the strange travels of kombucha
This book amounted to Betsy Pryor’s promotional bid on behalf of selling Kombucha — in the mid 1990s.  Leafing through his sort of bullet-points of vaguely clamied health benefits (a whole lot of “Doesn’t hurt!”), and I land to where I am interested. The bullet points on the history. Item number one is some “first clues” of its existence in not easily documented historical mentions in China. Item number two amounts to its origin myth. A Doctor Kombu administers aid to the Emperor of Japan. And so, either with Dr Kombu or with a seaweed Kombu, we have the name Kombucha.
And item number three is the one and only reason I maintain an interest in Kombucha. Here, Kargasok is singled out. It ends up being an important historical way station in the propagation of Kombucha Tea. We have mention of trade routes taking it up there, which is all good and dandy, but Kargasok ends up tied to the substance. From the book:
One of the many local names given to Kombucha over the years grew out of this experience. A woman traveling in Russia saw that many villagers in Kargasok lived to ripe old ages in good health and she searched for their “secret”. It turned out that each hut had one or more pots of this amazing tea brewing, and the tea was given to all members of the family as a normal part of their life. Reports of this miraculous “Kargasok tea” spread the use of Kombucha even further.
Olya in Virginia tells her personal experience with Kombucha when she lived in Russia. “I was born and raised in the former USSR, and I remember visiting my aunt and being treated to a very special sweet and sour tangy drink. I just loved it. My aunt kept a glass jar bottle on her windowsill with a guage covering the top […]
The next bullet point here is Stalin drinking it and being lied to that someone was trying to poison him, and then the liars being exiled or something. Yes, it’s that kind of book.
Explaining the travel of Kombucha into America, I think we can spot it starting off in popularity in the early 1990s in a place like Berkeley. Kombucha started being sold, and reached its plateau of sales. The next logical step is selling the tea, bottled. And so we get the next surge of popularity in the 00s. And now it enjoys brisk sales in “those spots on the map where Al Gore won in a landslide and Ralph Nader came in second,” with suggestions of Tibet floating around the packaging and marketing.
Meantime… Kargasok. I long ago had a page on the Internet about my brief drinking of Kombucha Tea in Kargasok. I became mildly embarrassed by it. There’s a modest exaggeration of its basic location in “Nowhere”. The trip had an airy experience to it, but I’m pretty sure some things would have been more grounded had we (my parents and I) spent any amount of time there, and I do have this counter-game: someone from across the globe comes in to my small hometown for a couple days — we do what? (Go on a picnic with the mayor, I suppose.)
I can easily spot locations of nearby note. Kargasok is up-river from Tomsk, which is the higher education center of Siberia. The Brotherhood of Joseph, by a Brooks Hansen, describes travelling into Tomsk to complete an adoption, and being agog by it all — imagining that the child is the product of a professor getting too close to a student or disposing of an accident that stalls a professional career path.
Kargasok is just… a rather random depot here. I want to know why. Something that makes it less random. Either it was somehow quarantined into this spot — roughly — for cultural (not unlike my Berkley explanation) or climate reasons, your explorer slid into it precisely here, or Kargasok is symbolic along the lines of Peoria (see the “travels to see my aunt” anecdote).