Anise Hyssop Herbal Tea

The other day I bought some fresh Anise Hyssop at a farmer's market. It was quite inexpensive, $1.50 for a massive bunch. Unfortunately, I did not think to write this post until after I used up the last of the leaves, so I have no photograph of the actual bunch that I bought. Here is a photo courtesy of Wayne Ray at Wikimedia Commons:



Anise hyssop is a plant in the mint family. Although it looks a lot like "regular" hyssop (Hyssopus sp.), hence the name, it is not closely related; both of these plants are in the mint family but are not closely related beyond that. Anise hyssop is interesting in that it is one of the aromatic, mint-family plants that is native to North America.

Why native plants?

As I have become interested in ecology, I have started to seek out native plants from the mint family, such as Monarda, for use in herbal teas, in contrast to the non-native, introduced plants from Asia and Europe. Most of the herbal teas widely consumed in the United States, such as chamomile, mint, and numerous others, are non-native plants here. Although mint (spearmint, apple mint, peppermint, etc.) and chamomile can both be grown in the U.S., they are not native; in some cases, these plants and other herbs have actually become invasive species, escaping into wild ecosystems and causing problems. Anyone who has grown mint in a temperate climate will testify to the way it can take over an entire garden, often choking out other plants. This same effect can happen in wild ecosystems. Part of the reason for this is that there are few native insects adapted to eat non-native plants.

There is a wealth of native plants available in North America that can be used to make herbal teas, both for beverages and medicinal purposes. Growing native plants is often better for local ecosystems, as they are eaten by native insects and thus help feed birds and create habitat for all varieties of animals, and are less likely to act as reservoirs for invasive pests and diseases. And, perhaps most importantly of all, native plants do not become a problem if they escape cultivation and seed back into a wild ecosystem--quite to the contrary, growing native plants in your garden can help provide a healthy population of these plants so that the population remains strong and diverse in nature.

I am sharing this info to explain what has motivated me to sample this herb and some of the other herbs I have been exploring for use in herbal teas.

The Review of Anise Hyssop Tea:

The leaves of this plant had a very mild aroma, so I steeped a very large quantity of leaf to make a single cup. I brought water to a boil, added the leaves, and then let it sit on very low heat for about 10 minutes. This produced a cup that had a light green color, paler than most green tea, and a moderately strong aroma.

The aroma was predominately licorice, with a strong suggestion of wintergreen, and other more generic vegetal tones. Licorice and anise are similar aromas, and the name anise hyssop suggests anise, but I found that the aroma resembled licorice more than anise. The vegetal tones are probably due to the fact that I brewed this herbal tea from fresh leaves; I suspect that if the herb were dried it would be significantly less vegetal in aroma.

The flavor is extremely smooth, and unusually sweet, so sweet it even tastes sweetened, as if honey had been added. There is almost no bitterness or astrigency. This is among the sweetest, smoothest infusions I have ever sampled from a plant. An informational page on anise hyssop run by the government of Manitoba, says that this herb was used as a sweetener by Native Americans, and I can believe that!

I also tried making an iced herbal tea from the anise hyssop (without blending it with anything), and I found it very pleasing. When iced, the vegetal tones are diminished somewhat, and one is left with a mild, sweet, drink that tastes like honey and licorice with a little wintergreen thrown in.

How does it make me feel?

I have had several cups of the brew from this plant, hot and iced. It seems to have a somewhat dampening effect on my body as a whole. I notice that it tends to fairly strongly suppress my appetite, giving me a sensation of fullness even after drinking a single cup. It does not necessarily relax me, but I felt slowed down and less energetic after drinking it. My stomach felt very calm and settled, but I felt uninterested in eating much food for some time after drinking it.

I wasn't crazy about the effects of this tea, given how I was feeling for starters, but I imagine that in some cases, it might have a positive effect. I also think it would make an excellent choice of a minor ingredient in an herbal blend, for people looking to sweeten a blend, as it adds sweetness without adding bitterness or astringency. I suspect that anise hyssop has some possibly potent medicinal uses, however, I was not able to find any scientific research on it, and the information on traditional use by Native Americans that I was able to find in a quick web search was brief and conflicting, not painting a clear picture of this plant's medicinal properties. This would be an interesting topic for further research, however.

Concluding questions:

Have you ever tried anise hyssop? And do you have any other suggestions about herbs, native to North America, that I might try infusing in my quest to discover more plants for herbal tea?

