Today the drink is found in every household, every office, every school. When I started out as a journalist 40 years ago, most reporters kept a bottle of gin in their desk drawer. Now, instead of alcohol, journalists keep nearby a stash of yerba mate leaves, a gourd, the metal straw and a thermos full of hot water.

Well-off people embraced mate as part of a trend of the wealthy appropriating popular habits of lower- and middle-class Argentines. Thirty years ago, wealthy people didn’t get excited about soccer. They didn’t dance the cumbia. Drinking mate would have been outlandish in wealthy social circles.

The difference now, like with so many other things, is that the rich drink it in private, the poor in public.

Globalization has resulted in the most significant cultural homogenization in history. All over the world, we hear the same music, drink the same fizzy waters and eat the same soft buns filled with minced meat. There are only a handful of foods and customs that remain local. That’s why it’s so extraordinary that a drink from a little tribe along the Paraná River persists. That’s why the passion for mate is so deep, as Dr. Dhers discovered.

It’s a bitter drink that no one else drinks, a sharing ritual that we don’t share with outsiders. We like to suck on a little metal rod so that the water we have poured into a little hollow gourd comes back flavored with the brittle leaves.

Mate defies the logic of capitalism: It hasn’t grown significantly in popularity around the world, but it doesn’t perish. It has all the elements a product needs to become a myth: an aboriginal history, a natural and distant origin, organic properties, mystery and a unique flavor. But people have tried to market it elsewhere, and it has never taken off. Yet mate continues to thrive in the places where it’s from.

The bitterness of its leaves, the warm straw, the sucking noises, the sharing, make it an intimate experience. It’s what we miss the most when we are away from home. There’s nothing as comforting for an Argentine abroad as running into someone who will share some mate.

Argentines have put up with so much, we always have, but we won’t stand for a pretentious person looking down on mate.