"Herbal Water"? A Skeptical Review

This past thursday, July 19th, I had the pleasure of attending the Baltimore Ave Dollar Stroll, a fun and lively event that happens three times a year in West Philadelphia, twice in summer and once in early fall. This event features $1 items from a variety of restaurants and cafes. It falls on a thursday, so that it coincides with the smaller of the two days of the Clark Park Farmer's Market. This is the sort of event that I'd recommend going to if you know a lot of people who live in the neighborhood, and not otherwise. There are long lines, and the fun is mainly in the community and the opportunity to see and chat with your friends and neighbors while waiting and wandering. I loved it!

There wasn't much tea happening at this event, but I did notice a product which I found very intriguing, and which is tangentially related to the topic of herbal teas, and this was Ayala's Herbal Water:

This bucket of "herbal water" bottles, incidentally, was being sold by Mariposa Co-op, which I wrote about recently in my post about the tea bag selection in the co-op. I picked out a Lavender Mint "herbal water", pictured here:

I also had the opportunity to sample the Lemongrass Mint Vanilla flavor, which one of my friends bought.

What exactly is this "herbal water"?

These herbal waters are very simple: they are seltzer water or carbonated water, flavored with organic-certified herbal extracts and natural flavor.

How do I feel about these products?

I have mixed feelings about these products. On one level, I love that they offer a flavorful carbonated beverage that is not sweetened. As an alternative to typical soda / soft drinks, I think these are a great alternative, and given the choice of these herbal waters vs. conventional soda, I'd take these products any day.

But these products still seem like a bit of a waste to me; for a company emphasizing organics, they don't seem like the most sustainable choice. They involve a lot of energy-intensive activities, with the packaging, glass bottle, and marketing, merely for a small bottle of flavored water. Why not just fill your own bottle with tap water? They are also rather expensive, not particularly original, and have a much cheaper substitute good.

For years, supermarkets have been stocking flavored seltzer waters, which are just carbonated water with added natural flavorings. I have been buying these for a long time as an alternative to sweet sodas when I want a carbonated drink. These flavored seltzer waters are very cheap; most supermarkets sell them for under $1 a liter. The difference with Ayala's products are that they contain actual herbal extracts rather than being flavored exclusively with the vague "natural flavorings", which in the US, can refer to extracts and essential oils, but can also refer to highly-processed flavorings such as distillates, protein hydrolysates, and products of roasting, heating, or enzymolysis. Here's a link to the official definition of natural flavor in the US, in case anyone is interested.

For the record, Ayala's herbal waters still do contain natural flavorings. If you want a product flavored exclusively with extracts or essential oils, you'll need to locate your own water-soluble extracts and flavor your own seltzer water.

My review of the two "herbal waters" I tried:

To give Ayala credit, I did find each of these products considerably more nuanced tasting than the flavored seltzer waters available in the supermarket.

I preferred the lavender mint to the lemongrass mint vanilla, although I liked both. The lavender mint was crisp, clean, and refreshing. The flavoring struck me as relatively light. Overall, both bottles tasted more like seltzer water than they did like iced herbal tea. I would have preferred a significantly stronger flavoring.

My friend remarked that the lavender mint water tasted like soap to her. I can see this, but it did not bother me. I think a lot of people associate lavender with "soap" smells and less with "food" or "drink" smells. The lemongrass mint vanilla, I found slightly less refreshing, because the vanilla led to a creamy finish, rather than a crisp finish present in the other soda. As it was hot and I was drinking this drink to quench my thirst, I found the lavender mint more refreshing.

What do you think?

Have you tried these? Do you think you would try them? Would you ever buy them? Do you think these sorts of products are a good idea? Do you share my sentiment that it would be a great thing if people would switch away from sodas to these sorts of drinks, but that in the big picture, these are not the most sustainable option?

Honesty and Dishonesty in American Business

Min River Tea recently left a comment on my recent blog post More Is Not Better: How To Balance Freshness and Turnover for Small Tea Companies, highlighting something that I had overlooked in that post. This is the fact that companies with a business model like Min River Tea keep their catalogue small in large part because they want to be able to actually visit the farms producing their teas, both for quality and ethical reasons.

The comment also raises the question of whether or not it is ethical to make claims about tea being "direct from the farm" or practicing "ethical sourcing" without having ever visited the areas in which a tea is produced.

The above photo, by vera46, shows tea pickers in Minamiyamashiro, Kyoto. Photo licensed under CC BY 2.0 license. Like many people who work within the tea industry in the U.S. and other Western countries, I have never visited a region in which tea is produced.

No consensus on what constitutes "ethical" sourcing:

Ethics can be a tricky subject, because different people have different fundamental beliefs or assumptions both about the basis of their moral systems, and about how the world works. An example is the issue of abortion, where people reach vastly different conclusions on the basis of certain beliefs or assumptions, including whether or not they believe human life begins at conception.

In economic matters, things become even muddier, as not only do people have different fundamental values surrounding money, business, and ownership of property, but people also have vastly different ideas about cause-and-effect, and about which sorts of outcomes in society are "good" or "bad". Some people may care primarily about increasing GDP or business activity, others may care more about reducing pollution or carbon emissions, others may care more about reducing human suffering and promoting human rights. This disagreement exists among academic economists, political figures, business leaders, and everyday people.

Disagreement on ethical issues is not necessarily bad, but casual labels of "ethical sourcing" are usually problematic:

I do not necessarily think that it is problematic that there is no consensus about what constitutes "ethical" sourcing. Quite to the contrary, I think that vigorous debate about ethics is healthy and perhaps even essential to address social and economic problems related to the tea industry (or any ethical problems in the world, for that matter). But what I think is more problematic or harmful is that people throw around words like "ethical" or phrases like "ethical sourcing" without explaining what they mean.

Whether one is dealing with the Ethical Tea Partnership, or fair trade certification for tea, there is still little transparency about where most tea comes from. When I buy fair trade tea, I know that there is a whole organization behind the fair trade logo. But I still do not know the exact portion of the price that I am paying that is reaching the individual producer. I do not know what percentage of revenue the company selling the tea to me is taking as profit, and what percentage is spent on business expenses. I do not know what portion of the price goes towards packing and shipping costs, or what portion is spent on marketing. And, in spite of all the bureaucracy and energy expended on the certification process, I still do not know where exactly the tea came from.

True transparency, whether in naturally-occurring minerals, or businesses in American society, is quite rare. Just as a majority of quartz crystals are not as transparent as this one pictured above, a majority of businesses and organizations are quite opaque about key points of ethical relevance.

To me, transparency is a key part of ethics. Without transparency, one lacks even the basic facts of the situation, and without the basic facts, even if one has clear morals, one cannot reach truthful conclusions about the moral or ethical status of a given action or practice. This belief comes in part comes from my religious beliefs, which have been increasingly taking form as I've been working with Why This Way and hashing out my views on different issues in a group of people who share certain foundational values.

Deeper problems with honesty and transparency, not limited to the tea industry:

I think the problem that Min River Tea was getting at in the original comment runs deeper than just the tea industry. Most of consumer culture in America is dominated by claims of dubious honesty, that is, products which are marketed in an overtly dishonest spirit. Often these claims take the form of brief phrases or labels, a lot like the claim of being "ethically sourced".

