The English-language literature on yerba mate has long been fragmented — scattered across agricultural bulletins, ethnographic fieldwork appendices, and beverage-industry trade publications. Christine Folch, an anthropologist and professor at Duke University, has produced what may be the first serious attempt to synthesize the plant's full story between the covers of a single volume. 'The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History,' published by Princeton University Press, moves from pre-Columbian Guaraní harvesting practices to the 21st-century wellness aisle with the analytical rigor that the subject has long lacked.
From Sacred Plant to Labor Commodity
Folch's account begins with the plant's deep roots in Guaraní cosmology, where Ilex paraguariensis occupied a role that was simultaneously nutritional, medicinal, and spiritual. The narrative then traces what the author portrays as a series of appropriations: first by Jesuit missionaries, who recognized the stimulant's economic value and established some of the first organized plantations in the 17th century; then by secular landowners after the Jesuit expulsion, who exploited Indigenous and mestizo labor in conditions that Folch describes as functionally indentured.
The industrial era — particularly the late 19th and early 20th centuries — receives substantial treatment. Folch documents how yerba mate production in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay was transformed from a forest-based extraction economy into a plantation system modeled on colonial commodity agriculture, complete with the ecological simplification and labor exploitation that such models typically entail. This section challenges the romantic framing that is common in contemporary yerba mate marketing, which tends to present the drink as an unchanged artifact of Indigenous tradition.
The Contemporary Reinvention
The book's latter sections examine the beverage's current global expansion — driven primarily by the ready-to-drink (RTD) segment in North America and Europe — and the tensions this creates. Folch is attentive to the irony that many brands market yerba mate as 'clean energy' and 'sustainably sourced' while the supply chains behind those claims remain opaque and, in some cases, environmentally destructive. The analysis recalls the trajectory of other commodities — coffee, chocolate, quinoa — whose globalization generated both economic opportunity and cultural dislocation in their regions of origin.
Yerba mate is a story of convergences: Indigenous knowledge, colonial extraction, national identity, and global capitalism. You can't understand the drink without understanding the history, and you can't understand the history without understanding who benefited and who paid the price.
The Princeton UP Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the press and the New Books Network, featured Folch in an extended interview in October 2024, where she discussed the research process — which included fieldwork in Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil — and the challenge of writing accessibly about a plant whose story intersects agricultural science, political economy, labor history, and food culture. The book has been recommended as essential reading for anyone seeking to move beyond the surface-level narratives that dominate the yerba mate conversation.