Tapioca

I love tapioca pudding.

Look at the instructions on the package of tapioca that you buy.

Do you want some tapioca pudding?

Tom only ate tapioca pudding for three weeks before dying suddenly.

Other products include coal, coconuts, sugar cane, pineapples, tobacco, vegetables, sago, tapioca, coffee, tea, maize, and groundnuts.

High school student Vivian Chau, like most Asian-American youngsters, loves a drink called boba, a sweet milk tea with jellied tapioca balls. Boba can be found in cafes around San Francisco, but Vivian says it is not sold in supermarkets. So she came up with the idea of a company called Jelly It! to make a ready-to-drink bottled tea mixed with jelly. She admits the idea is a gamble.

A cerulean sky and breezy warm weather was today, the 20th of July of 2025, here on Lulu Island. As usual, I walk to Tim Hortons café for summer drinks. At home, there is a Filipino dessert of sticky rice balls, jackfruit pieces, and tapioca pearls in coconut milk. Lunch was a curry rice dish much like Beef Rendang, but it wasn't. I walked my 72nd time this "Krismas" year to the "Clam Temple," the Roman Catholic church at St. Albans Road. On the way, in the immaculate garden of the Korean lady, was a hummingbird floating in the air. I delighted myself by whispering in Esperanto, "Kolibro!" (Hummingbird!). At the church lobby were two Kenyan ladies in beautiful colourful African gowns. I complimented: "Your clothing is really nice!" As I was sitting at the back of the near-empty nave, a Filipina worshipper approached and irksomely asked that I take off my green safari hat as a sign of respect. "Sorry!" I exclaimed. Later, at the front of the nave was an ongoing baptism of a Filipino baby boy named Mateo. Filipinos gathered around, there with the white minister and a Filipina nun. As I walked home, I said in Esperanto, "La loko estas magia!" (The place is magical!).

Fish eyes and glue we used to call the half-cooked, large-grained, starchy tapioca without flavour that we were served every week in our residence at university. How I longed for the creamy pudding Mother used to make.

It happened when beverage aficionados learned that tapioca, the starch used to make the sweet, round, chewy black bubbles — or pearls — that are the featured topping in the popular boba tea drink, was in short supply.

When the entire coast-line becomes a sea of waving palms, with Chinese and Malay villages fringing the shores, which are at present mere barren wastes of mangroves, with plantations of pepper, of gambier, and of tapioca and rice, the Northern Territory, backed up by the unswerving energy of the Australian squatter, miner, and planter, will present a spectacle almost unknown in the scheme of British colonization.