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I've developed a taste for yerba mate. I haven't been drinking that much coffee lately, and green tea also provides a nice alternative, but I've still been interested in integrating Yerba Mate into my stimulant lifestyle. I see bags of loose yerba mate on sale around town, and I get sticker shock. $8.95 for a half pound!

Prowling around my neighborhood FiestaMart the other night, I saw a few shelves of yerba mate, and my curiosity was piqued. The store carries about five different brands of mate, and I picked up a kilo of the Cruz de Malta brand for $2.99. I wonder what could account for the price difference. It seemed to be of a lower-quality than the fancy mate I've seen. There are a lot of stems, but I don't think they affect the flavor. The fancy brands say that their product is organic and fairly-traded, but I wonder how prevalent pesticides and labor abuses are in mate farming. I wonder if this is just a matter of repackaging mate as a boutique product, and increasing the margins.

The Wikipedia entry for yerba mate doesn't describe the social realities of mate production. This page from a mate vendor describes the production of mate, but doesn't suggest that there are social justice issues in the dominant mode of mate production. It uses green rhetoric to promote it's product. A page from another vendor touts it's concept of "Market Driven Conservation", complete with smiling, colonized people.

To end on a tangential note, I've long thought it would be fun to form a project called the Yerba Mate Center for the Arts. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it, but it seems like a good name for some kind of irreverent, collaborative something.