Confession About The Type of Tea Kettle I Use

Today I want to share a confession that may be astonishing to some of you.

I recently read a post on Uniquely tea, about tea kettles, in which Denise asks the question of what type of tea kettle people use. I originally posted my comment on that blog, but then I realized that it was interesting enough to share here as a post of its own:

My confession...I do not even own a tea kettle! I exclusively heat water for tea using a regular pot on the stove, usually, a copper bottom revere ware pot, to be precise. When the water is sufficiently hot, I pour it into a mug, teapot, or gaiwan, depending on what mood I'm in.

Why no tea kettle?

My apartment has a very small kitchen, with limited storage space. As I love food and love to cook, I have a variety of large implements, including a blender, toaster oven, and lots of food supplies. I also have a lot of cupboard space taken up by loose-leaf tea. I don't need a tea kettle to heat water, and as such, a tea kettle takes up unnecessary space. A pot, on the other hand, can be kept perpetually on the stove, because I can use it for a wide variety of purposes, including both heating water for tea, and cooking. Sometimes, especially when cooking for others in the winter, I cook using all four burners, so any implement that goes on the stove that cannot be used to cook food is taking away from my valuable kitchen space.

In the past, I've lived with people who had tea kettles, including an electronic water boiler from Zojirushi. As nifty as this device was, I did not really miss it. Electric kettles also take up a lot of space, and are less efficient from an energy usage standpoint, when compared to a gas stove, although they tend to be more efficient than electric stoves. (Gas is more efficient for heating than electricity, because over 3 times as much fuel needs to be burned to capture the free energy to produce a given unit of electricity, whereas when burning fuel directly, all available energy is converted to heat). And there's something I love about the old-fashioned process of heating water up in a pot on the stove.

I've been living without a tea kettle for well over three years now. I'm quite adept at pouring water from a large pot, into a small brewing vessel, and I rarely spill hot water, but in case I do, I usually pour over the sink anyway. And it works for me just fine!

What do you think?

Do you think I'm crazy for being such a die-hard tea enthusiast, and not owning a tea kettle? Do any of you also go without a tea kettle for heating water?

"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?

Green Tea Soap from Trader Joe's

Back in January, I wrote about the tea selection in Trader Joe's. Today, I want to highlight a completely different tea-related product from this company. This is the green tea soap sold in Trader Joe's:

I do not know the exact composition of this soap, but the label claims it is 100% vegetable based (a matter of concern for vegans), and contains shea butter, one of my favorite plant-based oils, and a great moisturizer in its own right.

I'm normally not a huge fan of most packaged bar soaps widely available in supermarkets and drug stores. Many of them smell a bit too much like synthetic chemicals to me, and some of them I find to be harsh on my skin. I rarely find bar soap sold in one of these stores that I like and become a fan of, and this particular one is one exception. This is the only widely available commercial soap (as opposed to artisan soaps created and/or sold by small, local businesses) that I've tried that I would recommend.

What do I like about this soap?

There is a lot about this soap that I like. It smells wonderful, pleasantly aromatic but mild and suggesting sweetness. Its aroma reminds me of some of the higher quality Chinese green teas, ever-so-slightly suggesting floral aromas. It is also quite inexpensive, at $3.29 for a 200mg bar. And, I find it mild on my skin. The soap is soft enough to cut easily when slightly warmer than room temperature, which I like because it is quite a large bar, and I find that cutting it into 3 or 4 smaller bars makes it more convenient and helps one bar to go a little farther.

Interestingly, Trader Joe's also sells a similar soap with a lemon verbena fragrance, and another that is lavender-scented. I find it notable that both of these herbs are frequent ingredients in herbal teas. Interestingly, although I love lemon verbena as an herbal tea, I found their lemon verbena soap a bit harsh; not only did I not like the smell as much, but I found it was not quite as easy on my skin as the green tea soap.

What do you think?

Have you tried this particular soap? Have you tried other soaps or personal care products which are scented with green tea? Have you ever tried the trick of cutting large bars of soap into smaller bars, in order to conserve resources?

Harris Decaf Tea, Cold Brewed, Offers Life Lessons

This post is about drinking tea that falls quite far outside my normal comfort zone, both in terms of the choice of tea itself, and the way it was prepared.

Pictured here is a pitcher of iced tea that some of my friends brewed up:



This is Harris Tea's decaffeinated black tea, cold brewed. The two pitchers are the same tea, but the strength of brewing is different; the darker pitcher is obviously stronger.

I found this tea interesting to sample, because it was well outside the zone of teas I would brew up on my own. I tend to avoid decaffeinated tea, instead preferring naturally caffeine-free herbal teas if I am looking for something without caffeine. I strongly prefer loose-leaf to tea bags, and I tend to avoid the brands of tea most commonly available in supermarkets. I also rarely cold brew iced tea, as I find it tends not to produce the results I like the best. For this reason, I wasn't comfortable writing an actual review of this tea on RateTea.

I wasn't crazy about this batch of iced tea. It was perfectly drinkable, but a bit bland. I suspect this tea, however, might taste a bit better to me if brewed the way I would prefer it.

Compared to the worst loose-leaf tea:

As much as I love loose-leaf tea and prefer it to tea prepared in the manner described above, I want to note that my experience with the tea above was still pleasant. I drank a cup of the iced tea, and it was refreshing, only a little bland. There have been some loose-leaf teas that I've brewed up that I've placed great care into preparing, only to pour them out without drinking them because I found them so foul tasting.

I think there's an important life lesson here. Life is a bit unpredictable; sometimes, even if I do everything the way I think is best, things can come out in ways quite different from what I want. At other times, the setup in a situation may seem close to the worst possible, at least by my standards, but things might surprise me by turning out in positive ways.

Delving deeper: what else is going on here?

I think there is one observation about the tea situation here. The tea pictured above was brewed weakly, and I did not expect much from it. When I put care into brewing loose-leaf tea, I usually brew it more strongly, and I usually expect more from it. Thus, it has much greater potential to disappoint.