One of the most glaring, recent examples of this is what I like to call the "0 grams trans fat" loophole. This loophole is the result of a policy or law that specifies that, in food labelling, amounts of trans fat less than 0.5 grams can be rounded down to 0. Another, broader problem is when products are marketed under the guise of being "healthy" when they are loaded with unhealthy ingredients. Two common examples are when "low fat" products are loaded with sugar, or when "whole grain" products are made primarily with refined flour, and contain only insignificant amounts of whole grain.

The above label shows 3 grams of trans fat. If the quantity were less than 1/6th as much, or if the serving size were smaller, it could legally be rounded down to 0 even though the product still contained trans fat.

These practices may satisfy the letter of the laws in the U.S., but I think a majority of Americans would agree that they are thoroughly dishonest in spirit.

I think that part of the problem is that the culture in the U.S. has been one that emphasizes a literalistic, legal-definition-based approach to product advertising. I think this is in large part because we have relied on legal regulation, rather than informed choice and moral integrity, to shape our marketplace.

Taking responsibility to solve these problems:

I believe that the only way to fully and sustainably address the issues of dishonesty in marketing is to take personal responsibility, that is, for all the choices we can make in our daily lives that can impact these issues.

Americans have been tolerating these sorts of practices for years. These products would not be on the shelf if people did not buy them. And marketing teams would not even consider making claims that were dishonest in spirit if they knew that the marketplace would swiftly and severely punish them with product boycotts in the case that they made dishonest claims. Moreover, marketers would not make these claims if they were strongly committed to integrity in marketing, and if their business decisions were driven by their own personal moral values.

It's for this reason that I don't tolerate these sorts of labelling practices. I don't buy these products, but it doesn't stop there. I often write letters to companies urging them to be more forthcoming in their labelling--in the case of trans fats, to remove all trans fats from their products, and in the case of "whole grain" products, to actually make products out of primarily (or exclusively) whole grain flours. But I also appeal to the individual moral conscience of the people who work within these industries. I do believe that most people want to be honest people. People are more likely to get sucked into dishonesty when they are simply not thinking about how much they value honesty. If everyone woke up every morning thinking about how much they valued honesty and integrity, and embraced this as an essential part of their identity, they would likely make different decisions in business settings.

Another way I try to address these issues is to talk and write about them with other people who might buy these products. I talk frequently not only to my friends, but to acquaintances, and to people who I see buying these products, and explain to them about things like the "0 grams trans fat" loophole, and I urge them to avoid products labelled as "low fat" but high in sugar, and to read labels on products labelled as "whole grain" to see that they actually are made primarily from whole grain flour rather than just including it as a minor ingredient.

Putting yourself on the line:

Sometimes I even go out on the line a little. It can be hard to point out concerns like the ones I discussed here, in casual social settings. One example of this is when someone brings a box of cookies to a party, a box that displays marketing that I find dishonest in spirit. It can seem a bit abrasive to comment on things like this, but I do believe it can be done respectfully. Sometimes all you need to say is: "Hey, I would really prefer if you did not buy this product, because I think their marketing is dishonest." and I explain a little bit about why. You can conclude by reassuring the person that it is okay that they brought it and telling them to not feel bad about it, worry about it, or think too much about it.

Some people may not care or may not want to hear it, but if they don't, or if they are offended, that is their issue, not mine or yours. And I do think that a large number of people actually do like to learn about these sorts of issues, and will act on the basis of them. They just never stopped to think about it.

What do you think?

What do you think about the comment that Min River Tea made? What do you think about the lack of transparency in the tea industry? How about the phenomenon of marketing claims that are dishonest in spirit? And of my recommendations of how to address these claims through choice and discussion, without resorting to legal battles?

Whoops I Did It Again: Tea Does Not Go Well With Grapefruit

Back in December of 2010, I wrote about Grapefruit and Tea, describing how I found that grapefruit did not go well with tea. If you missed that post, there's some interesting material in there both about tea and grapefruit, and about grapefruit's strange drug interactions.

I like grapefruit a lot, and I like eating it in the morning, close to when I drink my tea. Grapefruits have also been in season for some time, although we're nearing the end of the US season and I've found the quality has declined (and price increased) in recent weeks. But when grapefruit is in season, I seem to have a problem, which is that I keep end up consuming tea and grapefruit together, even though I know that I don't like the results.

Photo by J. Smith, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What happens?

I've recently sampled a lot of teas alongside grapefruit, as grapefruits are in season. I was particularly struck by the effect grapefruit had on TeaVivre's Xin Yang Mao Jian, a brisk green tea that I liked very much. I found the grapefruit took away all the bite from this tea...there was none of the pleasing bitterness that I find so appealing about this tea. But I also found that the aroma was also somehow lost.

I would really like to find a tea that goes well with grapefruit but I have yet to discover one, a year and a half (and two grapefruit seasons) after writing that original post. Any recommendations? Or is this just the way it is?

Interestingly, I never seem to have the same problem with oranges.

Tea and Locavores: Loose-Leaf Tea Which is Not Local Can Still Appeal to Fans of Locally Grown Food

I recently read an article on J-TEA's blog, Marketing Oolong in the U.S: Difficult But Not Impossible , which raises a number of questions. In this post, I want to focus on one question: whether or not imported tea can appeal to people who value locally-produced food and drink. My short answer is a resounding yes! I posted a comment on the post, but I decided that it was an interesting enough topic that I wanted to expand on it here.



The above picture shows a poster from the U.S. Food Administration, circa 1917-1919. While the U.S. government used to actively promote local foods, now, current U.S. food policy encourages a lot of long-distance shipping of foods, such as by subsidies of bulk commodities and other subsidies that benefit wide-scale factory-farming. Now, the local food movement is primarily driven by a decentralized network of people acting from their own personal value systems, out of a desire to preserve local food cultures and protect the environment.

My experience with locavores, die-hard fans of eating locally-produced food:

My experience is that there are very few "strict locavores", i.e., people who truly will not eat food that is not locally produced. Rather, most people seem to embrace eating locally-grown foods as a general guiding principle of something that is good, but not necessary to follow strictly, the way an Orthodox Jew might follow Kosher food laws. Strict locavores in colder climates would be forced to avoid such culinary staples as olive oil, lemons or limes, and many spices. Most people, no matter how enthusiastic they are about local foods, don't hold themselves to standards this strict.



The above salad (click the image for an ingredient list) was made in Pennsylvania from mostly-local ingredients, but it included lime, olive oil, and coriander from other regions.

It's also been my experience that people who are highly enthusiastic about eating locally-produced food and drink, either already love loose-leaf tea, or are very easy to get into drinking loose-leaf tea, especially if you present them with an explanation of how loose-leaf tea can fit into the same value system that values locally-produced foods.

Why do people want to buy or support locally-produced foods anyway?

There are many reasons that people seek out locally-produced foods. These include:

• Sustainability - Using locally-produced goods can minimize consumption of fuel to transport goods over long distances. Increased reliance on locally-produced goods can also promote economic sustainability by promoting more local economic activity and insulating each region against economic downturns in other regions.


• Local Traditions - Local food production is inextricably tied to local food culture. People often support local foods because they want to support traditions, including the preservation of and development of specific cultivars of plants, as well as traditions of preparing food. "Foodies", people interested in food culture in general, tend to be among the strongest proponents of locally grown foods.