Tea Spam: A Victory Against Spam Blogs

This past December I wrote an introduction to tea spam, talking about spam blogs, stolen content, and related topics. I had planned to follow up on this post by talking about other issues, such as blog comment spam, and I hope to do this soon. But I want to first highlight a recent victory I had in the realm of spam.

I recently caught, using google alerts, yet another plagiarist who had stolen things I had written online. Although articles I write about tea are the primary target for plagiarism by spammers, this time, the spammer had taken the text from a review I had written on Amazon.com. I looked up the domain host of the website, which was a .TK domain, and emailed both their copyright and abuse departments, with the following message:

Dear Abuse / Copyright Departments:

The following site is a spam blog:

[REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]

It is stealing content from amazon.com reviews and discussions. I
found some of my content stolen:

[REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]

Please shut this site down. Thanks.

Alex Zorach

I received a reply the same day, less than three hours later:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Dot TK is the exclusive registry for the
Country Code Top Level Domain for the island
of Tokelau (also known as "ccTLD").

Dot TK (.TK) registers domain names globally,
through our services Free Domain and Paid Domain.

As your email alerts us to
unacceptable content by a holder of a Dot TK domain, I
have researched the case. The user is in
fact a Free Domain registrant, therefore
because of the violation, the domain has
been cancelled and the registrant has been
removed from our database.

Thank you for your assistance & I apologise for any
offense or inconvenience caused.

With Kind Regards,

Dot TK Support

Victory!

I was impressed by the quick response from the Dot TK Support team, and I have left this experience feeling empowered, which is why I am writing this post to encourage others to pursue and crack down on spammers. It only takes minutes or seconds to look up a host and send a brief email to the copyright and/or abuse departments of the relevant company. There are different companies one can target:

• The domain host


• The web host, if it is different from the domain host


• Any ad host, if the site is serving ads (I.e. Google AdSense)


• Search engines, if the site is ranking high in search results and drawing traffic away from more legitimate sites.

No company wants to support unethical or spammy practices. I also have had luck shutting down a number of other spam blogs, including ones that have stolen my articles about tea. I have had luck in some cases with the domain hosts, like in this case, the web host, especially when it is a free blogging platform like wordpress.com, and I have also succeeded at getting Google Adsense terminated on sites where I did not get anywhere sending complaints to the domain or web host. I have also seen sites removed from Google's search results after I have submitted spam reports to Google search. I chose this example because it was powerful and encouraging, but in the past months, I have seen dozens of spam blogs shut down or excluded from various rankings and services, shortly following my complaints.

Although spam blogs and plagiarists can seem like an insurmountable problem, as spammers can set up a new site in minutes and use automated programs to scrape content and modify the text so it is harder to detect as being from the original source, it also only takes minutes to shut spammers down. When someone's hosting account, advertising account, or other accounts are terminated, it is a permanent setback, often affecting all of the spammer's websites, not just the one you targetted. Pursuing plagiarists and spammers is one activity that is worth the investment of time it takes.

Cultivars, Monoculture, Adaptation, and Extinction: In Tea and Elsewhere

I was inspired to write this post after reading a post by Gingko Seto of Life in Teacup, about Long Jing Cultivars. I want to start by talking about the word cultivar because it is often thrown around without being precisely defined.

In the world of horticulture and agriculture, a cultivar is a plant or collection of plants that has been recognized for certain desirable characteristics. There are some cultivars which can be grown from seed, those that come up "true to seed", but many cultivars are cloned--propagated by cuttings or grafts. In the world of tea, as with wine, cultivars are also called varietals. Whereas "variety" is a general term that can refer to a broader style of tea, varietal is a more specific term, referring to the individual plant from which the tea was grown.

In the world of tea, varietals usually refer to genetically-identified plants propagated by cutting or grafting, but there are also broad categories of tea plants that come up true to seed, such as the smaller-leaved Chinese variety, C. sinensis sinensis, and the larger-leaved Assam variety, C. sinensis assamica.

Cultivar Extinction:

Most cloned cultivars, regardless of what plant they are from, eventually go extinct for ecological reasons: because they have a fixed genetic stock, the insects, mold, and bacteria in the world around them is constantly evolving and adapting to be better able to attack the specific combination of chemicals in the one cultivar.

This is why many of the old varieties of banana and apple, enjoyed by people a few generations back, are no longer grown: various blights and pests have developed which make them infeasible to commercially cultivate.

Why do we have so many old tea cultivars?