A life lesson:

I've often found that situations involving people are a lot like this. Sometimes, it seems like I would have a lot in common with someone, but I struggle to relate to them, or find myself coming into conflict with them in odd and unpredictable ways. Sometimes I've been excited about a class or a teacher, only to find that I absolutely hate it, and either drop it or find a way to barely scrape through it.



Other times, I've interact with people from vastly different backgrounds, sometimes even people that others have told me are "difficult to deal with", only to find I get along with these people just fine. I've also taken classes or read books that I did not expect to find remotely interesting (like Numerical Linear Alegbra, or the accompanying text Matrix Computations by Golub) that I ended up finding absolutely captivating.

I think the lesson here is not only that life is unpredictable and full of surprises, but also that delving into something too deep, and becoming heavily vested in a certain outcome of a situation without first getting a taste of that situation, can lead to disappointment. With a cup of tea, you can just pour it out, but in life, sometimes you are stuck with greater consequences to deal with. I find I am both happiest and most productive when I embrace the unpredictability of life, and make decisions in such a way that acknowledges the uncertainties, leaving ample room for both unexpected disliking and unexpected liking.

How about you?

Do you relate to my experience of this batch of iced tea? How about my experiences with life and with people? How about Matrix Computations? Do you get excited about that?

Not Much Tea in Puerto Rico

Recently I took a one week long trip to Puerto Rico. The trip was rather spontaneous; one of my friends approached me with an offer to stay in her hotel, paid for by her employer, while she was there on a business trip. When I checked idly for flights, I was surprised that even last-minute flights, direct from Philly, were very cheap. And since Puerto Rico is a US Territory, there is no need for visas, passports, and the like. I couldn't pass up this opportunity.

Having grown up in Lancaster, PA, a small city where Puerto Ricans are the largest ethnic group (outnumbering each of whites, blacks, and Asians), I've acquired an odd familiarity with and affinity for Puerto Rican culture, for someone who has zero hispanic heritage in my own family. When left to my own devices, the music I most often put on my playlist is Puerto Rican salsa, and, to me, Puerto Ricans sound like they have no accent, whereas Mexicans, Spaniards, and other Spanish-speaking people from Latin America all sound to me like they have some strange sort of accent.

I want to write about this trip here on this blog, but it's a bit of a struggle, because I did not do much in Puerto Rico relating to tea. But when I started thinking about that, that in itself is interesting.

Going mostly without tea:

The first cup of true tea (not herbal) which I had in Puerto Rico was a cup of the London Cuppa, served with breakfast in Hotel Belgica, a quirky hotel in Ponce, a city on Puerto Rico's southern coast. I would recommend this hotel wholeheartedly; it was very reasonably priced, and located conveniently on the town square. Unlike many of the hotels in San Juan, it was not a tourist trap; some of the hotel staff spoke no English. But the rooms were clean and the building was beautiful and a prime example of the unique architecture you can find about Ponce.

I didn't drink much tea in Puerto Rico, but I found, I didn't miss it very much, mainly because it was so hot. I did, however, have a very nice iced herbal concoction, involving ginger and lemongrass. In Puerto Rico, herbal teas, especially iced ones, seemed a little more popular and widespread, but only slightly so.

Pictured above is the town square in Ponce, in the morning, when it was quietest. This square came alive in the evening, filled up with people doing all sorts of activities. One thing that struck me on my trip was how friendly and approachable Puerto Ricans were, and how caring they were towards each other, their families, and to me. With my minimal Spanish and the fact that most Puerto Ricans speak at least some English, I found it easy to communicate with almost everyone. And people I talked to were immensely positive, helpful, and open. I found little of the closed-off attitude that seems to be the default in much of the U.S. and especially in the bigger cities of the east coast. I never got the sense that anyone was judging anyone else or trying to impress. It seemed everyone I talked to at length talked about their families a lot, and many expressed a deep caring for Puerto Rico, and for their families and communities.

A lot of little things went wrong on the trip; random things we had hoped to depend on were often closed, broken, under construction, or just not present at all. But there was always someone willing to help out. Once I got used to the slight unpredictability, and got more comfortable talking to random people, I realized that the unpredictable points were small and most of the important things worked out very nicely on the trip.

My experience with the people made me want to go back again some time soon.

Hot, Humid Climates and Tea:

The climate in Puerto Rico is solidly tropical, fairly uniformly hot and humid. Temperatures are relatively constant year-round and from day-to-day, and, especially in San Juan, on the humid, northeast part of the Island, there is much less variation in temperature between day and night than I am used to in the U.S. Temperatures ranged from about 87F (30C) during the peak of the day to around 77F (25C) at night.

In San Juan, pictured above, it seemed like there was water everywhere, even when it was not raining. I saw numerous rainbows like this one pictured here. I got used to being rather sweaty while walking around in the near constant 70% humidity. It rained every day, at unpredictable times (apparently, May is a rainy month on much of the island), although the rain only took up a small portion of the day. Umbrellas are a lot less useful than I thought they would be...when it starts to rain, the wind typically picks up, making umbrellas unwieldly. And it's often more pleasant to just let it rain on you...you're already wet from the humidity, and the rain doesn't seem to get you much more wet.

Tea in hot weather?

Here in the U.S. I like to drink hot tea even in very hot weather. But what is "hot"? During the heat of the day, in July and August, it often gets much hotter than the 87F (30C) highs I encountered daily in Puerto Rico. But it tends to cool off a lot more at night, and during much of the year, it's much cooler.

I've heard that coffee is much more popular than tea in Puerto Rico, and I saw a lot of coffee for sale and on menus, but I did not see many people actually drinking coffee. I saw a lot of people drinking water, beer, smoothies, and various cold sugary drinks.

People think of South China and Taiwan, where hot tea is popular and widely consumed, as being tropical and humid, but these regions are actually much cooler than Puerto Rico. Taipei, for instance, has more well-defined seasons, with night-time lows in winter averaging 55F(13C), a good 22F(13C) cooler than San Juan's "winter" night-time lows. See Taipei's Weather Averages compared to San Juan's averages to see for yourself. I can understand why people might not want to consume many hot beverages in this climate. San Juan's temperatures are more similar to areas much farther south than China's southernmost point, like Southern Vietnam or points in the Philippines. Do people consume many hot beverages in these solidly tropical areas? I don't know, and I'd be curious to hear from people who have traveled in these areas.

