You can’t brew a decent cup of tea without a bit of steel, and you can’t get steel without Manganese.

I’m sitting here at the kitchen table after a late dinner, watching the steam curl off my favorite chipped ceramic mug and eyeing the stainless steel kettle on the stove. Most folks chase the glory of gold or the high-tech hum of lithium, but it’s the humble Manganese that does the heavy lifting in every girder and blade we own. It’s the silent workhorse that cleans out the sulfur and toughens the iron, yet we don’t produce a single pound of it here in the States despite how much we rely on it. There’s a certain quiet gravity in realizing that even my midnight ritual of a hot drink is tethered to a global supply chain buried deep in the earth. It’s a sobering thought, but it makes the tea taste just a little more like honest work.