The rise of Kava in America: Innovative or cultural blasphemy?
Kava being served at Brooklyn Kava in New York, where the drink is promoted as “soothing the stress of NY millennials”. Photo / Getty Images
‘All right, we’re back with the Coke-Pepsi challenge,” said Jeffrey Bowman as he stood behind the counter at The Nak, his kava bar in Boca Raton, Florida. Oversized tiki heads grimaced from a nearby wall as he raised a small red bowl of purple-brown liquid and toasted four Americans who sat along the counter opposite him. “Bula, bula. American kava.”
Together, they downed their mix of Coke and kava, a psychoactive drink that has long been fundamental to indigenous culture in the Pacific. “Damn, that’s not so bad,” said one man, who made a thumbs-up gesture towards the camera, with which Bowman was filming, later posting the clip to social media. “It lightens the kava.” One woman in full denim smiled nervously. “I like it,” she said. Another woman in a Yosemite tank top enthused: “It makes it taste creamier.”
“See! America!” said Bowman. Later, after trying a Pepsi version, he decided, “The Coca-Cola does make a superior kava product. That’s all from American kava today. You should really try some American Coca-Cola and Pepsi in your kava while you’re making it: it works out great.”
Depending on your perspective, this experimentation with kava was either brilliant American innovation or a form of cultural blasphemy. That is a tension with which Bowman, a sturdy middle-aged Floridian, is intimately familiar.
After founding America’s first kava bar in 2001, he has become a leading proponent of kava consumption, helping drive the drink much closer to the US mainstream. Yet his advocacy has often involved things that people in the Pacific find uncomfortable, like liberal use of exaggerated and stereotypical tiki, the addition of flavours to the kava such as cola mixers, and the sale of addictive drugs alongside (or, it appears, in) kava.
That tension became particularly acute this year when Bowman and two US partners revealed they had grown and harvested usable kava roots – with which the drink is made – in mainland America for the first time. In the coming years, they aim to turn kava farming in the US into a fully fledged commercial enterprise, which Bowman says is essential to developing kava into a global business.
Faced with these developments, experts are expressing concern about the impact of foreign competitors on Pacific growers, raising fears about what US-grown kava could mean for the plant’s cultural significance. They point out a worrying reliance by US kava enthusiasts on a different psychoactive plant with addictive properties that threatens to plunge the industry into a new era of stigma and suspicion.
Now, a global fight has broken out over the future of the Pacific’s most iconic drink. Bowman declined to speak with the Listener, but in a recent Facebook post, he insisted, “I don’t cut down anything people of the South Pacific do. I am in fact one of their biggest supporters.” That said, he added, “Capitalism has come for kava. Nothing anyone can do about it.”
Pacific wide
For roughly three millennia, kava has been integral to cultures throughout the Pacific. When crushed and combined with water, the psychoactive root creates a drink whose chalky flavour belies the intense calm it generates. Where alcohol excites, kava calms, and its most commonly exported variety causes no hangover. As a result, it is drunk in practically every Pacific context, from religious ceremonies to social gatherings.
The plant’s centrality extends to economics. To understand its importance, it is useful to consider Vanuatu, one of the root’s largest producers, where kava bars speckle almost every city street and residents grow it in their backyards. “You cannot imagine this place without kava,” says Michael Louzé, chairman of the Vanuatu Kava Industry Association. “It’s the heart of the country.”