Create The Conditions For Your Business To Thrive: Che Guevara Offers Business Advice

One thing that I find a useful concept in business is an idea that I first encountered from a rather unlikely source, an individual who is best known for his anti-capitalist views: Che Guevara.



This post aims to address those sorts of tough business problems like:

• I want to sell traditional Chinese or Japanese teas in the U.S. but what little tea culture there is seems to be focused on British-style black teas and flavored teas.
• I want to start a tea business but I have no source of funding.
• I want to start a locally-oriented tea room or tea shop, but there does not seem to be much local demand.
• My business is not doing well because of external conditions beyond my control. (such as an ecoonmic downturn)

I claim that Che can help you out on all these points.

Who exactly is Che Guevara?

Che Guevara was a key figure in the Cuban Revolution, and is a bit of an icon or symbol in certain subcultures. There are a lot of things that I don't like about Che Guevara: he advocated for the use of violence to achieve his goals, and he advocated for a political system (socialism/communism) that I am not fully on board with. But there is a lot about him that I do like. And while I do not like all the results of this revolution, in which Cuba became a Communist country, I think it is important to remember that the revolution overthrew an oppressive government, run by Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power through military force after he was set up to lose a democratic election.

My thoughts on the history of Cuba and its interactions with the U.S. during the cold war:

As an aside, I'm sometimes irritated that I never learned any of this stuff when growing up, not in school, and certainly not in the mainstream news media; the popular media in the U.S. presented a one-sided view of things, painting a picture of Cuba as the "bad guys", and I think it is eye-opening to get a fuller picture of the history of Communist countries. Part of me wonders if Cuba wouldn't have had a freer society, and if the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn't have happened, if the U.S. had discouraged Batista from seizing power or had cut off ties with him, and if the U.S. had not made an unprovoked attack on Cuba during the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Back to Che Guevara's advice:

But, returning to the point of this post, I think Che Guevara offers some interesting advice in his famous 1961 manual on guerilla warfare. If there is one key idea that I would take from this book, it is the following (this is my own paraphrase, not a quote, as I do not have the book on hand currently):

Do not wait for the conditions to be right for revolution to succeed; make your revolution create these conditions.

Translated into the business world, this advice becomes:

Do not wait for the conditions to be right for your business to thrive, make your business create these conditions.

What conditions what Che Guevara talking about?

In this idea, Che Guevara was demonstrating systems thinking, which I recently wrote about. A person thinking in a rigid or linear fashion might say--the conditions aren't right for me to accomplish this task, so I need to wait. But the right conditions never come. Your country continues to suffer under an oppressive dictatorship, or your business languishes, or perhaps you never start your business at all, and instead keep working in a mindless, dead-end job.



The above diagram shows a way of thinking about achieving goals that leaves you unempowered. When you think in this way, it seems like there is no way for you to move towards your goals. The problem with this viewpoint is that most goals in life and in business are not one-time events, they are ongoing processes. A revolution, a business, a job, an organization, are all systems. There may be key events, such as the overthrow of a dictator in a revolution, or the founding of a business, which get the goal going, but without a coherent system, it will all be for nothing. A revolution that replaces one dictator with another, or with a dysfunctional governing system, does not solve the problems it set out to solve. Similarly, if a business does not have a sound business model or if it is not run effectively, it will fail.

It makes more sense to think about goals as a system, pictured below:



Initially, you may not feel like you have the power to influence the conditions that affect your business (or revolution, or whatever other system you're trying to create), but if you brainstorm, specifically, about the things pictured in the yellow box above, you may get ideas of how to influence them. I want to provide an example that I think is particularly compelling.

In this example, and also for any sort of retail business, especially tea ones, part of those conditions are loyal customers, recognition of your name, and momentum of the daily functioning of your business. This momentum includes cash flow.

An example from a business:

When I was in high school, I worked for a bakery, Ric's Bread, located in Lancaster, PA. The bakery was founded by Ric Tribble, the father of my friend Max, whom I met in second grade. Ric was an important role model in my life, from whom I learned many things about business. Ric has since sold the bakery, but it is still operating.

Ric has started and run many businesses over the course of his life, including the bakery, at least one restaurant, and all sorts of odds and ends of things (including his own brand of Barbecue sauce, which was very good). He has also sold clothing, and real estate; recently, he returned to real estate, where he and his wife Mary (who was also instrumental in running the bakery) currently work for Puffer Morris Real Estate in Lancaster, PA. What I found particularly interesting about Ric is how he was able to create businesses seemingly out of thin air, requiring far fewer financial resources than most people talk about needing. How he did it with the bakery is particularly illuminating.

How Ric started Ric's Bread:

The first ingredient in the bakery was that Ric knew how to bake good bread, and people in town knew that Ric knew not only how to bake, but how to cook. Ric and Mary frequently had people over for dinner, and Ric was respected as an impressive chef in his circle of friends. To generalize this advice, Ric used a skill he had as a starting point for his business. Ric being a really friendly person and knowing a lot of people also helped a lot.

Ric partnered up with a coffee shop, Fred and Mary's (which is now closed), which had its own kitchen, with an oven suitable for baking bread, and started baking bread in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning. Ric would bake bread for the coffee shop, in exchange for use of the kitchen. Because he was using the kitchen at a time when the coffee shop was not open and the kitchen was not being used, this deal cost the coffee shop much less than they gained from it.

Ric would then deliver the bread to subscribers, which included local restaurants and individuals. Soon, Ric had rented a small market stand at the Lancaster Central Market. It wasn't long before the business had grown to the point of renting a full-sized bakery and storefront. But by the time Ric wanted the storefront, the business already had a loyal customer base, including restaurants and subscribers to bread delivery. The bakery expanded into selling cinnamon buns, coffee cakes, muffins, foccacia, and all sorts of other baked goods. Early on, when Fred and Mary's was still around, the bakery used the relationship with the coffee shop to benefit both parties, with the signature loaves that they used to bake for the coffee shop called "Fred and Mary's Bread", both helping to draw in customers of the coffee shop to buy bread, and to advertise the coffee shop to customers of the bakery.

