Matcha, Ube, Hōjicha: Are We Eating Flavours or Buying Aesthetic Identities?

Walk into almost any new-generation cafe today and you’ll find the same trio dominating the menu boards: matcha lattes in soft green, ube everything in violet pastel, and hōjicha desserts in warm amber brown. These flavours have become more than ingredients. They have become a visual language, a mood, a filter you can drink or eat. Which raises an uncomfortable question worth sitting with: are we actually enjoying these flavours, or are we buying into the aesthetic identity they represent?

The Colour Came Before the Craving

There’s a reason these three flavours, out of hundreds of possible global ingredients, rose together. Matcha is a soft, contemplative green. Ube is a striking, almost unnatural lavender purple. Hōjicha is a warm, muted brown, often described online as “your therapist’s living room in a cup.” Each one photographs beautifully. Each one fits neatly into the soft, minimalist, slightly muted colour palette that dominates lifestyle content right now, the kind associated with quiet mornings, linen aprons, and carefully lit kitchen counters.

Compare this to flavours that are arguably just as complex or interesting, like tamarind, hibiscus, or black sesame. They haven’t seen the same explosion, and part of the reason is visual. Tamarind is murky brown-red. Black sesame, despite tasting incredible, photographs as a flat, uninviting grey-black. In a culture where a dish’s Instagram performance can matter as much as its taste, colour is doing more work than flavour ever could on its own.

Matcha: From Ritual to Ring Light

Matcha’s journey is the clearest case study. In Japan, matcha carries centuries of ceremonial weight, tied to Zen Buddhist practice, precise whisking technique, and a slow, deliberate ritual of preparation. The version most people encounter today, a sweetened iced latte topped with oat milk foam, bears almost no resemblance to that history. It has been stripped of ceremony and repackaged as a wellness signal: a drink that visually announces “I am calm, intentional, and slightly better for you than a coffee.”

This isn’t necessarily bad. Cultural dishes evolve as they travel, and matcha lattes have genuinely introduced millions of people to an ingredient they’d otherwise never have tried. But there’s a real tension between appreciation and extraction. Ceremonial-grade matcha production is limited and labour intensive, and the sudden global demand driven largely by aesthetic appeal, rather than knowledge of the product, has created real supply shortages that affect traditional Japanese tea houses and long-standing matcha producers who never asked to be trending.

Ube: A Filipino Staple Rebranded as “Purple Food”

Ube tells a slightly different, more complicated story. In Filipino cuisine, ube is a everyday staple, used in desserts like ube halaya, ensaymada, and halo-halo for generations. Yet in much of the world, ube has entered popular consciousness not as a Filipino ingredient with its own culinary history, but simply as “the purple thing,” often marketed and described with no reference to the Philippines at all.This is where the aesthetic-versus-flavour question turns into something closer to a question about erasure. When an ingredient’s cultural origin gets quietly dropped in favour of its Instagram-friendly colour, the people who have eaten it as part of their identity for generations can feel like their food has been repackaged and sold back to the world without them. Filipino food writers have been vocal about this exact frustration, noting that ube’s flavour, a subtle, nutty sweetness distinct from simple vanilla or “purple flavouring,” often gets flattened or replaced with artificial purple colouring and generic sweetness that has little to do with the actual root vegetable.

Hōjicha: The Quiet Alternative to Matcha’s Fame

Hōjicha, a roasted Japanese green tea, has ridden in on matcha’s coattails as the calmer, less caffeinated, more “muted aesthetic” alternative. Where matcha is vivid and slightly bitter, hōjicha is toasty, mellow, and low in caffeine, making it an easy sell to a wellness-conscious audience looking for something that feels gentler. Its rise is almost entirely aesthetic-driven, riding the popularity of “brown flag” and “quiet luxury” visual trends that favour muted, earthy tones over the loud maximalism of earlier food trends like rainbow bagels or unicorn frappes.

Unlike ube, hōjicha hasn’t triggered the same cultural-appropriation conversation, likely because its origin story remains attached to Japan in most marketing, and because roasted tea doesn’t carry the same weight of being tied to a specific community’s home cooking in the way ube is tied to Filipino households.

So, Flavour or Identity?

The honest answer is probably both, in proportions that shift depending on the product and the person buying it. Someone who grew up drinking matcha at their grandmother’s tea ceremony experiences the flavour differently than someone ordering a matcha latte because it matched their outfit for a cafe photo. Neither experience is invalid, but they are not the same thing, and conflating them flattens the cultural weight some of these ingredients carry.

There’s also a commercial reality worth naming plainly: food brands know exactly what they’re doing when they lean into these trends. A muted green, purple, or brown product line photographs consistently, sells merchandise well, and fits a broader “soft life” or “clean girl” aesthetic that drives engagement regardless of whether the flavour underneath lives up to the branding. Plenty of matcha and ube flavoured products on shelves today use minimal real matcha or ube at all, relying instead on colouring and flavouring to chase the trend’s visual signature rather than its actual taste.

What Genuine Appreciation Might Look Like

None of this means people should stop enjoying a matcha latte or an ube donut. Cross-cultural food exchange, done with curiosity and respect, has always been part of how cuisines evolve and spread. The difference lies in a few small but meaningful habits: learning where an ingredient actually comes from, seeking out versions made with the real thing rather than artificial flavouring, and giving credit to the culture an ingredient originates from rather than treating it as a generic “aesthetic flavour” invented by whichever brand marketed it best.

The next time a pastel green, violet, or muted brown drink shows up on your feed, it’s worth asking a simple question before ordering: am I craving this because of how it tastes, or because of how it will look? The answer doesn’t have to be one or the other, but noticing the difference is where genuine appreciation starts to separate itself from aesthetic consumption.