Bubble tea is the drink of the moment. Shame it can have more calories than a Big Mac!
First came the slushy bars selling vat-like cups of sugary, luridly coloured crushed ice that froze your gullet and stained your kids’ teeth. then came the juice and smoothie bars for ‘clean eaters’ and vegans, offering murkylooking fruit-and-veg concoctions that branded themselves as ‘healthy’ but were often laden with hidden calories. And then, from the East, came bubble tea. For the uninitiated, this beverage consists in its most basic form of black or green tea, milk, ice and tiny chewy balls of tapioca dough — shaken together like a cocktail and served with a wide straw so you can suck up those fat and glistening tapioca pearls from the bottom of the cup.
Originating in taiwan in the 1980s, bubble tea ‘cafes’ and bars offering a dizzying array of creations have been on British High streets and in shopping centres since the early 2010s and have become a fashionable hang-out spot for teenagers.
But recently they’ve been experiencing a stratospheric growth — proliferating at an extraordinary rate, and all thanks to a surge in popularity on social media platforms such as tiktok, where these drinks have become a new viral trend.
Millions of young people — mostly under 25 — now follow bubble tea ‘influencers’ as they ‘taste-test’ different concoctions on camera, even making their own in every taste and hue.
it’s becoming a cultural phenomenon, with videos on tiktok
alone featuring the ‘Bubbletea’ hashtag currently racking up almost three billion views.
it’s all bizarrely voyeuristic. People post videos of themselves piercing the drinks’ foil or plastic lids with a straw (to a satisfying ‘pop’), before slurping the pearls, or ‘boba’ as they’re known. (Actually the Chinese slang for ‘breast’, referencing their shape.)
so, then — all a bit of fun? And much safer for our teenagers than cider or vodka gulped round the back of bike sheds?
WEll, perhaps not. While green and black teas are famed for their detoxifying benefits, these ‘teas’ are far from healthy. Only this week, it was revealed that some bubble teas, packed full of different fruit syrups and with endless different topping options such as jellies, whipped cream and ice creams can contain a whopping 800 calories.
that’s the same as 50 sugar cubes and even eclipses a McDonald’s Big Mac at 550 calories.
today Britain has nearly 250 shops selling bubble teas, and the main market is teenage girls, lured by the garish branding (to match the eye-wateringly sweet drinks) and who relish the ‘likes’ they get on social media for it.
Bubbleology is the UK’s biggest chain, with 40 stores across Europe, including 17 in Britain. thanks to this ‘bubble boom’, a stonking 70 more are set to open before the end of the year.
And all this when last week it was reported that childhood obesity in England is at an alltime high — with a shocking 2.5million children now overweight or obese — partly due to recent increased sedentariness during protracted lockdowns.
And a gut-busting 56 per cent of UK diets now consist of ‘ultraprocessed’ foods.
And yet legions of youngsters now seem hooked on so-called ‘meal-in-a-tea’ drinks.
so, for my job as a presenter of the BBC’s the Food Programme, and in the spirit of keeping up with the latest culinary trends, i went out this week to my local branch of Bubbleology in North london to discover more about these beverages which both enthral and, perhaps, endanger our youngsters in equal measure.
i chose my size (a ‘regular’ 500ml at £3.59 or a ‘supreme’ at £4.59), my flavour, then specified how sweet and milky i wanted it.
And then came the performance. the ‘boba barista’ scoops in the tapioca balls, pouring the creamy tea on top, then the ice, then the toppings.
i confess, i wasn’t entirely looking forward to the taste. i remember tapioca milk pud — or fish eyes as my friends and i called it — all too well from my school days.
But this is different territory entirely. And i understood the appeal immediately.
First i ordered a pomegranate fruit tea, the lowest-calorie option and yet still clocking in at 200 calories (the milk teas start at a heftier 350 calories) plus the extra 94 calories with the boba.
it tasted intensely of pomegranate. And while sucking balls of pomegranate-impregnated tapioca into my mouth was fairly unique, i can report that they’re soft, slightly chewy — and really rather nice! Certainly a long way from fish-eye pudding.