Back to tea:

Whether you're running a tea company, or thinking of starting one, you may find it helpful to use the sort of thinking described here. You don't need a lot of funding to start a tea business. People frequently start businesses out of their homes. Most tea companies have started out very small. Stash Tea started as a small business operated out of a house; Twinings started as a single tea room.

On starting a business:

Just like Ric had the momentum of being a skilled baker and chef, and having people know about his culinary skills, if you are a tea enthusiast, you likely have some momentum of your own, in that you know how to select and brew high-quality tea, and you serve it to others, who recognize you as someone knowledgeable about tea.

Stay tuned for future posts:

You may think that some of the points I mentioned at the beginning of this post are still beyond your control. How can you deal with an economic downturn? Isn't that beyond your control? Not at all. But this post is already too long. Stay tuned for future posts, in which I will explain how similar advice can help you protect your business against an economic downturn.

RateTea to be Bought Out By Teavana (April Fool's)

I'm giving an inside peek here to my most loyal subscribers, before I share the official post via the RateTea newsletter.

I love working on RateTea, but it's a lot of work, and there are a lot of other things that I've been wanting to pursue in my life. Recently, I've been receiving increasing attention from various companies, expressing interest in buying out RateTea. Most of these offers did not impress me, for the simple reason that people were not able to provide me with enough cold, hard cash. But after some deliberation, I have decided to accept one of these offers.

RateTea will be purchased by Teavana Holdings, Inc, for an undisclosed sum of money. I will continue to work with the site for the next three months to facilitate the transition, after which the site will be completely run by Teavana. The Teavana management has assured me that they will do everything in their power to maintain the site's impartial character, and that Teavana's teas will be treated just the same as other company's teas.



As Yahoo! Finance's profile on Teavana shows, Teavana, following their recent IPO, is one of the few tea companies with enough cash to actually buy RateTea for the price I was asking.

Did I get you?

Haha. April fools.

Obsessive-Compulsive Tea Shopping, and Unity in Addictions

I just discovered an interesting discussion thread on Steepster, How do you stop the compulsion to buy buy BUY more tea?!, through a post on the Life in Teacup Blog how to deal with obsessive tea shopping... . This got me thinking about addictions in general, and I decided I wanted to write on the topic here.



Pictured here is some heroin, an illegal drug that can be highly addictive. Addiction, including addiction to hard drugs like heroin, is something I have thought about for a long time; when I was in high school, someone on the periphery of my social circle died of a heroin overdose.

This post is only tangentially related to tea, but I think it is an important topic, and I hope people find it useful.

If you were thinking initially of compulsive shopping, and are shocked by my leap to heroin, you may think I am exaggerating. But I hope that if you bear with me, you will find that my analogy has an interesting reason behind it, and the reason is not to shock or exaggerate. And, after explaining myself, I will conclude the post with a suggestion of how to overcome compulsive tea shopping.

There is unity in addictions:

I personally believe that there is unity in addictions, in the sense that, whether a person is suffering from compulsive shopping, unhealthy behavior in sex or relationships, drug addiction, compulsive gambling, self-injury, video game addiction, or anything else, the person is suffering not just from a specific form of addiction, but from a general state of addiction. All forms of addiction have in common that a person's self-control is not strong enough that they are able to choose long-term benefits over short-term behaviors that produce some sort of immediate mental reward or stimulation.

There is some science that is beginning to confirm the idea that different types of addiction have a lot in common, in terms of what is going on with the brain. I also find it interesting that twelve step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, and other similar programs, have been developed not only to help with alcoholism, but with a variety of other sorts of addictions, and these different programs have basically the same approach. The approach begins with admitting that the people have a problem with addiction, and that self-control is inadequate. In terms of my understanding of addiction, I would say that these programs work because they change a person's beliefs (the step of believing that one has an addiction and choosing to want to overcome it is a critical one) as well as providing a network of social support.

My experience with addiction:

Addiction is not something I discuss from afar; I personally have had problems with video game addiction, and it got bad enough that I deleted all video games from my computer years ago. I could spend hours playing role playing games and neglecting all sorts of other activities. More recently, I have struggled with addictive behavior towards social media and online communication media such as Facebook and gchat. I have also seen people close to me struggle with alcoholism, self-injury, and unhealthy patterns in relationships. One of my friends found a twelve step program helpful for overcoming problems with codependency in relationships, and I have seen people overcome alcoholism while others have failed to overcome it.

Some interesting resources on addiction:

If you're interested in this topic, NPR has recently had a number of programs (and published articles) on this topic. One that I found a particularly interesting read was Addiction Is Not A Disease Of The Brain. Wikipedia's article on addiction is also well-developed and has a lot of interesting and relevant material on it. The overall picture I get by reading different materials on the topic of addiction though is that addiction is complex and involves many factors, including brain chemistry, actions, habits, and life choices, social networks and relationships with people, and beliefs about the effects of various actions.

My thoughts on how to overcome addiction:

Some people "overcome" one addiction only to fall into another. I think that this is not a true victory over addiction...truly overcoming addiction involves overcoming the whole state of addiction, in which someone seeks some sort of immediate gratification through some sort of impulsive activity. The question of which activity is more harmful is often a relative one. Playing video games may seem relatively benign when compared to heroin use, but a true video game addiction, in which a person spends hours every day playing video games, and neglecting their job, school, health, or significant other, could actually be more destructive to a person's life than someone trying heroin once and never using it again.

I think that the best model for overcoming addiction is a holistic approach, one that aims to help a person reach a healthy state in which they are thinking and acting based on the long-run rather than immediate gratification. I think that an essential part of this is feeling happy and content in the moment. Addiction is all about satisfying immediate cravings; if you are consistently able to enjoy the moment without engaging in any of your addictive vices, and, without these activities, you can feel like you have everything you need in the short-term, then you have overcome addiction. I find mindfulness exercises like meditation, or the appreciation of subtle pleasures to have a positive effect on this whole process. A lot of people use addiction to run away from their problems...difficult situations, feelings, or memories they don't want to confront. It is hard to overcome addiction if you genuinely believe that your life is in ruin, as you will feel that you have nothing to lose, but if you feel like your life is worthwhile and in order, your willpower will be greatly increased. At least, that's how I view things.