• Quality - Locally grown foods are often fresher and higher in quality, and are often preferred by people seeking out the best-tasting and highest-quality goods.

Loose-leaf tea may not be local, but fits easily into all of the main driving factors behind the eat local movement:

In most parts of most Western countries, locally-grown tea is simply not available. But even if tea is not locally-produced, there are reasons that loose tea, specifically, high-quality loose-leaf artisan teas, traditionally produced, single-origin teas, can fit into this same framework for a variety of reasons. Much of this comes into comparing tea to coffee, or presenting tea as a substitute good for coffee:

• Tea production, measured per cup of brewed tea, is less resource-intensive, and thus more sustainable, than coffee production.


• Tea culture is associated with a more mindful, slow-paced culture than coffee, which is often associated with a fast-paced consumerist society.


• Tea is much more diverse than coffee, having a greater potential to appeal to foodies and people interested in the diversity present in the different types of a certain food or drink available.

But looking at tea on its own, it also fits into more things:

• Tea, even higher-priced tea, is quite inexpensive when compared to other food and drink. Tea can thus appeal to people who value sustainability and the prudent use of resources.


• The traditions of tea production in many countries are rich and diverse; by buying high-quality single-origin tea of specific varieties, produced by traditional methods, people support the preservation and development of local traditions.


• As tea ships and stores well, people seeking out local foods primarily for quality reasons will have no qualms about seeking out high-quality tea imported from far away, as it is a good, much like olive oil or spices, that does not suffer much from being shipped.

Do these "selling points" work for drawing local food enthusiasts into the world of high-quality, imported loose-leaf tea? It has been my experience that they absolutely do! Most locavores are not strict or fanatical in their focus on buying and eating local. They are just regular people with common sense, who care about sustainability, about the quality of their food, and about preserving local food traditions. If you can show them how loose-leaf tea fits into their value system, they can and will get into it.

If you want to read more about these issues, you can find more depth on my post Tea as Slow Food.

Surface Area, Tea, Food, Physics: Do We Misuse The Word "Superficial"?

This post is about surface area, both as it pertains to tea, to food, and to everything about our world. In our culture, we use language in such a way that implies that, when dealing with anything, it's what's really inside that matters. Phrases like "on the surface", or the word "superficial" (which just means on the surface) are used to describe phenomena that are somehow more fleeting or transient, less reflective of true reality, and less important than things that are "deep", "on the inside", or "at the core" of something.



Diagram by Cmglee, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This post provides some powerful examples that demonstrate that this way of looking at things is not always valid. The world, both on a human level, and a fundamental physical level, does not always work in the way that the the word "superficial" suggests. The surface, or the boundary of a region, is often where the most interesting things are happening, and this phenomenon is widespread at all levels in our universe.

Surface and Boundary in Biology:

Anyone who has studied microbiology will undoubtedly be familiar with the cell membrane. Cell membranes, a double layer of nonpolar (oily) and polar (like water) substances creates a barrier which separates the interior of a cell from the outside world. Complex channels exist in these membranes to allow a living cell to control what passes through its walls, and structures attach to the membrane to allow it to interact with the outside world. A large portion of biological research focuses on the cell membrane or the various proteins and structures that exist within it.



Tea And Surface Area:

The surface area of tea leaf is of critical importance in determining how the tea infuses in water. The infusion of the tea's flavor and chemicals into the water happens at the surface of the leaf, so increasing the surface area will make the tea infuse more quickly.

The following is a photo of Imperial Tea Garden's Moon Swirl White Tip, a green tea from Hunan province. The complex curls and folds of the leaf provide greater surface area than the small, tightly rolled pellets suggest.



Breaking up the tea leaf increases the surface area, thus making the tea infuse faster. Finely-broken tea, like fannings and dust, have the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuse fastest. On the other hand, whole-leaf tea with thick, tough leaves has the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuses slowest of all, considerably slower than whole-leaf tea with thinner, more delicate leaves.

Thinking about surface area also helps us to understand the infusion behavior of flavored teas as compared to pure teas. When flavoring is added in the form of extracts or essential oils, the flavoring is added to the surface of the leaf. While some of the flavor may permeate deeper into the leaf, it is concentrated on the surface. The flavoring thus infuses very quickly. This is why flavored teas often have the strongest aroma of their "flavor" in the first infusion, and then taste more like tea in subsequent infusions.

Food, Surface Area, and Nutrition:

Surface area is relevant in food and nutrition as well. The skin of fruits and vegetables tend to be richer in vitamins, minerals, and proteins than the interior. Although not all fruit and vegetables have edible skin, the ones that do often have remarkably more nutritional value in their skin. As an example, let's look at the potato:

The USDA Nutrient Database tells us that 100 grams of baked potato skins have 4 grams of protein, 8 grams of fiber, and 39% RDA of Iron. 100 grams of baked potato flesh, on the other hand, while slightly less caloric (probably because they contain more water), only contains 2% of Iron, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of fiber. Baked potatos are not a good example for comparing Vitamin C content because the skin of the potato is exposed to more heat than the interior, so, although the skin is richer in Vitamin C, baked potato skins have similar vitamin C content. This is just an example. In some fruits, such as apples, the skin contains much more vitamin C by weight than the flesh. Moral of the story: don't peel your fruits and vegetables.



This blue potato has a lumpy shape, increasing its surface-area per unit volume. Buying lumpy, irregularly-shaped varieties of fruit can actually lead to better nutrition by adding more surface area. Similarly, buying small fruits also has the same effect.

Surface Area And Information in Quantum Physics:

There is some relatively recent work in quantum physics that has suggested a most peculiar result: it is possible that the amount of information that can be stored in a region of space is bounded not by its volume, but by its surface area. If you're a physicist, you can find the original paper here: Operational view of the holographic information bound, published in Physics Review D, Vol. 82, No. 12, 2010.

Doesn't it sound bizarre and counterintuitive? In other words, imagine a filing cabinet. The amount of information you can put in the cabinet depends not on the space inside the cabinet, but on the amount of area on the walls of the cabinet.

What does all this mean?

The point is...the phenomenon of the surface being more important than the inside of something, and the surface area being more important than volume for various practical reasons, is a phenomenon that appears again and again at all levels of our world: with tea, with food, with microbiology, and with the very fundamental laws of physics at the smallest possible scales.

So next time someone describes something as superficial, stop to think...maybe they're actually describing the things that really matter in life.

Trader Joe's Tea - And Commentary On The Chain As A Whole

Some time ago I wrote a long post about Tea at Wegmans Supermarket, which I followed up on by reviewing nine of Wemgans' Teas and herbal teas on RateTea. This post is about another supermarket chain: Trader Joe's. The following picture shows a Trader Joe's that I have visited before, in Media, PA, although this is not the store I regularly shop at. If you've seen me with my hat, the flower (a poppy) in my hat was a gift from a veteran outside this store, after I donated some money. This store was built inside the old Media armory, which also houses the Pennsylvania Veteran's Museum:



Trader Joe's and Wegmans share a few things in common: they are both perceived as relatively high-end supermarket chains, catering to people who like food and want higher-quality products. But the similarities end there. Both the tea selection and the stores as a whole are vastly different.

