Really? Is and adquired taste though but here in 🇦🇷(Argentina) and also in 🇺🇾(Uruguay) is widely consumed.
Is kind of a social ritual mostly, you shared with people, super common at work, in college studing with friends but is also really goof for having time woth your own thoghts.
Here is a little short story from a famous local story teller;
* * *
"Mate is not a drink. Well, it is. It's a liquid and it goes in through the mouth. But it is not a drink. In this country nobody drinks mate because they are thirsty. It's more of a habit, like scratching.
"Mate is exactly the opposite of television: it makes you talk if you're with someone, and it makes you think when you're with someone, and it makes you think when you're with someone.
you are with someone, and it makes you think when you are alone. When someone comes to your house the first sentence is 'hello' and the second 'some mate?'
"This happens in every house. In that of the rich and in that of the poor. It happens between chatty and gossipy women, and it happens between serious or immature men. It happens among old people in a geriatric home and among teenagers as they study or take drugs.
"It is the only thing that parents and children share without arguing or throwing each other in the face. Peronists and radicals drink mate without asking questions. In summer and in winter. It is the only thing in which the victims and the executioners are alike; the good and the bad.
"When you have a child, you start giving him mate when he asks for it. You give it to them warm, with lots of sugar, and they feel great. You feel an enormous pride when a little baby of your blood starts sucking mate. Your heart goes out of your body.
"Later, over the years, they will choose whether to drink it bitter, sweet, very hot, tereré, with orange peel, with weeds, with a splash of lemon.
"When you meet someone for the first time, you drink some mates. People ask, when you don't trust them: 'Sweet or bitter? The other answers: 'As you drink it'.
"The keyboards in Argentina have the lyrics full of yerba.
"Yerba is the only thing that is always there, in every house. Always. With inflation, with hunger, with military, with democracy, with any of our eternal plagues and curses. And if one day there is no yerba, a neighbor has it and gives it to you. Yerba is not denied to anyone.
"This is the only country in the world where the decision to stop being a boy and start being a man happens on a particular day. No long pants, circumcision, college or living away from parents.
"Here we start to be big the day we have the need to have some mate for the first time, alone. It's not by chance. It's not by chance. The day a boy puts the kettle on and drinks his first mate without anyone at home, at that minute, he has discovered that he has a soul. Either he's scared to death, or he's dead in love, or something: but it's not just any day.
"None of us remember the day we first drank mate alone. But it must have been an important day for each of us. Inside there must have been revolutions.
"The simple mate is nothing more and nothing less than a demonstration of values....
It is the solidarity of banking those washed mate because the talk is good. Because it is the talk, not the mate that matters.
It is the respect for the time to talk and listen, you talk while the other one drinks and it is the sincerity to say: 'Enough, change the yerba mate'.
It is companionship made moment.
It is the sensitivity to boiling water.
It is the affection to ask, stupidly, 'Is it hot, isn't it'.
It is the modesty of those who brew the best mate.
It is the generosity to give until the end.
It is the hospitality of invitation.
It is the justice of one for one.
It is the obligation to say 'thank you' at least once a day.
It is the ethical, frank and loyal attitude of meeting without greater pretensions than sharing."
Author: Hernan Casciari
*** Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) ***