"Tasting Qualities will be a beneficial read to a broad range of scholars with interest in food, labor, and commodity studies, the intersection of food, nutrition, and health knowledge, science and technology."
"With a fine eye for detail and sparkling writing that makes the seemingly mundane fascinating . . . Tasting Qualities is a highly original, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of Indian tea’s modernity, which adds to the scholarship on commodities and capitalism."
"Engages deeply with the theoretical aspects of assessing the quality and value of commodities through the lens of tea."
"A fascinating view of the Indian tea industry. . . . Manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea."
"Tasting Qualities is a persuasive ethnography of quality and its many unseen constituents."
"Tasting Qualities is a persuasive ethnography of quality and its many unseen constituents."
"With a fine eye for detail and sparkling writing that makes the seemingly mundane fascinating . . . Tasting Qualities is a highly original, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of Indian tea’s modernity, which adds to the scholarship on commodities and capitalism."
"Combining ethnographic and archival description, Sarah Besky’s Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea cleverly turns an analytic lens on the dependable and standardized aesthetics of modern capitalism."
"Besky offers anthropologists and other interdisciplinary scholars an ethnography to teach, think with, and push their studies of work, agriculture, finance, and commodities a bit further toward our collective understanding of quality."
"Refreshingly focused on spaces 'in between' plantation production and restorative consumption, Besky incisively details the expert work of blending, tasting, evaluating, and auctioning that regularizes every bag of 'regular' black tea to deliver a 'nice cuppa'—producing qualities, she argues, that also reproduce India’s plantation form of monocrop agriculture."––Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America
"A ‘nice cup of tea’ may be a small thing; the making of that ‘niceness’ is as big a subject as any taken on by anthropologists or historians. Tasting Qualities is an impressive account of the complex networks of expert practices and sites––plantations, auctions, blending rooms, scientific laboratories––in which qualitative judgments are made and then transformed into a priced product on the market."––Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
"From plantation to laboratory to digital auction, Sarah Besky has drawn from the modern history of ordinary black tea to create something much more extraordinary: an ethnography of quality. Her attention to the diverse experts and experiments behind quality’s production makes for a book rich in ideas, imagery, and ultimately humanity."––Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History