Trader Joe's Tea:

Tea is not Trader Joe's strong suit. The company does sell its own brand of tea. However, the tea is only available in tea bags, and as tea bags go, I personally find them quite disappointing. If you read reviews of Trader Joe's Tea on RateTea, you'll see that, as of writing this, all of their tea ratings on the site are in the 40-50 range (out of 100). They're not terrible, but no one seems to love them either. There are no single-region teas, and no loose-leaf teas.



Trader Joe's also does not seem to put as much effort into tea as they do coffee. The company has a full four pages on their website about coffee, and not one page on tea. Their coffee offerings are also, in my opinion, clearly superior to their tea offerings: they sell single-origin coffee, including some shade-grown coffee.

I do believe that, with little effort, Trader Joe's could do better. Most of Trader Joe's products are consistently high quality for a relatively low price, and their tea seems to fall outside this pattern: it is average-priced, but strikes me as below-average in quality. Even if they just wanted to stock tea bags, they could stock higher-quality tea bags. Maybe they could throw in an offering or two from Ten Ren Tea, which, in my opinion, offers one of the best quality-to-price ratios among simple tea bags. Even offering just Foojoy tea bags would be a step up in quality (and a step down in price) from what they currently sell. And there are so many great companies out there selling simple tea bags that are better than what Trader Joe's offers, and lower in price. Why not throw some single-region teas in the mix?

If I were running Trader Joe's:

If I were running Trader Joe's, I'd make the following changes:

• Sell finum basket infusers in the tea section, and sell some boxes of loose-leaf tea. I'd search long and hard to find a product offering superior quality at a low price, like the three teas I featured in my post cheap tea: loose-leaf teas offering outstanding value.
• I'd put a big, and cute sign next to the loose-leaf tea for about 6 months after stocking it, saying something to the effect of: "Loose-leaf tea saves money, protects the environment, and is superior in flavor." These are three things that Trader Joe's customers seem to care about, and I think it would probably make the loose-leaf tea sell quickly, even among people who had not ever tried loose-leaf tea before.
• I'd put an equal amount of pages on their website about tea as about coffee. I'd highlight the individual products they offer, and draw attention to the fact that the company was now selling loose-leaf tea, and explain the benefits of loose-leaf tea in terms of price, quality, and sustainability.
• I'd find a new supplier for their private-label brand of tea bags. From what I've tried of them, I don't think their current tea bags compare well to what else is out there, even among low-end tea bags.
• I'd add single-region tea bags, like Darjeeling, Assam, and I'd probably offer some of the most popular Japanese styles of green tea, like hojicha and genmaicha, and maybe some Chinese teas as well, like oolongs and green tea. I know these things exist because I've had decent tea in tea bags for a fair price from brands like Ten Ren Tea, Foojoy, Harney and Sons, and Jacksons of Piccadilly.

In short, all Trader Joe's needs to do is to start thinking more about what tea they offer. The offerings now seem to reflect a lack of consideration or focus on this product, like tea is merely an afterthought.

Trader Joe's as a Whole:

While I'm writing on the topic of Trader Joe's, I want to comment on the chain as a whole. I shop here semi-regularly (every couple of months) and there is a lot I like about the store. But there's also a lot that I dislike.

Strengths:

In my opinion, the biggest strength of Trader Joe's is that it has consistently fair prices on products that are consistently above average quality. I think the best products to buy at Trader Joe's are packaged products that you can buy in relatively large quantities. I buy such things at this store as raw nuts, dried fruit, kalamata olives in glass jars, canned smoked herring, and massive bars of 70% dark chocolate. I also buy a fair amount of cheese and chicken sausage at the store.

I also want to mention some strengths of this store, other than the quality of the products: the employees are very courteous, which, according to my friends who have worked at this store, follows naturally from the fact that Trader Joe's treats their employees very well and the store is a pleasant place to work. I also like the no-nonsense pricing -- there are no sales or complex deals, only consistently fair prices. Another benefit of shopping here is that the store keeps enough staff on hand so that lines stay short, even when the store is busy.

Weaknesses:

Trader Joe's produce section is close to what I would consider an epic fail. Nearly all the produce is shipped in from very far away; the chain lags behind even the most "ghetto" supermarkets in terms of its lack of locally-grown or even semi-locally-grown produce. Much of the produce is packaged, and a very large portion of it originates outside the country. Once in a rare while I've picked up a good batch of something or other here, but my experiences, by and large, with the produce have been pretty bad.

Trader Joe's also fails when it comes to the sustainability of their fish offerings (with the exception of the canned fish I mentioned above). There is no fresh fish in the store, only canned fish and frozen, packaged fish, which can be fine, except for the problem that much of what the company sells is among the worst choices available from the perspective of sustainability and health. I use Seafood Watch and EDF's Seafood Selector to guide my choices of what fish to buy, and a large portion of what Trader Joe's stocks is on the "Avoid" or "Eco-Worst" list of these organizations, not to mention that many are also marked as being high in mercury and/or PCB's.

In terms of the store itself, some other downsides of this chain are that the store interiors tend to be cramped and have traffic jams during busy times of day, and that many of the store's parking lots also tend to be cramped. I have also noticed that some of their stores in urban areas have a pedestrian-unfriendly design. For example, there is a Trader Joe's on market street in Philadelphia, but you can only enter from the rear of the building, where the parking lot is--friendly to drivers but unfriendly to walkers or people arriving from the trolley stop.

What do you think?

Do you shop at Trader Joe's? What do you think of their tea offerings? Do you think they could do better? How about the chain as a whole?

Tea-Food Pairings: Kiwifruit And Pouchong

I mostly discover tea-food pairings by accident. I recently I discovered an unlikely pairing that I thought went quite well together: kiwifruit and Pouchong / Bao Zhong tea.



Photo by André Karwath aka Aka, Wikimedia commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.

On Kiwifruit:

Kiwifruit are a rather strange fruit; they are quite delicious (and high in Vitamin C), but leave a lingering tangy quality on the palate, which I find can radically change the experience of anything I eat or drink after them. Sometimes, I find the effect on a cup of tea is negative, especially if the tea is a more mellow or subtle one. Usually, the teas that I find are best to drink after eating a kiwi are strong teas which overpower the lingering flavor and sensations left by the fruit, but teas that work well with having an additional tangy quality added to them.

Pouchong or Kiwifruit:

Pouchong is a type of tea that I would not expect to go well with Kiwifruit. Its flavor is mild and slightly sweet, and its aroma gentle, floral, and vegetal. But I found that, in the case of the pouchong I most recently tried, they went pretty well together.

This Pouchong:

I drank a cup of Upton Tea Import's TT92: Formosa Pouchong. When I first ordered from Upton, they had only two Pouchongs in their catalogue. Both were extremely high-end, among the highest-priced of Upton's offerings. One of the reasons I prefer Upton is their lower prices. This new offering is not cheap, but it is lower in price than either of the two other teas (both of which they still carry). You can read my review of this newer pouchong on RateTea.

What do you think?

Does kiwifruit spoil or interfere with your experience of tea? Can you see pouchong going well with kiwi?

Molasses in Tea

A post on the (now defunct) tea blog Steep, Sip, Smile, "’tis the season for holiday teas" got me thinking. This post was about holiday teas and holiday cookies. The post resonated me because of the way the author, Mary Beth, remarked that she is usually not a big fan of sweets and tends to like her tea unsweetened.

