Saccharomyces boulardii CNCM I-745
Touring Indochina during a cholera outbreak in 1920, the microbiologist Henri Boulard noticed that people who drank a tea concoction made with the skins of lychees and mangosteens did not develop diarrhoea.
Isolating a strain of yeast from the skin of these tropical fruits, he named it Saccharomyces boulardii; after himself. These first samples were sent back to the Collection Nationale de Cultures de Microorganismes (CNCM) at the Insitut Pasteur under the reference CNCM I-745.
Although part of the brewers yeast family, S. boulardii CNCM I-745 displayed very distinct properties making it a valuable microbe. It has a high resistance to stomach acids with an ideal growth temperature equal to the human body.
The first probiotic with proven and demonstrated preventive and treatment outcomes for diarrhoea, including antibiotic and post-antibiotic diarrhoea associated with Clostridium difficile, S. boulardii CNCM I-745 continues to be a mainstay of conventional healthcare, traveller’s diarrhoea prevention and the gut wellness industry.
As tea growers, members of my family regularly prepare tea with various blends of dried fruit peels and seasonal flowers and roots depending on their specific health needs at any given time.
Tea as a reMatriative practice exceeds the superficial fetish repackaging of high East Asian Culture, and by extension, fuelling the aesthetic and unattainable economic inequity of ‘wellness.’
Tea can be a mundane and common practice of daily resistance (across many cultures folding in both major and minor histories from the east and west). At the most basic level, drinking tea reminds us to boil often contaminated water; to mask the flavour of brackish rivers; to rehabilitate and reMatriate displaced microbiomes; to avoid wasting food scraps. By understanding the daily practice of making, fermenting and drinking tea as a shared and collective expression of biological and cultural health, strength and resilience, these ancestral practices and knowledges historically (and continuously) stolen, reappriopriated and recommodified can continue to be accessible to those living outside the purview of the ‘wellness’ class.