer fills a small hollowed-out gourd three-quarters full with dry leaves and twigs of the plant. Water at 70-80 degrees Celsius goes in next, hot but not boiling. Sugar is optional. This preparation is called mate in Spanish-speaking countries and chimarrão in Brazil.

  The gourd has many names. Spanish speakers say guampa, porongo, or simply mate, while Portuguese speakers say cabaça or cuia, and Italian speakers say zucca. Everyone drinks through the same straw, called a bombilla in Spanish and a bomba in Portuguese. Today the gourds are also made from wood, glass, bull horns, ceramic and silicone.

  The round follows a clear routine. The brewer hands the gourd to each person in turn, often in a circle, moving clockwise. The recipient drinks the few mouthfuls inside and gives it back, and the brewer refills it for the next person. There is one firm rule. Anyone who says thank you before they are finished drinking will not be served again.

  In Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Southern Chile, drinking mate is a social habit for all ages. Friends gather to matear the way others meet for tea or coffee. In Paraguay and Uruguay, people stroll the streets with a mate in hand and a thermal flask, called a termo, tucked under the arm. Paraguayans usually drink it with hot water in the morning and when the weather is cooler, and with cold water on hot days.

  The numbers are striking. Argentines drink 11 pounds of yerba mate per person each year, while Uruguayans, the largest drinkers, reach 22 pounds. The weights look huge because far more herb goes into a gourd than into a cup of tea.

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• 6. Hot, Cold, Roasted

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  On hot days in Paraguay, Southern Brazil and the Argentine littoral, the drink of choice is tereré. It is mate steeped in cold water or fruit juice and sipped through a bombilla from a horn cup called a guampa. The Guaraní drank it this way too, but without ice, because they had no means of making or storing it. For that reason, tereré is considered the first and original way to drink mate.

  Paraguayans and Brazilians usually make tereré with cold water, while Argentines favor fruit juice. The water version tastes more bitter, and juice acts as a sweetener. In Brazil, people avoid juice and add table sugar instead. Medicinal or culinary herbs called yuyos, meaning weeds, may be crushed in a mortar and added for taste or healing. In warm weather, lemonade sometimes replaces hot water in the regular drink.

  Another form is mate cocido, sold in Paraguay and Argentina, and chá mate in Brazil. It comes in teabags and loose leaf and is made with roasted leaves. Shops and street vendors serve it sweetened, hot or iced, plain or with fruit juice or milk. Lime juice, called limão in Brazil, is a common choice. In Paraguay, Argentina and Southern Brazil, it appears at breakfast or in afternoon tea with sweet pastries called facturas.

  An iced, sweetened version of mate cocido is sold as an uncarbonated soft drink, with or without fruit flavor. In southern and southeastern Brazil, it sits in the same cooler as other soft drinks. Unsweetened brewed mate tastes like an infusion of vegetables, herbs and grass, with echoes of green tea, and it turns bitter when steeped in hot water. Some producers blend the leaves with peppermint or citrus rind.

  Mate batido is toasted, so it has less bitterness and a spicier aroma. It turns creamy when shaken. Coastal cities in Brazil prefer it. Farther south, people stick to the green leaves and the silver straw of the shared gourd, which they call chimarrão, or cimarrón in Argentine Spanish.

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• 7. Chemistry and Risks

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  Caffeine makes up between 0.7 and 1.7 percent of dry yerba mate by weight. Tea leaves range from 0.4 to 9.3 percent, guarana from 2.5 to 7.6 percent, and ground coffee reaches up to 3.2 percent. Theobromine adds 0.3 to 0.9 percent, while theophylline is present in small amounts or sometimes absent entirely. Some people call the caffeine in mate by the name mateine, in the same way tea has theine and guarana has guaranine.

  The leaves also hold polyphenols such as the flavonoids quercetin and rutin. Minerals include potassium, magnesium and manganese. There is no good evidence that yerba mate changes body weight in humans.

  The cancer question depends on temperature. Hot mate is associated with oesophageal cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies very hot beverages, those above 65 degrees Celsius, as probably carcinogenic to humans, in group 2A. Mate is typically drunk at 70 degrees. The agency says the link is likely, but the share of oesophageal cancers caused by very hot drinks is not yet known. Cold mate shows no such association. Preparations under 65 degrees fall in group 3, not classifiable as to carcinogenicity.

  Smoke brings its own problem. Because traditional preparation involves smoking the leaves, they contain many polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, among them the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene.

  Paraguayans have one more tradition that is potentially toxic. They sometimes mix mate with the crushed leaves, stems and flowers of flor de agosto, the flower of August, a plant of the genus Senecio, particularly Senecio grisebachii. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which can cause veno-occlusive disease. This rare liver condition gradually blocks the small venous channels and ends in liver failure.

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• 8. Beyond South America

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  In Syria and Lebanon, the Druze and Alawite communities drink mate, which is imported from Paraguay and Argentina. The habit goes back to 19th-century Syrian immigrants to Argentina. Most of mate's popularity beyond South America traces to this pattern of emigration and later return. Expatriates from the Southern Cone also drink it all over the world.

  In the tiny hamlet of Groot Marico, in North West Province, South Africa, the local tourism office learned about mate from returning descendants of the Boers. After losing the Anglo Boer War, these families had emigrated in 1902 to Patagonia in Argentina.

  Yerba mate can now be found in energy drinks worldwide, and also as a bottled or canned iced drink.

  The Cuban soft drink Materva carries the story further. It is a sweet, carbonated drink based on yerba mate, developed in Cuba in 1920 and produced in Miami, Florida, since the 1960s. It remains a staple of Cuban culture in Miami.

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