Emboldened, i moved on to other flavours: next passion fruit, then honeydew and vanilla chai.
in the name of research, of course, i also sampled mango and lychee bobas on top: the possibilities were endless.
My boba barista told me i could have strawberries and cream, Oreo or even banoffee pie.
And it doesn’t stop there: there are popping varieties — with seaweed-shell balls that burst in your mouth like popping candy, a wild creation of which Willy Wonka would be proud, although perhaps one that could easily end in milk-spluttering disaster.
there’s even an ice cream version of the drink (substituting out the milk base).
Again, for research purposes, i tried the ‘taro ice cream’, made from taro root — a purple vegetable not dissimilar from a sweet potato or a yam — and it too was rather lovely.
But, above all, my favourite variety included hot balls of molasses with cold milk poured on top to create a delicious, dark brown swirling concoction.
so indeed, in conclusion: all rather delicious, and certainly a treat for when nothing but the sickliest of sweet things will hit the spot.
BUt, of course, there’s no escaping the fact that they’re laden with calories. if you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself slurping up piles of sugar in an instant — far more than the 30g the Government says adults should limit themselves to in a day.
Of course, our social media-mad kids don’t care one jot.
None of the teenagers i talked to out on my recce were concerned about the nutritional value of the drinks.
they see them as a treat — but also as a trendy instagram or tiktok opportunity.
And if they can’t get out to buy them, there are myriad recipes for at-home concoctions, too.
Arriving back, perhaps already on a sugar low, i turned to tiktok at once, where i found plenty of aficionados making their own versions.
Of course the milk and toppings are fairly simple. But to make the tapioca dough, they must be boiled to perfection (30 minutes, then a further half hour to cool). if you over-boil they will be too squishy and stick together, under-do it and they will be too hard to chew. A fine science.
so will the bubble tea bubble burst? And are they simply milkshakes on steroids?
Well, the argument for them sticking around for a long time to come is that they’ve tapped into a large and growing percentage of young people who don’t want to drink alcohol, but do want to go out together for a ‘drink’.
But they’re also, i admit, incredibly unhealthy, and likely only adding to the sugar-filled diets of our woefully overweight population of children — and yet another black mark on the list of the damaging effects of social media.
they’re deceptively moreish and can easily lead to dangerous over-indulgence.
something i found out myself as i got home and wondered... what’s for tea?
CHARlOTTe CAleB was texting a client when she realised she might have to put her phone down for a few hours. ‘I’d been invoicing and drafting contracts but I thought it might be a good idea to step back,’ says Charlotte, 32, a music artist manager from Hertford. Self-employed, she would only have benefited from around £151 per week maternity allowance from the State.
‘I’m always so nervous telling clients I need time off, but this particular client understood. In fact, she told me not to
respond to her. She was very surprised I was messaging her at all.’
That client’s compassion is understandable once you realise that Charlotte was in active labour. Induced at 6pm one evening in February, she worked into the night. It wasn’t until moments before the actual delivery of her son Cassius at three minutes past midnight that she took her foot off the pedal.
‘I took my laptop into hospital and remember wandering around the ward saying:
“Is there somewhere I can plug this in?” ’ says Charlotte, who is married to Philip, 34, a quantity surveyor. ‘But when I got to 10cm dilated I said to this lovely client: “If I don’t reply, this is why” and she couldn’t have been more understanding. She said: “OK, yes go away and have your baby!”
‘It had been a 72-hour labour and I needed an episiotomy, so I was exhausted. Once I’d had Cassius, I allowed myself to rest. I wasn’t back at work properly until three days later.’
Many mothers who have been through a bruising labour will be agog at Charlotte’s work ethic. But she is among a growing number of women eschewing the traditional six-month-or-more maternity leave and returning to their desks weeks, days or even hours after giving birth.
Among them is the Prime Minister’s wife,
Carrie Johnson. She will take no maternity leave after the birth of her second child, due around Christmas, it was revealed this week.
The 33-year-old is head of communications for the Aspinall Foundation, which runs wildlife parks and releases zoo animals back into the wild. Carrie is said to be keen to work on a release of elephants in Kenya next year.