In the world of tea, we are left with many older cultivars. Why have they not gone extinct as most of the older varieties of apple have? One reason is that the tea plant, in general, is not particularly susceptible to pests, and the plant itself is very long-lived (some individual tea trees are themselves hundreds of years old). However, there is also another contributing factor, which is that, for hundreds of years, many of these cultivars were only cultivated on a small scale; below I will explain why this has prolonged the life of tea cultivars.

Some of the most popular cultivars are actually relative newcomers, compared to the long history of the tea plant. The varietal used to produce Tie Guan Yin emerged some time in the 18th century, although I've seen some sources claiming it was later. Either way, it is possible to find individual tea plants older than this particular cultivar.

Monoculture and its Role in Cultivar Extinction:

Monoculture is the widespread planting of a single crop, like tea, over a large area. Monoculture is widespread in tea cultivation, and is the norm for most commercial tea production, which is unfortunate for a variety of reasons. A long while ago, I wrote an extensive post about tea monoculture and monoculture in general which explains a number of negative impacts that monoculture has both on human agriculture and the surrounding ecology.

One of the main negative impacts of monoculture is that it facilitates pest and disease spreading. With no other plants to function as barriers or buffers, once a pest or disease gets established, it can rapidly spread through the whole crop. And with such a huge reservoir of a host plant, the pest or disease can quickly evolve and adapt by establishing a healthy, genetically diverse population of its own. Just as in my last post about the value of diversity, I explained how diversity is an essential ingredient in ecosystems. When two populations are competing in some ecological sense, the more diverse one typically wins the battle.

An extreme form of monoculture is the widespread planting of a single cultivar or varietal, over a broad area. When a single cultivar is grown in monoculture, the evolutionary pressure for pests and diseases to evolve or adapt to the particular cultivar or varietal is very strong. The pest or disease forms a huge, genetically-diverse population, but the crop being cultivated has no diversity, zero, as it all comes from a single plant that has been cloned, propagated by cuttings or grafts.

This is what causes cultivars to go extinct quickly. If a cultivar is only grown in moderation, and is grown only in small batches, mixed in with other crops, it will usually last for far longer; the risk of extinction by a pest or disease adapted specifically to that cultivar becomes minimal.

What can you do about this?

There are actually several ways you can help prevent monoculture. These tips are about tea, but they could easily be generalized to buying any type of plant-based product:

• Pay attention to where your tea comes from, and give preference to operations that use ecologically sustainable methods. An example is Makaibari estate in Darjeeling, which leaves most of their land as intact forest and only cultivates a smaller portion of it. Seeking out the organic label is typically not enough to make the best choice; there are plenty of certified organic operations that are still monocultures, and plenty of more ecologically-friendly operations that are not organic certified.


• Seek out and buy tea produced from different varietals. Varietals like Tie Guan Yin (to use an example) are so widely cultivated because people buy them for a high price. While it's hard to dispute that Tie Guan Yin produces amazing tea, there are numerous other cultivars that produce delicious tea as well, that go largely ignored on the global market. Try broadening your perspective: not only will you discover new teas, but you will be helping to preserve the most famous cultivars for future generations.


• Returning to the topic of the original post that inpsired this one, which was Long Jing cultivars, don't malign or dismiss "fake" teas produced from different cultivars. For example, when tea in the style of Long Jing is produced from different cultivars, it helps to preserve and protect the original cultivars. If the original cultivars were grown on a wider scale, it would speed the development of pests and diseases targeting this cultivar, eventually leading to their extinction. These newer teas emulating an older style actually protect the "authentic" tea, rather than threatening it.

The Best Teas, or the Most Diversity? The Value of Diversity

The illusory search for the "best" teas:

When I was younger, I used to believe that the purpose of sampling and reviewing foods, products, businesses, or anything, was to distinguish good from bad, and to help identify the "best" ones, or at least my favorite ones (which could be defined as the ones I like best). As I began to learn about business and economics, I started to think that the role of reviews in business is to guide shoppers to the best products, so that the businesses creating or supplying a higher-quality product for a reasonable price thrive.

But whenever I have sampled anything, whether it is restaurants, teas, or anything, I find it very difficult to pick a single favorite, or even 10 favorites.



As I began to learn more about both ecology, culture, history, and current events, my worldview started shifting. I realized that in many aspects of life, there is no such thing as "best" on the level of individual products, people, cultures, foods, or businesses, species, and indeed, the best results for society as a whole often emerge when there is a great deal of diversity.

In many aspects of life, there is no such thing as "best"; when you look on a broader scale, diversity is usually better than uniformity.

The picture above shows a deciduous forest in Delaware, much like the forests in Pennsylvania where I grew up. I chose this picture because natural ecosystems were what most helped me to understand the true value of diversity.