How to overcome compulsive tea shopping:

I find it ironic that people suffer from compulsive tea shopping, as for me, tea is something that is associated with mindfulness, taking a break in my day to focus both on the act of preparing a cup of tea, and on the aromas, flavors, and other sensations while drinking a cup of tea, or my company when sharing tea with others. So perhaps a remedy for compulsive tea shopping would be to spend more time enjoying the tea. If you're truly enjoying what you have, you don't need any more, right?

What do you think?

Have you had any personal experiences with addiction, either mild or severe, that you are comfortable sharing in the comments? Do you think there's much truth in the "unity in addiction" view that I put forth here? What do you think about my suggestions of how to overcome addiction?

Top 5 Google Search Terms About Tea

When using Google for search, there is a convenient and sometimes humorous autocomplete feature: if you start typing a word or phrase, Google provides options for completing what you've typed with the most commonly-typed searches. The selection of autocomplete options given sheds light on what people type into Google search most frequently.



Here are the top five terms related to tea:

• tea party - Yes, they're talking about the tea party political movement, not a party featuring the drink.


• tea tree oil - Tea tree oil is not from the tea plant, it is from another plant, Melaleuca alternifolia.


• tea leoni - An American actress, whom I know next-to-nothing about.


• teacup pig - "Teacup pig" is a term for a breed of miniature pig; these pigs, small enough to fit inside a large teacup, were originally developed for medical research, but have become popular as pets. "Teacup pigs" apparently generate a lot of shady business, as it can be hard to distinguish a true miniature pig (which will stay small) from normal piglets which will eventually grow into a full-size pig.


• tea act - The Tea Act was a famous piece of British legislation, passed in 1773, and leading to the Boston Tea Party.

If you are using personalized search results, or are searching in a different region of the world from me, you may see different results from this list.

It turns out that none of these terms are directly related to tea, the drink, although most are related in some roundabound way.

Why Top 5? Why Not Top 10?

Today, instead of posting another top 5 post, I wanted to explain my rationale for deciding to post top 5 lists.

Questioning Numbers:

Top 10 lists seem to be the norm not only on the internet, but elsewhere. Why? I suspect it is because we use a base 10 number system, which, ultimately, is because we have 10 fingers. Well, we also have five fingers on each hand, so I think top 5 is a pretty good alternative. A lot of posts on the internet go way beyond top 10, as well...top 100...top whatever.


This old X-ray of a human hand is from a book "The Human Body and Health" by Alvin Davison, 1908. A lot of arbitrary numbers in our society originate from the fact that humans have two hands with five fingers on each hand.

Often, 10 is too much. My blog posts are already rather long, and I update frequently. Sometimes I think that quality is more important than quantity. I share top 5 posts because I want to draw attention to something: to teas, to articles on RateTea, to old blog posts. I don't want to overwhelm (I already think I do that too much).

How about you?

Did you ever wonder what life would be like if we used a different base for our number system? If we used base 8, you could divide more numbers in half, and there would be fewer multiplication tables to memorize, but doing math by hand would involve more carrying and borrowing. If we used base twelve, it would be more convenient to divide things by 3 or 6, but we would no longer be able to count to "10" on our fingers, and multiplication tables would become substantially bigger and more unwieldly.

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.

Top 5 Most-Viewed Press Releases of RateTea and This Blog

I occasionally issue press releases related to RateTea and/or this tea blog, using prlog.org, a free service that is minimal but easy to use and rather powerful. Sometimes, I find it almost comical which of these releases get the most views. Here are the top 5 press releases of all time, by views:

• Microwave Oven Not An Ideal Way To Heat Water For Tea - I issued this press release shortly after publishing the new article on this topic on RateTea. It seems so strange to me that this release got the largest number of views, as it seems the least significant of all of the press releases I've ever issued.


• Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) Overwinters in Newark, Delaware - This post announces an unusual overwintering of a plant that is supposedly not hardy anywhere near the mid-Atlantic climate zone of the US.


• New Website to Rate and Review Teas: RateTea.net - This is the original press release, issued when RateTea.net was first launched. It makes sense that this release got a lot of views, because it was breaking news and I put energy into sending the release out widely.


• Percentile Rankings for the Best Teas: Loose-Leaf & Tea Bags - This press release announces a small but significant change to RateTea, when we added percentile ratings to the page for teas which had enough ratings to calculate one.


• Recent Changes to RateTea.net: Logo, Header, Homepage, and Rating Descriptors - Another press release announcing major changes and the major redesigns to this site, carried out in the past year.

What's the lesson? Life is a bit random perhaps?

Back From Break, SEPTA's Holiday Trolley, and Transit & Sustainability

Over the holidays, I enjoyed a lot of tea, but I did not write about much of it, because I needed a break. Because I did not post over the holiday break, I want to share one picture from during this time period which captures both a little bit of the holiday spirit, and also shares something of personal importance from my life.

Here is a SEPTA trolley, decked out in Christmas lights:



There are a lot of SEPTA trolleys, but to my knowledge, only one of them is covered in lights like this one. All of the trolleys flash "Happy Holidays" on their signs, alternating with the route number, but I liked the unique touch offered by this one trolley.

These trollies are not directly related to tea (beyond the fact that I rode one of these trolleys to and from World Tea East back in September), but they are directly related to another topic that I am passionate about: sustainability.

Public Transportation And Sustainability:

The U.S. used to have trolleys or streetcars in nearly all of its larger cities, and many smaller ones as well. Unfortunately, the streetcar systems were completely dismantled in most cities, and mostly dismantled in others, such as Philadelphia. The southern end of West Philadelphia is one of the few neighborhoods that kept its system mostly intact. The trolleys branch out and follow the major streets, going away from the city. Travelling towards the downtown, the trolleys come together at 40th street and enter a tunnel, becoming a subway, which travels downtown, ending at 13th street, and connecting with the major north-south and east-west subway lines, with free transfers.