Countdown’s Rachel Riley has also hinted she will be breastfeeding her new baby — a girl called Noa — on the TV show’s set very soon. And comedian Katherine Ryan, 38, returned to work ten days after giving birth to her second child, Fred, in the summer.
‘I was in a privileged position where I could do that,’ she said. ‘Yes, I was still physically recovering, but I think it was easier to take him places when he was ten days old than it is now. If you want to take a year off or ten years or ten days, then that’s totally up to you.’
Charlotte says it was the pandemic that prompted her to start a family — and insists she never had any plans to take a lengthy maternity leave.
‘Although I’m not a massive “baby person”, I’ve always wanted children,’ she says. ‘When lockdown happened, everything slowed down. Philip and I are both very career and travel-oriented, but getting off the hamster wheel made us reassess and we decided the time was right.
‘When I fell pregnant last year, I was terrified of telling clients because I never want anyone to think I’m not going to be as sharp as I’ve always been. I have a friend in the same line of work who had to stop when she became a parent. I built it up in my head that I was letting everyone down — but of course my clients couldn’t have been nicer about it.’
As she earns slightly more than her husband, the couple realised it made financial sense for Charlotte to return to work at some stage.
‘We could survive on my salary alone but not my husband’s — and in any case, it would just be surviving, not living,’ she explains. But money was by no means the only factor.
‘I am one of those women who has to be doing something. I can’t sit around. I love my job and drive my husband mad with all my moneymaking schemes and hare-brained business ideas. When lockdown happened and my usual work slowed down, we set up a Caribbean food delivery business.
‘I am not judging anyone else’s choices, but I simply couldn’t be one of those mothers who takes a long maternity leave. They always seem to
child‘I have to plan things like coffee mornings and playdates but that’s not for the children’s benefit, it’s so the mothers don’t get bored. The would be happy playing with a cardboard box!
‘I’ve had run-ins with mothers who can’t understand why I’d want to go back to work so soon, but it’s no one’s business but my family’s.’
Charlotte didn’t want her identity to be swallowed up by being a parent. ‘I didn’t want to be the person who only talked about her baby all the time,’ she admits.
‘I suffered with mild postnatal depression and for the first three weeks of his life I kept bursting into tears and had some quite dark moments. But as soon as I was back at work, it was like having an anchor. The person I was before Cassius was still in there.’
Charlotte was back to work full-time within days of giving birth, setting up meetings and looking after clients. And she hasn’t regretted it for a second. ‘The pandemic made life easier for me because in the early days I could breastfeed Cassius and have a Zoom meeting at the same time, positioning the camera so no one could tell,’ she says.
‘At first I thought I was superwoman, that I could take Cassius to actual meetings, tours and shoots. I was really optimistic but a bit naive. I
didn’t want to be someone who only talked abou t her baby
didn’t factor in things like him being sick, and that has been the biggest challenge — juggling a sick child when you have meetings to attend.
‘But we manage somehow. I may miss a call occasionally if he’s ill, and my mum will help out if I have a vital meeting. He’s now in daycare for two half-days a week and that will slowly increase over time. For now, we muddle through.
‘I actually feel he benefits from me being at work because he’s mixing with other children — and it’s good for boys to see their ’ mums working and see that my role is just as important as Daddy’s.’
While Charlotte insists she was happiest working from day one, campaigners warn that not everyone taking a ‘mini maternity leave’ finds the decision so easy.
‘We are increasingly hearing from women who feel forced back to work earlier than they would like,’ says Ros Bragg, director of the charity Maternity Action.
‘We know from pre-pandemic research that financial issues above all else determine how long a woman takes in maternity leave. We also know that women are returning early because they fear they may be selected for redundancy.
‘Pregnant women and new mothers are often among the first to be unfairly targeted for redundancy.’
A survey in July last year found that 11 per cent of pregnant women had been, or expected to be, made redundant. Of those who lost jobs, 61 per cent believed their maternity leave plans played a role, according to the campaign group Pregnant