An example from ecology:

As an example from ecology, the total biomass (mass of all living things) in an area will tend to increase as you increase the number of different plant species in that area. For example, if you have a garden plot with a single species, and you carefully exclude all other plant species, and let the plot grow to its maximum size, it will tend to grow less total biomass than if you allow two species to grow, and that will tend to grow less total biomass than if you include three, and so forth. It's not always true as a strict rule, so much as it is a strong correlation or trend. Biomass and biodiversity are two different measures, and are independent to some degree, but they tend to be strongly related.

If you are a gardener, this concept is important. You can often achieve a higher total yield by mixing many crops in a small plot, than you could by growing the same crops separately. This higher yield comes as a result both of increased productivity and biomass as a whole, and decreased pest problems (pests spread most quickly through a monoculture). While this complicates commercial harvesting, it poses little problem for home gardeners who harvest by hand.

Back to tea:

I have noticed that I tend to prefer different teas at different times of day, different times of the year, in different weather, or when in different moods. I also sometimes tire of certain teas, while at the same time becoming more enthusiastic about other ones. Most people, even those who are strongly habitual in their food or drink habits, experience some degree of these shifts or changes.

Diversity in tea gives us the ability to better match the tea we choose to drink, to what we want to experience, both in terms of taste and the effect of the tea on our mind and body. It also helps us to experience a broader range of aromas and flavors. It also helps tea to appeal to a broader range of people: people inherently have different tastes, and when there is more diversity in teas, tea as a whole will reach and satisfy more people.

Back to the world again:

I would encourage people to think about diversity in other aspects of your life, as well as in tea. How is your community enriched, culturally and otherwise, by people from different cultures and backgrounds? How is your yard or garden made more beautiful or more productive by the biodiversity in what you plant there? How is your health sustained or enhanced by eating a diverse diet? How is your workplace driven by the diversity of skills and abilities of your different coworkers? How is your life enriched by the diversity of personalities and experiences of your friends and family members?

Diversity is not a politically correct buzzword; it is more like an essential fuel that we require and cannot do without. It is necessary not only for us to live rich, interesting lives, but even necessary for ecosystems to exist and sustain us, and for our society to function at all.

Multiple Infusions of a Tea Bag: Novus Tea's Dragon Well Green Tea

Many casual tea drinkers resteep their tea bags, but people who are into more serious, gong fu style brewing, generally do not apply their art to tea bags. But there is no reason that tea bags cannot be brewed in this fashion, so as to bring out nuances and subtleties in the same way that these qualities emerge when brewing loose-leaf tea with multiple, brief infusions in a gaiwan or yixing teapot. While I agree with die-hard tea enthusiasts that brewing loose-leaf tea in a small brewing vessel is preferable to using tea bags on many counts, it is still possible to bring out the qualities of a tea bag more or less, based on how you brew it.



An Aside: Why am I drinking tea from a tea bag?

I frequent coffee shops where, out of politeness to the business, I generally drink whatever tea is served. One coffee shop that I like for its quiet atmosphere and reliable wireless is Cafe Clave, located in West Philadelphia. A musicless shop (unless live music is playing), the soundscape in here is much like a library. I like to go here when I have highly technical things to work on that require focus. It is actually significantly quieter than my apartment, which is on a busy corner and often has nearly constant truck traffic.

The brewing experience:

Infusion 1, 1 minute: Aroma strongly suggestive of chamomile, with similar fruity and grassy tones, a pleasing hay or straw-like quality. However, cooler, crisper, and lighter than chamomile. Seems strongly caffeinated.

Infusion 2, 2.5 minutes: Aroma similar to first cup, fruity and suggestive of chamomile, less of the grass or hay tones. Darker infusion, deeper flavor. Still cool and crisp. Finish still very similar to chamomile; still seems to have significant caffeine.

Infusion 3, 3 minutes: very similar to, almost indistinguishable from the second cup, but with slightly less-evident caffeine.

Infusion 4, 5 minutes: Surprisingly strong tones of mint, reminiscent of peppermint or pennyroyal, emerge in this infusion. Chamomile-like qualities are gone, very slight, almost metallic grassiness lingers on the tongue in the finish. Overall character is thin and watery, and flavor is muted, but the flavor seems to sink to the bottom of the cup; flavor at the bottom of the cup is noticeable stronger. Afterwards, the tea is spent and the tea bag has almost no aroma left.

Final thoughts?