Now, thankfully, much of the U.S. is starting to think about rebuilding these systems. Philadelphia recently restored one discontinued line, the Girard avenue trolley, and some smaller cities have rebuilt trolley systems, such as Little Rock Arkansas' River Rail Streetcar, run by the Central Arkansas Transit Authority. Pictured here is another type of transit, a regional rail station, featuring heavy rail lines that can carry large volumes of passengers over moderate distances:



Public transportation, whether bus, trolley, or other rail, promotes sustainability because it can reduce car traffic, which not only reduces energy use and pollution directly, but also provides indirect benefits: with fewer cars on the road, the remaining cars can get to their destinations faster. Public transit also allows riders to relax, getting to enjoy their commute or travel time, talking, looking out the window, or reading, rather than having to focus on the road. By looking out the window on buses, street trolleys, or elevated trains, people learn more about their communities, including learning about businesses located on or near transit lines. People also can converse with fellow passengers, and get to know regular riders.

Public transportation is like tea:

Public transit thus helps to reduce stress levels and also helps to connect people to each other and their communities. In this respect, I think it is a lot like tea, and I think that many of the same people who enjoy tea because of its relaxing properties and potential to bring people together might enjoy riding buses, trolleys, or trains for the same reasons.

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.

Lego Bricks: Components, Quantization, and the Discrete, and Tea

When I was a child, I used to play a lot with Lego bricks. I love Legos; I think in many respects they are an ideal toy. Besides being really fun, I think they also encourage creativity and help develop spatial reasoning skills and manual dexterity. Pictured here is a box of Lego bricks:



One thing that is interesting about Legos is that they are inherently finite and limited, unlike other creative media, such as drawing or painting, or even playing with a musical instrument. When drawing, an artist can choose to draw anywhere on the paper, and a musician can choose exactly when to play each note, how loud to play it, and what tone or timbre to play with, whereas with Legos, the bricks can only connect in a predetermined number of ways.

But as anyone experienced with playing with Legos knows, the amount of possible combinations of even a modest number of lego bricks is so great that it is essentially endless for our limited human comprehension.

Components, The Discrete, and Quantization:

In the language of mathematics, Legos are discrete, whereas many other forms of art are continuous. This distinction parallels the distinction between calculus, which studies continuous changes, and discrete mathematics, which studies things broken into individual units. In the language of physics and quantum mechanics, Legos are quantized. Both of these mean that legos can be broken into smallest units or components, which can be placed or combined only in certain pre-determined configurations.

The Nature of the Universe:

When we look at the world around us, we see a world that looks for all practical purposes continuous. For example, we can raise our arm and move our arm or hand through various motions of distance or angle. We can cut a slice of cake, or a cucumber, exactly where we want to, rather than being constrained by only being able to divide it into a certain number of pieces.



But people who have studied science in more depth will know that the continuous nature of the world around us is actually an illusion. What looks like the unbroken surface of our skin, or the surface of the cucumber pictured above, is actually made of cells, and what looks like a smooth piece of metal is actually an array of individual atoms held together by electromagnetic forces. Furthermore, more modern advances in quantum physics have given us both theoretical grounds and empirical data to suggest that distance and time itself are quantized--that is, that there is a "smallest unit" of distance and smallest unit of time, and that particles cannot exist just anywhere in space and time. Like lego bricks, they can only be placed on the allowed grid.

Components, Quantization, and The Discrete, and Tea:

These concepts may seem very far removed from tea, but they are actually much more directly related than you might think. There are many macroscopic elements of our world that are broken into indivisible, discrete components. On a very basic level, we see these in terms of the individual leaves of a tea plant, which are well-defined units that we can see after brewing whole-leaf tea. But the same is actually true of more deeper things, things that are actually relevant to the important questions of how we experience tea. One particularly poignant example of something that is broken into a finite number of components is the olfactory receptors which we use to perceive aroma. The quantization or finite nature of the olfactory receptors is of paramount importance to how we experience tea because aroma is arguably one of the most important aspects of tea.

Humans, like any animals, have a finite number of receptors for aroma. These receptors are very numerous and very diverse, and they vary greatly from one individual to another. But for each person, the same basic fact or constraint is true: each chemical activates some finite number of receptors, in some combination, which are then processed by our brain. And the number of chemicals out there in the universe, even in our daily environment, far exceeds the number of aroma receptors we have. Our perception of smell is limited. This is why there are a variety of different chemical compounds which smell similar to us. When two teas seem to share the same aroma, it can sometimes mean that they share individual chemical components, but it can also mean that they have chemical components that are similar enough that they activate some of the same receptors.

When we try to communicate our experience of aroma to others, we run into another form of quantization: language. There are only a finite number of words with which we can describe aromas, and there are far fewer words available than there are possible combinations of olfactory receptors that can be activated by the chemical compounds in a cup of tea.

The Limitations of Being Human, and Being At Home in the Universe:

Smell, however limited it is, is still extremely complex, even when constrained by language. But I find it interesting to think about how, when it comes down to it, our experience of everything in life is finite, limited. It reminds me of our inherent limitations as human beings, but it also can make us feel more at home in the universe. Perhaps it is not so bad after all that we are finite human beings, as the very universe we live in seems to also be finite, discrete in some strange sense, like a set of lego bricks. But just like the lego bricks, it is so complex so as to effectively be boundless and infinite, offering far more depth and richness of experience than any one person could ever hope to experience in their lifetime.

Tea and Honey Bourbon Whiskey

Today I am sharing a post that is rather acharacteristic of me in several ways. For one, I am sweetening my tea, and for two, I am featuring a type of alcohol to do so. However, in a broader sense, I think this post fits with my character as the amount of sweetness and alcohol that I added was very minimal.