The thought of "holiday teas" and holiday cookies got me thinking about the cookies that I like most. One type of holiday cookie that I really love is gingerbread cookies, and I like gingerbread cookies that use a lot of very dark molasses. I like the cookies to come out very dark brown, almost black, and I like them to have a strong molasses flavor but without being very sweet. One way to achieve this is by using blackstrap molasses, a very dark type of molasses that is not particularly appealing looking:


This photo by Badagnani, courtesy of Wikimedia commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0.

Molasses, an interesting by-product:

One thing that I find interesting about molasses is that it is a by-product of the production of refined sugar. As sugar is refined, all the other things in the sugar cane become concentrated in the by-product. As a result, molasses is extremely high in iron and other mineral nutrients. According to the USDA Nutrient database, a tablespoon (20g) of typical molasses contains only 11 grams of sugar, yet has 5% of your iron and 4% of your calcium for the day. This may not exactly be the healthiest food, but it sure beats refined sugar.

This whole phenomenon is interesting to me because it reflects some of the things that are harmful about how our society treats food. We highly process and refine certain foods, and in doing so, the more "desirable" foods actually become less nutritive. The refining of sugar is in many respects analogous to the refining of grains to produce white flours. But this is just an aside...back to tea.

Molasses in tea:

Have you ever used molasses to sweeten tea? If you do, I would not recommend using blackstrap molasses like that pictured above. I actually don't have any molasses on hand so I can't even try this out, but I was thinking about the combination of tea and molasses and wanted to throw the idea out there.

My intuition is that I'd like to put molasses in a strong, malty black tea like an Assam, or perhaps a deep, fruity black tea like Keemun. I'd also imagine that it would be hard to get it to dissolve...molasses is extremely viscous and tends to be slower to dissolve than honey.

I really have no idea how it would taste though. If anyone has tried it, or tries it after reading this post, please let me know.

More Thanksgivings For Tea

Last year, I published a post around Thanksgiving time, Thankful about Tea. I am still very thankful for the things mentioned in that post, and I would recommend reading it if you missed it. This post is in the same spirit. I am not just thankful for tea, but thankful for many things that have some connection to tea. I am thankful for:

• I'm thankful for Sylvia Odhner and her work that has helped RateTea look much nicer, as well as for her wonderful friendship that has helped me to grow in more ways than I can put into words.


• I'm thankful for the time I have in my life to slow down and enjoy a cup of tea multiple times throughout the day, and for the rest and mindfulness that these small breaks produce.


• I'm thankful for the earth's ecosystems that have given us tea, together with the myriad of different plants and animals we use for food, drink, and all sorts of other purposes.

If you eat turkey this thanksgiving, please remember where turkeys come from, and that they originated as wild creatures with great dignity. Look at the agility demonstrated by this wild turkey, which was perched high in a tree and flew across a large expanse of open water:



Happy thanksgiving!

Tea Food Pairings - Black Grapes & Assam

The subject of tea-food pairings is one that I have been wanting to explore more, ever since I discovered about a year and a half ago that spicy food enhanced a tea that I did not otherwise enjoy, and similarly, that I found shou mei, one of my favorite styles of tea, did not go well with spicy foods. But today, instead of spicy foods, the foods in question that I'd like to explore are grapes:



Pictured on the left are black grapes, and on the right, red grapes. These grapes were grown in California, and are currently in season, so are inexpensive and tend to be relatively high in quality. While I prefer buying local produce, I definitely prefer buying California grapes, while in-season, to produced shipped from outside the country.

I typically eat some fruit with my breakfast, and I've had a lot of these grapes on hand recently, so I've been munching on them as I drink my morning cup of tea. In the course of eating these grapes together with different teas, I've realized something about tea-grape pairings. This is not the first time I've explored tea-fruit pairings; see Pare down the teas to pair with your pear for a similar post based on a terrible play on words, or Grapefruit and tea for my discovery that one of my favorite breakfast fruits often spoils the flavors of many types of tea.

Grapes and tea:

Certain types of tea have a natural grape-like quality. Both Darjeeling black teas and Bai Hao Oolong often have a quality said to resemble muscat grapes, a specific type of grape. Of the two grapes pictured above, muscat grapes are probably more similar to the black grapes on the left...which brings us into the realizations of pairing.

The red grapes above, I found to be relatively neutral among fruits. They were crisp, lightly sweet, lightly sour, and somewhat watery, making them refreshing without really dominating the palate. These grapes seemed to go well with just about any teas I drank for breakfast, black, green, oolong, Pu-erh, or white. They did not get in the way of my appreciation of the tea, nor did they enhance it.

Black grapes:

The black grapes however, were another beast. These were a bit stranger, not the usual grapes you buy at the supermarket. They had a dusty outside, and their skin was noticeably astringent. The interior was intensely sweet, but less sour than the familiar red or green grapes, and they had a strong, deep aroma, reminiscent more of raisins than of most fresh grapes.

I tried these grapes with a variety of teas and I found that they tended to overpower most teas, including lighter black teas, green teas, and white teas. However, the mornings that I drank strong Assam (lately I've been drinking a lot of Ahmad Tea's Kalami Assam), I found that these grapes not only went well with the tea, but helped me to enjoy the tea in a more intense and deeper way than I normally did. It was hard to notice which qualities were from the grapes and which from the tea, as both left lingering flavors on the palate, but I found that sipping the tea after munching on these grapes led to an explosion of a deep, fruity aroma, like in some of the better Keemun I've tried--qualities sometimes present in Assam, but not to this degree.

How about you?

Have you ever tried grapes like the ones described here? Do you like eating grapes with tea? Which teas and grapes do you think go well together?

Antioxidants: Tea vs. Vitamins A, C, and E

This post is about the relationship between tea, antioxidants, and several different classes of antioxidants, including essential vitamin antioxidants (including Vitamins A, C, and E), synthetic antioxidants, and naturally-occurring antioxidants such as catechins and anthocyanins. I wrote about antioxidants last November, but this post goes into more depth.

Pictured here is one of my favorite fruits, a blood orange:



A blood orange is an interesting variety of orange that has a deep reddish color. The red pigment is due to the presence of anthocyanins, a class of natural pigments which are known to work as antioxidants. Another red-pigmented orange variety, the Cara cara orange, or red navel orange, is also pigmented red, but due to a different pigment, lycopene, the pigment giving tomatoes their characteristic orange-red color. I chose an orange because oranges have a reputation for being very high in Vitamin C. Vitamin C is also an antioxidant.

Anthocyanins also occur in high concentrations in certain varieties of tea plant. One particularly pronounced example of this is purple tea, which is a varietal of tea plant with dark purple leaves, loaded with anthocyanins. This variety was developed in Kenya. I recently tried purple tea for the first time, and I hope to write more about it in future posts.

Antioxidants in Tea:

One of the most popular topics when it comes to tea and health is that of antioxidants. Unfortunately, "antioxidants" have become a bit of a buzzword, and in some cases, a marketing scheme or even scam used to sell tea, or worse, sell herbal supplement products containing tea.

It is pretty well-established scientific fact tea is rich in antioxidants. If you want to read in more depth about these chemicals, there's a ton of info on RateTea's article on antioxidants in tea. What's less clear is the degree to which these antioxidants are actually beneficial to health. As strange as this may sound, although there's a fair amount of evidence that tea is good for your health, there's little to no evidence that the health benefits of tea can be attributed to the antioxidant activity of chemicals in the tea. The article explains more.

