Left to its own devices, tapioca is flavorless and pretty much nutritionless, but it makes for a very satisfying, chewy addition to tea-based drinks.) Intrigued, I threw it into my shopping cart and took it home, and to my pleasant surprise, it did, in fact, live up to its promise. (For the uninitiated, the “bubbles” in bubble tea are made from a starchy substance called tapioca, which is derived from the roots of the cassava plant. On a trip to H Mart in Koreatown, I stumbled across an enticing-looking package that promised ready-to-eat bubbles in five minutes. Partly as an act of defiance and partly of necessity, I began frequenting Asian grocery stores around the city to stock up on ingredients I had previously relied on restaurant takeout to experience: things like fresh okra and cellophane noodles and hot-pot mix. But there was also the rampant xenophobia - think back to the beginning of the pandemic and the conversation around wet markets in Wuhan - plus an uptick in hate crimes, and suddenly, the foods I had grown up consuming and the habits I never thought to question took on new meaning. Of course, if the worst thing to happen to me during the pandemic was that I was slightly inconvenienced by my inability to access a drink, I would have been 1) extremely fortunate and 2) probably not still be talking about it right now. When the pandemic forced New York and the rest of the country to go into lockdown, many of my favorite bubble-tea shops around the city began to shutter (some of them permanently, others for the monthslong stretch between spring 2020 and the first murmurs of a widely available vaccine). Two things happened simultaneously to change all of that. Bubble tea was something I took for granted, and I certainly never thought of it as the complex cultural product that it is. It always sort of hovered on the periphery of my social life, serving as an occasion to catch up with a friend or a treat to myself. To this day, I still drink bubble tea the way other people drink coffee or beer - sometimes with a meal, usually on its own. During high school in suburban Maryland, my friends and I would take advantage of the open-lunch policy and race to get in line at the Kung Fu Tea a few blocks away, where the lunch-hour rush was so intense that we always risked being late to fifth period (but it was worth it for the adrenaline rush alone). Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).My earliest memory of bubble tea is trying it for the first time on a family trip to Shanghai I was 7 or 8, and I was so obsessed with my new discovery that I couldn’t stop prattling on and on, bending my mom’s ear about how the Oriental Pearl Tower resembled the similarly shaped orbs in my drink. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.
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