"Tea" refers to a drink made from the leaves of the evergreen Asian shrub camellia sinensis, whereas the leaves in mate come from Ilex paraguariensis, a shrub with small greenish-white flowers that grew especially abundant in Paraguay. Technically, mate is not a tea, but rather, an infusion. The brew is now a common sight in health stores and specialized coffee shops in the U.S. Paraguay has a National Tereré Day ( tereré is a drink made with yerba mate, but it's drunk cold). Indeed, in 2013, mate was officially declared a "national infusion" of Argentina, where an estimated 250,000 tons of herb are consumed every year. That passion for mate (unlike the governor) is still very much alive and well today in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil, where it is known as chimarrão (pronounced she-ma-how). When they stop drinking it they fade away and say they cannot live." ![]() ![]() "All Spaniards, men and women, and all Indians, drink these dusts in hot water," one dismayed Jesuit priest wrote, lamenting, "And when they don't have with what to buy it, they give away their underpants and their blankets. And it was spreading like wildfire among the Spanish colonists - as far away as what is now Bolivia, Chile and Peru. It was a filthy vice, the Spanish had decided. ![]() The governor had seen the region's indigenous Guaraní people carrying this drink with them everywhere they went. In 1616, Hernando Arias de Saavedra, the governor of the Spanish province that included Buenos Aires, banned the population from drinking a green herbal drink called yerba mate. Photo: iStockphotoīy Jasmine Garsd, The Salt at NPR Food (3/17/15) Legend has it that the moon gifted this infusion to the Guaraní people of South America.
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