Essential Antioxidant Vitamins vs. Other Antioxidants:

Many people are surprised to learn that a number of essential vitamins, including Vitamin A, Vitamin C, and Vitamin C, are antioxidants. Perhaps more shocking to health nuts is the realization that the synthetic preservatives BHA (Butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (Butylated hydroxytoluene) are also antioxidants. BHA and BHT are both controversial food additives, and both show some evidence of having harmful effects on health, although the research on this topic is inconclusive. The point is, antioxidants are not necessarily beneficial, and can even be harmful.

Essential Vitamins, on the other hand, are very different beasts. Vitamins A, C, and E are all antioxidants. Although each of these vitamins can be problematic in extremely high doses under certain conditions (one form of Vitamin A, retinol, can be harmful in high doses, and others, such as beta-carotein, can turn your skin orange) they are generally quite safe. There is a lot of research suggesting that most people in the U.S. consume far too little Vitamin C, although this is a matter of controversy. Wikipedia has some good sources on this controversy on their section on Vitamin C's Daily Requirements.

The catechins, the antioxidants of green tea, and the theaflavins and thearubigins (together called tannins), are not essential nutrients. They may be beneficial to health, but they are certainly not necessary, and they do have some downsides (such as inhibiting iron absorption).

Tea or fresh fruits and vegetables?

As wonderful as tea is, it is not necessary to human health, nor is caffeine, nor is theanine, an amino acid derivative found in high concentrations in tea.

Fresh fruits and vegetables, for the most part (with a few exceptions such as certain Inuit diets), are necessary for optimal health. If you want antioxidants, eat a diversity of fresh fruits and vegetables...they're loaded with vitamin A, C, and E, nature's antioxidants. Drink tea if you like the taste, and the way it makes you feel.

What do you think?

I'm curious...how much of the information in this post is new, unfamiliar, or surprising to you, and how much of it is old stuff that you already know inside and out?

Seasonality of Tea and Nature

One of my favorite aspects of reading tea blogs, which is more evident in some blogs than others, is reading about nature. Among these blogs, one of my favorites is Tea for Today, where Marlena often adds detailed little notes about birds she observed, and often includes nature scenes. I also love Tea Musings, a blog with original poetry; many of these poems focus on aspects of nature and the changing seasons. I very highly recommend both of these blogs if you love nature as much as I do.

The way I view it, becoming interested in and knowledgeable about tea, beyond a certain level of introductory knowledge, requires becoming interested in nature. In this post I want to show how the seasonality in tea is part of a broader trend of patterns that exist in numerous other plants and animals. Here's a picture that, for me, captures this time of year, early fall:



This photo shows a black-and-white warbler in fall plumage. This is a first-year bird. The fall migration season of birds is characterized by an abundance of newly-raised first-year birds, travelling south for the winter. In the background are the yellowing leaves of a hackberry tree, partly bare already. Hackberry trees, of the Celtis genus, lose their leaves relatively early, but this year, many of these trees lost their leaves particularly early. In nature, there are fluctuations in the health and population of nearly all living things, including plants and animals. Just as the tea harvest is different each year, each tree species fares better some years than others, insect infestations wax and wane (attacking stressed trees more easily), and bird populations grow, shrink, and move in response to the abundance of food. These hackberry trees, partly defoliated and full of insects, and also full of ripe fruit, attracted huge mixed flocks of migratory warblers, who help to control the populations of these insects.

The changing of the seasons is evident in this bird; compare its appearance to a photo I took of the same species in spring, in the same area:



The background shows the intact, yellow-green leaves of spring, in this case, on a white oak. This bird has a black throat and cheek, signaling that it is a male. (I'm pretty sure the first bird is male too). You can click the photos to learn more about these birds.

One reason I wanted to share these birds is to make an analogy to the seasonality of tea. Both of these birds are clearly identifiable as black-and-white warblers. The differences between them are noticeable, especially after someone points them out, but they might not be immediately evident to an untrained eye. This difference is a lot like the difference between the different flushes or harvests of tea, for instance, Darjeeling black tea. A connoisseur would usually (not always) be able to easily distinguish first flush from, say, autumnal flush (which, by the way, is coming available right now). But inexperienced tea drinkers often (not always) would not. I think in this respect, seasonal distinctions in the different qualities of tea are a lot like the seasonal differences in bird plumage. There is a certain unity in how nature works and is organized.

Changing of the seasons:

The changing of seasons is a very fundamental aspect to human existence. Some areas, such as the eastern United States, where I am located, have four well-defined seasons, whereas other areas have fewer, more subtle, or different seasons. For example, San Diego has a cool, slightly rainy season in their "winter", a cloudy but generally rainless spell around May-June, and then a sunny late summer and early fall, sliding back into the cooler, slightly rainy winter. Only certain climates produce the familiar fall or autumn with changing tree colors and fallen leaves of diverse colors:



Many of the major tea-growing regions have very strong, well-defined seasons, but these seasons do not always correspond to what most Americans or Europeans know of as seasons. South and Southeast Asia has a strongly pronounced monsoon season, much more pronounced than any of the seasonal precipitation patterns in North America. Most of Asia has wet summers and dry winters. The dry winters produce a greater swing of temperatures during the winter than similar areas experience in North America...but Asia experiences fewer heavy snow events. Some tea-growing areas, including much of Sri Lanka, and parts of Africa, have a bimodal precipitation pattern, meaning that there are two distinct wet seasons and two distinct dry seasons in each year. In many tropical regions, the seasons are poorly defined at low altitudes, where it is warm year-round, but as altitude rises and it becomes both colder and rainier, the seasons become more pronounced. This effect is evident on the west-coast of the U.S., such as in how high altitudes in Southern California show a full four seasons like the east coast.

Unfortunately, our modern society has often disconnected us from the seasons. Carefully climate-controlled interiors of offices, homes, and cars make us comfortable, but disconnect us from the world outside. Year-round avaliability of normally seasonal foods like apples, oranges, or even lettuce, further disconnects us. We lose touch with nature. Is this what we really want? I don't want it at all, and as I've gotten older, I've realized that I'm willing to give up something (i.e. no apples in spring, no plums in winter) in order to be more in touch with what's really going on. I also have found that the food I eat tends to taste better, and also be more affordable, when I eat what's in season. Living this way is also more sustainable, as eating and using what is seasonally available requires fewer resources; it involves working with rather than working against nature.

The following photo of a red Bartlett pear and a Valencia orange looks natural, but is not: Bartlett pears are a fall crop of cold climates, and Valencia oranges, a late winter / early spring crop of milder climates. It's simply not possible that these were both produced locally--not even both on the east coast of the US. One of these was clearly shipped across the globe from a different climate:



The same things are true of tea, to a degree:

Single-harvest teas vs. blends:

Naturally, as the growing conditions of the tea plant change throughout the year, the character of the tea produced changes, sometimes radically. Large tea companies, including the brands of tea owned by Unilever, seeking a consistent product, often blend-out these differences, changing the proportion of teas used in their blends in order to retain a consistent flavor and character of their tea year-round and from one year to the next.

While I can understand the drive to consistency, I resist it. I want to taste that variability. And I want to stay true to production methods that work with nature, rather than working against it. Nature has variability. I want to taste that variability, and I certainly don't want to pay to blend it out.

How about you?

