Where does the border lie: Locally grown plants used for making tea for recreation and/or healing, 1970s–1990s Estonia

Abstract

Ethnopharmacological relevance

Traditional use of local wild and cultivated plants for making recreational tea in Estonia often borders with the medicinal use of the same plants.

Aim of the study

The aim of this paper is to map the perceptions of plants used for making tea and to define the domains of recreational and medicinal teas in specific cultural settings.

Materials and methods

Between November 2011 and March 2012 the authors distributed electronic questionnaires on the use of wild food plants in childhood. The questionnaire was answered by 250 respondents. 178 of them reported the use of plants for making recreational teas. The responses were analysed according to the taxonomy of the used plants, the most frequently used taxa and families were detected, the influence of respondents' demographic data on the number of use reports was assessed and the overlapping of medicinal and recreational uses was discussed.

Results

The study detected 69 vascular plant species, ten vascular taxa identified on the genera level only, and one lichen. The most popular families were Rosaceae, Asteraceae and Lamiacea, and 12 taxa were used by at least 10% of the respondents, while only one of them (Tilia) was used by more than 50% and one (Rubus idaeus) by over 33% of the respondents. The next ten most used taxa were: Rosa, Mentha, Primula veris, Matricaria, Achillea millefolium, Hypericum, Carum carvi, Urtica dioica, Thymus serpyllum and Fragaria. Of the 30 most used consolidated taxa mentioned in five or more use records, only four were used exclusively in one domain.

Conclusions

The majority of the used plants were situated on the recreational-medicinal continuum, which could be divided into two domains: recreational, medicinal and the “grey” area that lies around the borderline. The predominance of the cold and cold-related diseases on the spectrum treated by plants used for making recreational tea reflects the climatic conditions of the region and suggests that they are the most commonly self-treated diseases in the region, seen from the child's perspective.

Introduction

There is growing interest in research on the chemical composition and potential health threat or positive effects of herbal teas (for example, see Kulišić et al., 2007, Desideri et al., 2011, Albayrak et al., 2012, Oh et al., 2013). Although many studies name the use of recreational tea a few times among food plants (Milliken and Bridgewater, 2004, Łuczaj and Szymanski, 2006, Turner et al., 2011, Svanberg, 2012), there are only a few regional studies with an emphasis on recreational tea in specific areas of Europe (Pardo de Santayana et al., 2005; Sõukand and Kalle, 2012a, Grasser et al., 2012). All the latter show that plants can simultaneously be used for making medicinal teas and teas drunk with meals, depending on circumstances and personal preferences.

While herbal tea or tisane is an English term used to denote a decoction or infusion made of herbs for medicinal purposes, there has not been a specific technical term in English for denoting herbal tea used without clear medicinal indications. For that purpose the technical term “recreational tea” was proposed to describe “herbal beverages prepared as infusions that are consumed in a food context for their general social and/or recreational value or for their general attributions of being “healthy” drinks (Sõukand et al., 2013). We will use this term from now on, as opposed to tisane e.g. herbal tea consumed for specific medicinal purposes.

The Estonian word tee has several meanings: (1) it denotes a drink made of local or imported plants, (2) it means “a road”, a path or direction, (3) as a verb it means the imperative of tegema “to do”. The phrase tee teed means “make some tea”. Nevertheless, the word denoting the drink tea in Estonian originates from the German Tee or the archaic Thee which in turn originate from the Chinese tsha, the name given to Camellia sinensis (L.) Kunze (Theaceae).

Although Baltic Germans and the Russian elite in Estonia were already using oriental tea at the beginning of the 19th century, Estonian peasants and later even urban citizens did not adopt this custom and used a great number of local plants instead, to make a drink they nonetheless called tee (Sõukand and Kalle, 2012a). It is difficult to ascertain what the name of the herbal drink was before the adoption of the German Tee, but the practice of soaking herbs in hot water was certainly already common as a way of making medicinal drinks from local plants, as shown by the long list of medicinal plants used in the 19th–20th centuries, many of them used in the form of infusions (Sõukand and Kalle, 2011, Sõukand and Kalle, 2012b). As in English, the category of “recreational tea” hardly exists in modern Estonian everyday life, instead the term tee is used to denote both recreational and medicinal tea, although the specific terms rohutee (herb tea) or ravitee (medicinal tea) are occasionally used to specify the medicinal use of the infusion.

All of the plants historically used for making tea in Estonia were in fact also well-known and used medicinal plants (Sõukand and Kalle, 2012a). Nevertheless, when asking people to name food plants, many plants are usually listed as teetaimed. After further questioning the researcher realizes that although many of them are really used as recreational teas, quite a large proportion of them is known and used for specific medicinal purposes. Moreover, people often drink tea as a preventive measure for mild diseases; a phenomenon recorded internationally and named “folk nutraceuticals” denoting the “grey” area between the domains of food and medicine (Pieroni and Quave, 2006).

Hence the question is: if there is a border between recreational tea and herbal tea and if so where does it lie? Our working hypothesis is that while all plants used for making recreational tea can be also used for medicinal purpose, the intensity of use in either category depends on the specific characteristics of the plant and its position within the culture. We also argue that recreational use of plants is derived from their medicinal use or is closely related to it. This is our next step in analysing the domains of medicinal and wild edible plants in Estonia.