I am not much of a drinker; I never have been and I likely never will be. I don't like going to bars and I never feel the need to get drunk. But I do love the taste of many kinds of alcohol. It is no secret that RateTea was inspired by RateBeer, where I have been an active user for years. I enjoy beer more than any other sort of alcoholic beverages, but I do like several types of liquor. My favorite of these is bourbon. I find something about bourbon to be enticing...it's smooth yet complex, and I like it so much that I can drink it straight, although I usually like to add a dash of water to it.

Recently, at the house of some of my friends, someone procured a bottle of Wild Turkey American Honey Bourbon, a honey-sweetened bourbon of the Wild Turkey brand. This is not the sort of thing I would drink on its own. I tend to avoid sweet alcohol, and I like plain bourbon without any honey. But this drink was more subdued flavor-wise than pure honey, and it was pleasingly aromatic, and I got the idea of using it to sweeten black tea:



I chose a first-flush Darjeeling, the Darjeeling from Two Leaves and a Bud, and added just a dash of the bourbon. The result was really interesting. For one, the addition of the bourbon changed the character of the tea, much more so than adding sweetener alone, although less so than adding milk. The bourbon seemed to take some of the edge off the tea. This tea was already a relatively smooth tea, low in bitterness and tannic qualities, but I found it was even smoother upon the addition of the bourbon. I also found that the aroma of the bourbon seemed to blend seamlessly with the tea. Both were rather floral, and in oddly similar ways.

This was an interesting experiment, and the results were pleasant. I could see myself trying something similar again, perhaps with different types of liquor or different teas. Have you ever added liquor to your tea? Does this idea appeal to you at all?

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!

Drinking Tea for Memories, My Memories of Tea in the Dining Hall, and a Wish

I'm scheduling this post for 11:11 on 11/11/11, because it contains a wish.

This post is inspired by a post by Ken Macbeth, on lahikmajoedrinkstea, titled Red Rose memories. The post relays a story from Cara in Cleveland about her grandmother, and memories she has of drinking Red Rose Tea.

Cara talks about how she does not actually like the taste of Red Rose Tea, but she finds that it brings back pleasant memories of her grandmother, and drinks it more for the memories than for anything else.

Aromas in particular can be some of the most powerful agents at conjuring up vivid memories from our past. Tea, stimulating multiple senses, but primarily manifesting itself in the sense of smell, has a particularly rich potential to bring back memories in this way.

A memory of mine:

I touched on this topic very early in my tea blog, in my post how I became interested in tea, but a formative experience in my life, and the place where I first started to deliberately sample different teas (not to mention a broad range of foods) was the dining hall at Oberlin College, where I went for undergrad. Pictured here is one of the few pictures I have from this period of my life:



This photo was taken with a manual camera and scanned into the computer years later; when I started college, digital cameras were virtually unheard of; they cost thousands of dollars and I had never even seen one. When I graduated, I received my first digital camera, evidence of the changing times.

I loved the dining hall at Oberlin college.

Why did I like the dining halls at Oberlin so much?

• I found it very easy to meet people in the dining hall. Often, it would happen with little effort: I would sit with one friend or with a table of familiar friends, and then new people would join the table, and we would introduce ourselves or be introduced. Even when I went into a dining hall alone, I found it was often easy to meet people. If I sat alone, people would often join me, and if I approached a stranger or table of strangers, they were nearly always open to me joining them and starting a conversation. I met more people in the dining hall than any other way in college.


• I could always go to the dining hall, alone, unplanned, and I could be virtually certain of running into people I knew. This imparted a sense of stability and security to my life, at a time when I had moved out to a new place where I knew almost no one and had no established friendships.


• The dining hall was a reliable source of stimulating intellectual conversation. I never knew what to expect, but it was nearly always interesting. Often, people would talk about their classes, and through these conversations, I got exposed to knowledge and intellectual ideas from courses that I would never take and academic fields that I would never have any direct involvement in.


• The dining hall was a place where practical knowledge was exchanged. People would talk about courses to take and professors to seek out or avoid. Classmates would talk about math and physics problems they were stuck on, musicians would talk about technique, expressiveness, and pieces they loved or hated to play, people would talk about where they wanted to live next year. In more intimate conversations, people would talk about relationships or their own personal life struggles. People would talk about anything and everything.


• The dining hall was highly democratic, a place where there were no pretences of social status, where everyone was an equal. Everyone had to wait in lines and eat the same food, and everyone had the same choices. And the choices were almost always good enough that you could, sometimes with effort, secure a healthy, well-balanced meal.

At times, I really miss the dining hall. I've spent a large portion of my life after college eating alone, and when I eat with people, it's often with just one person. Currently, I am self-employed, but even when I've worked for large employers, I've often eaten alone. I've been shocked to see how many people in America eat lunch at their desks (Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal writes a great post about why this is a terrible idea), or worse, don't even eat at all. Many parts of my life after college have seemed like a desert to me, a lot like this photograph here, which I took in the American southwest, when I drove across the country:



Furthermore, I have found that getting together with people out in the "real world" requires a great deal of effort. I need to plan ahead, and this planning requires work, a commitment of time and energy. I have been unable to find community gathering places that recreate the sort of stimulating and wholesome environment that I found in the college dining hall. And I know that this dearth of spaces (physical and temporal) to connect with other human beings is not good for me, nor is it good for anyone. As political alarmists and reactionaries would like to say:

IT IS DESTROYING AMERICA! IT IS RIPPING OUR NATION APART!!!

I'm not joking here though.

My wish:

I'm hoping that people can read this and feel inspired, and moved to do their part to make the world more like the dining hall at Oberlin college. I want people to think: "That dining hall sounds awesome! I would love to have environments like that in my life!" My wish is that our world would have more environments like this, not just for me, but for all people.



The world is the way it is because of our collective thoughts, decisions, and behaviors. If we are open to meeting new people, we make the environment around us one in which it is easier for people to meet each other. If we create common spaces where people can go to eat with friends in a causal, relaxed atmosphere, then those spaces will exist in society and will be there as a support net for people who need these sorts of spaces. But if we judge others by social status, we move the environment in our social sphere more in this direction. And if we associate only with our existing clique of friends, we make the social environment around us more closed. On the other hand, if we engage in stimulating intellectual conversation with those around us, we create a stimulating intellectual environment around us. We can push things either in a positive or negative direction through the choices we make.