Red Shiso (Perilla) for Herbal Tea

In this post I want to write about a fascinating herb which is important both as an herbal tea its own right, for blending with Japanese green teas, and for culinary uses. The English common name is Perilla, but as this herb is not well-known in Western cultures, and many people have not heard of it under this name. In Japanese, it is referred to as Shiso(紫蘇). If you want to learn more about this herb, there is a good Wikipedia page on perilla. The plant is in the mint family, the same family which also contains basil and coleus. Here is a picture of red shiso, a red-leafed variety of Perilla frutescens (there are several different species in the Perilla genus); this picture shows the clear visual resemblance to basil and coleus:



Shiso has a variety of uses. One of them is in blending with Japanese green tea, usually sencha. On RateTea I created a page for Shiso sencha, but the only two listings have both been discontinued. I haven't exhaustively searched for other providers of this sort of blend, but a quick google search shows that they are available, so hopefully I can get to adding some more soon. In Japan, shiso is used not only as a seasoning but also a vegetable.

The flavor and aroma of Shiso is interesting...it is relatively mild but has a lot of different components to it. It is mildly suggestive of anise or licorice, but also somewhat resembles mint and basil, and it has a faint skunky quality. It is milder in flavor than basil and much milder than mint. I have found that many people find it very pleasing, but a small number of people find it to have an unpleasant aroma.

Perilla / Shiso Naturalizes Easily:

I took this photo in an alley or very small street in center city Philadelphia. This plant is widely used as a landscaping plant in Philadelphia, often co-planted with the tropical plant Coleus, which bears superficial resemblance to it. But, in contrast to the tropical Coleus, which cannot survive the cold winters in temperate climates, Perilla is adapted to cold-winter regions, and will easily naturalize. In Philadelphia and surrounding areas, it grows wild, coming up from seed (and usually retaining its red color). Some people even view it as an invasive species. Here is a picture of it coming up wild in a Philadelphia sidewalk:



Perilla is a highly vigorous plant, growing in between cracks in brick sidewalks, up against buildings, and in flower beds. As it is often planted deliberately, it's sometimes hard to tell where it has been planted and where it has come up naturally.

Herbal Tea from Red Shiso:

I gathered a bunch of this plant while on a walk in my neighborhood the other day, and brewed up a batch of it as a fresh herbal tea. The infusion shows a brownish purple color:



It was quite delicious. Like the dry leaf, the infusion smelled somewhere in between anise, basil, and mint, and had a slightly skunky finish. It was exceptionally smooth on the palate, and had a slightly sweet flavor, with only a hint of bitterness, and no astringency. Although some people might not like it because of the mild skunkiness, overall, I found this drink to be very pleasing and I could see drinking this regularly.

Eating Perilla:

In my last post, herbal infusions and cooked vegetable broth, I made the point that we often discard the broth after cooking vegetables, and that this broth can be viewed as an herbal infusion, and drunk. Conversely, when brewing an herbal infusion from fresh leaves, instead of discarding the steeped leaves, we can eat them as a vegetable. In accordance with the Japanese use of Shiso as a vegetable, I decided to eat the leaves leftover after steeping, and they were delicious! They had a mild flavor, similar to the infusion, and were fairly tender in texture, certainly more tender than a variety of greens, like collards or kale, which are widely consumed in the U.S.

Have you tried Shiso or Perilla?

Did you know about this herb before reading this post? Have you ever used it as a seasoning? Grown it? Eaten it? Infused it, either on its own, or blending it with sencha or other tea?

Herbal Infusions and Cooked Vegetable Broth

Pictured below is an herbal infusion: for once, I actually am not using the term herbal tea because there is nothing remotely tea-like about the process I used to create this liquid:



What is it? It looks a little bit like hibiscus tea, but it's not...a little too light perhaps? It does not taste remotely like hibiscus. This is nothing you'd ever buy at a tea or herb shop, it's the broth left over after cooking vegetables, a specific type of cooked green. Red-veined amaranth leaves, to be specific, called xian cai(莧菜/苋菜) in Chinese. Here are the greens themselves, after cooking:



I found the leaves to have a flavor most closely resembling green beans, but with suggestions of beets and asparagus. They tasted very familiar, even though I have never consciously eaten them before. If you click on the photo of the cooked greens, you can read more about my experience cooking and eating them. In contrast to some new vegetables, which often become more of an acquired taste, I think this vegetable would be pretty accessible to someone who likes the more familiar Western cooked greens and other vegetables.

What is amaranth?

In the U.S., amaranth is most known for its use as an alternative grain; it is generally available in health food stores, and is also gluten-free. It is also a relative of quinoa. In China and India, especially in warmer regions, however, amaranth is widely used as a cooked vegetable. Amaranth thrives in hot climates with poor soil, where the heat and soil are poor for growing greens like spinach that are popular in northern climates. I first learned of amaranth's use as a cooked green from an Indian gardener in Cleveland.

Vegetable Broth vs. Herbal Tea:

In our modern society, when we cook vegetables, we often discard the broth, viewing it as waste. Yet we then go out and buy herbal teas, carefully steep them, and drink them. At times, we even drink foul-tasting concoctions in search of their supposed "health benefits". In this post I want to highlight something so simple it's almost mindless. When you cook vegetables, the resulting leftover water is an herbal infusion; it's packed with vitamins, minerals, and beneficial phytochemicals--anything water-soluble goes out in the broth. And it's fresher and more nutritious than any infusion that you could make from dried herbs, as the drying process results in considerable loss and degradation of vitamins and flavor.

There are a few cases where it is not good to drink vegetable broth; some plants used as vegetables, such as pokeweed, have water-soluble toxins and which are only edible after repeated boiling and draining, but these plants are generally not widely available at stores or markets in the U.S.

What did this amaranth broth taste like?

If you're not used to drinking the leftover broth after cooking vegetables, it may taste a bit strange to you. The flavor is the very essence of vegetal...after all, the word "vegetal" is just an attempt to describe the aromas and flavors of vegetables when they occur in tea or other food or drink where we may not expect them.

It was definitely not the sort of thing that I would seek out to drink as a beverage, on its own, but it was also not at all unpleasant. Perhaps I would acquire a taste for it if I drank this sort of thing more. But the experience was interesting to me, and I think will inform my palate when tasting teas and herbal teas that have vegetal qualities.

What do you think?

Some questions come to my mind. Do you ever drink the leftover broth after cooking vegetables? What is the cutoff between vegetable broth, and herbal tea brewed from fresh herbs? Does this distinction only lie in intentions? What do you think of the vegetal qualities in tea? And have you ever tried amaranth greens?

Ginger in Tea and Herbal Teas

I love ginger; it is one of my favorite spices and I use it heavily in cooking. I have even grown ginger...it is relatively easy to grow indoors. In the spirit of raising awareness between the food, tea, and herbs we eat, and the plants they come from, here is a picture of a ginger rhizome, sprouting:



Ginger is the rhizome of a grassy plant, Zingiber officinale; the rhizome is storage area below the ground, looking like a root but technically part of the plant's stem; the rhizome stores energy, nutrients, and water so that if the above-ground part of the plant is threatened or dies, the plant can regrow when conditions are right. This adaptation allows ginger to survive drought, as well as having its leaves and stems eaten. The strong-tasting chemicals which give ginger its flavor are concentrated in the rhizome, to protect this most important part of the plant. I wish I had a picture of the ginger plant that I grew for two years, but I cannot find one. The ginger plant looks like a grass, here's a photo of the ginger plant on Wikimedia commons. This picture looks nearly exactly like what my plant looked like.