But there's only so much I can do in the short-term. One way I feel better is by remembering the happy times in the past, and the feelings of connectedness and purpose that these times were characterized by. And one way I can do this is by drinking tea.

Tea in the Dining Hall:

Back to tea...which teas did I drink in the dining hall? I drank Bigelow tea, specifically, their flavored teas and their herbal teas, including Earl Grey, Constant Comment, Plantation Mint, Mint Medley, and many others. But there is one of these that I drank more often than the rest: Sweet Dreams Herbal Tea, and because I drank it so often in this dining hall, it is the (herbal) tea that brings back the most memories. This effect is so strong that even drinking similar teas such as ShanTeas Lotus Wisdom (a blend also combining peppermint, hibiscus, and chamomile) produces this same effect.

How about you?

What teas evoke memories for you, and what memories do they remind you of? Do you like college dining halls? Was your college dining hall like the one I described? Have you found that sort of environment elsewhere in your life? Do you have any novel ideas for how to find or create that sort of environment?

OpenSky, and Why Communism Failed

Lainie Petersen of Lainie Sips wrote a blog post about a tea coupon special through a website called OpenSky. This was the first time I had heard of the site OpenSky, so I decided to check it out. Apparently, tea is one of the products that this site occasionally has deals on.

But when I visited the site, it reminded me, among other things, of Communism, which inspired this post.

My memories of Communism:

I've never lived in a Communist country, but I was born in 1980, when the cold war was still very much alive, and I remember, as a child, the rhetoric and public talk of Communism, with the unified "Eastern Bloc" of Communist countries from the USSR through Eastern Europe. And I remember the fall of the Berlin wall, and the breakup of the USSR. My mother, being a German professor, felt that we had to get over to Germany after the wall came down, and I remember going to Germany in the summer of 1990, after the wall came down, but before reunification. We arrived in East Berlin on the day that East Germany was changing their currency to the West German Deutsche Mark; shopping on that day was chaotic and confusing, but to an American at the time, prices were dirt cheap. I was only 10 at the time, but this experience left a lasting expression on me, and I think it helped fuel my propensity to think critically about economic systems.



I did not take any photos on the first trip, but I returned to East Berlin in 1996, and stayed with a host family. The photo above is from this trip; it depicts a Strassenbahn, meaning Street-train, a trolley much like the ones I ride now in West Philadelphia. The pictured trolley is a modernized one, an upgrade from the decrepit trolleys that I saw during my first trip, and occasionally during my second trip.

Even in 1996, East and West Germany were like night and day. East Germany had construction everywhere, although it still looked poor and falling apart. And even to an American like me, it was easy to spot and distinguish East and West Germans by their body language and dress. There was considerable evidence of cultural tension, and I saw the toll that Communism had taken on East Germany and its people.

Learning about Communism:

I've also heard about Communism through other means. My roommate during my first year in Oberlin was Armenian, and talked about his experiences during Communism. I also have known, less closely, numerous Russians, East Germans, and others who grew up in Communist countries, over the years. One thing I learned was that East Germany was by far the most prosperous and functional of the Eastern Bloc Communist countries, and that the level of poverty and dysfunction in other areas was far greater. Add on top of this the authoritarian control of the government, punishing any sort of dissent, and overly paranoid to the degree that it employed people to spy on just about every citizen, and you have a culture and society that created such depressing but beautiful works as Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet. Shostakovich, by the way, was contemplating suicide while writing that work. Have a listen:



Besides listening to Shostakovich, I've also extensively read the works of Marx, not just The Communist Manifesto, but also some of his earlier works, in which he takes a more metaphysical approach, talking about how people are spiritually connected to the product of their labor, and how capitalism results in alienation of people from the product of their labor, through paying for labor. And I've read enough Marx and know enough about Communism to know that Communism in the Soviet Union would have been absolutely abhorrent to Marx.

Why did Communism fail?

I think I have a pretty good idea of why Communism failed. It failed because it was based around the idea of a small core group of people micromanaging an entire society, specifically, micromanaging its economy. This phenomenon is called a planned economy or a control economy. And it doesn't work.

Societies are too complex...they're more like an ecosystem than a machine. And a group of people, no matter how intelligent, simply cannot centrally plan everything needed to make an economy function at all, let alone function well. Even in a smaller country, some sort of decentralized system, like the free market, is necessary, or eventually, massive economic failure results. The only way for a government to be successful at managing its economy is to shape and guide the economy by setting up good incentives, rather than by trying to micromanage it. China realized this, and embraced a market economy and this is why China's economy did not collapse like the USSR did.

Now to OpenSky:

My first impression of OpenSky was not positive. The site immediately displays a squeeze page, a page with little content and few links, which prominently leads you to sign up for something. I wrote about squeeze pages and how they are a common feature of spam / scam sites on my post Tea Spam: Starting With The Most Blatant. This screenshot shows the squeeze page:



What exactly is this site about? Here are two quotes from the site:

"Our tastemakers don't just curate your shopping experience..."

And:

"They'll discover the best products for you."

Really? This is starting to sound a lot like Communism to me, not to mention that it takes the fun out of shopping (I love searching around for a bargain, love evaluating the quality of different products, and I love the process of comparing different stores or sellers against each other!). And also, it's been my experience that there are only three people who know my tastes better than anyone else, and who are consistently best at picking out products that are best for me, and these people are me, myself, and I. And it also has been the case, for the most part, that retail businesses themselves also play an important role in the selection process.

I don't need or want celebrities or specially appointed people (who aren't directly involved in running the business) picking out products. I'd rather just operate as I do...find sellers or businesses that seem consistent in their quality control and fair in their pricing, and buy from them. Didn't Communism establish that having a team of people trying to do a better job of this doesn't work?

What do you think?

Did you live through Communism? What do you think about Communism? How about OpenSky? Have you used it? Do you think it has a spammy-looking squeeze page? Do you think it's a Communist conspiracy to make our economy collapse through central planning?