This next photo shows fresh ginger root which I have sliced in order to brew up a batch of iced tea:




Dried Ginger vs. Fresh Ginger:

One reason I feel particularly compelled to share these pictures and this post is that, over the years, I've tried a number of blends containing dried ginger, and they just don't do it for me. I think that ginger is one of those spices that is best fresh, and that loses most of its character when dried.

Still, I do sometimes enjoy teas and herbs which have been blended with dried ginger. I will say, I do not have any dried ginger in my cabinet, and I have never bought it; fresh ginger root is a staple in my household.

Medicinal Properties of Ginger:

Ginger is a fairly common ingredient in herbal blends. It has potent medicinal properties, or supposed "health benefits", to use a buzzword I have become slightly annoyed with lately. Ginger is used traditionally to settle the stomach and provide relief from nausea. I personally find it to be very effective for this purpose. Wikipedia's article on ginger is fairly well-referenced and explains these medicinal uses, and what is known of the chemistry of ginger, in more depth.

Ginger as a Flavoring for Tea:

Ginger is also used as a flavoring in black tea, sometimes on its own, but often when paired with peach. Adagio Teas sells a black tea flavored with ginger, and a number of brands, including Adagio, Republic of Tea, Revolution, Stash, Bentley's, and many others, sell ginger peach tea. These ginger-peach flavored teas, usually but not always black teas, are very popular. I used to regularly visit a coffee shop in University Heights, OH, which sold a ginger peach tea, and it seemed that more customers ordered this tea than all the others combined. I will say, even though I'm not a huge fan of flavored teas, I do like this combination.

Ginger is also a common, but not necessarily defining ingredient in masala chai or spiced tea. I like including some ginger in chai, but I generally do not miss it when it is absent (unlike cardamom).

Ginger in Herbal Blends:

Ginger is widely used in herbal blends. One of the most common combinations is lemon ginger. While I find that lemon and ginger go very well together (one of my favorite combinations for an iced herbal drink is boiling fresh lemongrass and fresh ginger root, then chilling it), I find that most herbal blends focusing on ginger, and relying on dried ginger, just don't do it for me. Teatulia has an odd ginger herbal infusion that also includes the herb Vasaka (Justicia adhatoda). I wasn't really a fan of this either...the Vasaka is extremely bitter; while I normally like bitter flavors, it was too bitter for me, so I suspect it is probably too bitter for a majority of others as well.

How about you?

Do you ever use fresh ginger as a flavoring for tea, or for making herbal infusions? Do you like the presence of ginger in masala chai, or other blends? Do you notice much of a difference between fresh and dried ginger? Have you ever tried growing ginger?

Tea as Slow Food: Fast Tea vs Slow Tea

Today I want to write about a social movement that, in my opinion, is directly related to the world of tea. This is the slow food movement. Slow food is a broad and far-reaching concept; it can be seen as an opposite or alternative to "fast food". The idea of slow food is to preserve and create new traditional local and regional cuisines, to enjoy food together with people, and to become more aware of where our food comes from. By promoting local food cultures, the movement encourages diversity, and by promoting local foods and raising awareness of how food is produced, the movement promotes sustainability. The huge number of tags I've classified this post with demonstrates that this movement is related to many different facets of the things I care about.

The logo of this movement is a snail, cutely symbolic of slowness:



Wikipedia has a great article about slow food, which I would recommend at least glancing at. If you want official information from the movement itself, you can visit the websites of Slow Food International or Slow Food USA. The slow food movement is something I strongly support, so I would urge you to check it out, and give some thought to what it advocates, beyond just reading this post.

How does slow food relate to tea?

Tea, like any food or beverage, can be viewed (and produced/consumed) in any number of different ways. Virtually everything about the slow food movement can be applied to tea, except possibly the "buy local" part (although one can still buy or grow local herbs for use in herbal teas, and one can certainly support local tea shops and tea houses). Using the concept of "fast food vs. slow food" as a continuum, we have two different "ends of the spectrum" so to speak.

Tea as fast food: "fast tea":

The ultimate manifestation of tea as fast food is ready-to-drink tea, which includes both bottled tea and tea in cans and other types of containers. This tea is brewed in a factory, packaged, and sold as-is. Ready-to-drink tea is fast food, in that it is quick and easy to purchase and then immediately drink, and that it is primarily an industrial product, produced in a factory, with minimal preparation on behalf of the person consuming it.

Tea as slow food: "slow tea":

At the opposing, "slowest" end of the spectrum, would be single-estate, single-harvest whole-leaf teas, processed by traditional methods, and brewed traditionally in loose-leaf form. Tea traditions are diverse, so I will not claim that "slow tea" needs to be brewed gong fu style in a gaiwan or Yixing tea pot. There are rich tea traditions in eastern and western Europe, in the middle east, and all across the globe, and they each have different practices of enjoying tea. But in order for it to be slow tea, it needs to be brewed at the point of drinking, and it needs to be brewed and drunk with care and thought.

Slow tea, like slow food, encompasses not just the production of the tea, but also the enjoyment of it. Slow tea is not just about the tea originating in a specific garden, but it is about the person drinking the tea knowing which garden it is from, and knowing when it was harvested, and knowing a bit about what makes this tea special. And slow tea involves paying attention to how the tea tastes, and enjoying the setting and process of drinking tea, whether it's a calm, meditative tea session alone, or sharing tea with friends or family.

Most tea is somewhere in the middle:

Relative to loose-leaf tea, tea bags certainly move much farther in the direction of "fast tea", but from the vantage point of bottled or ready-to-drink teas, they are more "slow".

In summary:

The slow food movement is a social movement which promotes greater awareness of and enjoyment of food, including awareness of where food comes from, enjoyment of food, and preservation and promotion of local food cultures. Slow food can easily be applied to tea, and pushes one in the direction of single-estate, single-harvest, loose-leaf teas, brewed with care and enjoyed mindfully either in a private reflective state, or shared with friends or family.

Slow tea and RateTea:

Personally, I want to support the slow food movement and what it advocates for. One of the main motivating factors behind creating RateTea is to get people to think more about tea, in the same sort of framework that the slow food movement works. I want people to rate teas not to discover which tea is "best" in some absolute sense, but just because I want them to start thinking about how their tea tastes...a key idea with RateTea is that the ratings and reviews are tied into a database that classifies each tea by style and by region, and in one click, a person can go from a page of a specific review, or a specific tea, to an article about that style of tea, or that tea-producing region. The idea is to draw casual tea drinkers in and open the world of high-quality loose tea to them, and in doing so, get them to think more about food and drink as a whole, and hopefully, move our society in the direction of greater sustainability in the process, so that we are all healthier, happier, and more able to appreciate all our food and drink, and where it comes from.

How about you?

Were you aware of the slow food movement before reading this post? Where do you think your own tea habits fall on the fast food / slow food spectrum? Does your interest in awareness of tea's production and enjoyment of artisan teas carry forward into your appreciation and awareness of food in general? Were you aware of my intentions of promoting "slow food" through RateTea or do you think this is something it would be good for me to emphasize more on the site?