This tea was surprisingly complex, and lasted surprisingly long (with less leaf than one would typically use for gong fu cha). I am impressed...and eager to try the process again next time I am confronted with a tea bag with reasonably high-quality tea. I also briefly summarized this experience with my review and rating of this tea on RateTea. It goes to show you: I may not like tea bags, I may write about how I don't like them, and I still believe this. But I think that even with a tea bag, you can definitely have a better tea experience if you approach brewing the tea with as much care as you would if you were brewing loose-leaf tea, especially if your tea bag contains high-quality tea.

If I have an opportunity to do this particular tea over again, I will use a much briefer first infusion. I will also say, I hope to try more of Novus' teas when I return to Cafe Clave. This is the third that I've tried; the other two were solidly good, and I wonder if I would like them more if I took more time to experience their nuances through careful brewing.

Reviewing Teas to Give Useful Feedback to Tea Companies

People review teas for many different reasons; one of the many roles or functions reviews fill in the world is that of giving feedback to tea companies on their products. Whether or not you intend your review to function as feedback, it is feedback. If you publish your reviews online, people within tea companies are able to read your reviews, and whenever a tea company comes across or reads one of your reviews, they will see it through the lens of customer feedback.

Reviews as customer feedback:

From the perspective of a business, reviews can be immensely valuable as feedback on one's product or work. In the realm of tea, this feedback can sometimes be simple, such as "I did not like this tea.", which, if enough customers express it, may guide a company to retire the tea more quickly than if they had to rely solely on sales figures. However, it can also be a sign of offerings being more or less similar. But the problem with this sort of feedback is that tastes are highly subjective, and most tea companies already put a great deal of effort into sampling, tasting, and selecting their teas before offering them. So, in a sense, this sort of feedback is not particularly useful. A tea company likely to put out enough effort to respond to customer feedback is probably already doing a pretty good job of selecting good teas to begin with. But there are other things to be learned from customer reviews.

To draw an analogy, I occasionally receive feedback on RateTea of the form: "I love/hate the site." or "I find the site easy / difficult to navigate." or "I think the design looks good / bad or professional / unprofessional." This type of feedback is never particularly useful, because it is not specific enough for me to know how to act on it. There is no "why", and there are so many possible confounding factors (maybe the person just loves or hates the color green, maybe their opinion is skewed by being in an unusually good or bad mood). And, as a webmaster, I have access to detailed statistics showing me how much people are visiting the site, how many pages they view, how likely they are to return, who is sharing or linking to which pages, etc. Simple positive or negative feedback, for all practical purposes, is almost useless. Similarly, when writing a tea review, simply saying that you love a tea does not necessarily provide much useful feedback to a tea company. The company may benefit if, over time, lots of people love a tea (or can't stand it), but the company already has access to this information because they can tell how much of a given tea people are ordering.

More specific feedback is more useful:

For example, with tea: "I felt that X tea was almost indistinguishable from Y, which was lower in price." or "X tea is similarly priced to Y, and the name and description makes them sound similar, but I found them to be quite different, and I enjoy both." or "I can definitely notice the hints of cocoa in the aroma." or "I liked this tea, but I did not detect the malty aroma and I found it more smooth and delicate than robust." So, reviews can also provide more nuanced feedback to a company, than just a coarse "good vs. bad" rating...they can communicate information about value, how similar or different a tea is from the company's other offerings, and perhaps, how a tea compares to a tea in a similar style, offered by a different company.

This can help guide business decisions, such as finding a niche, diversifying one's offerings, writing catalog descriptions of teas, and guiding the selection of teas with different price points.

To those involved in the tea business:

What types of feedback are most or least useful to you? If you could give some advice to tea bloggers and others publishing tea reviews online, advice that would benefit your business in terms of getting useful feedback, what advice would you give?

Camellia Not Sinensis, And Some Ecology

Does this look just a little bit like a tea plant?



That's because it's from the same genus, Camellia, as the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. I found this plant growing in a garden in west Philadelphia. Since I do not live in an area where the tea plant grows (and certainly not where it is native), I cannot say much firsthand about the ecological relationships involving the tea plant. However, much about ecology is fairly universal: the same relationships play out on different continents and different regions with different species playing more or less similar roles.

There are some interesting lessons about ecology in this seemingly simple photograph, and they are surprisingly relevant to tea cultivation.

Why are the young leaves red, but the older leaves green?

Just as the young of humans and other animals are vulnerable and in need of protection, the young leaves of plants are most vulnerable. Soft and tender, and growing rapidly, the newest leaves are those most vulnerable to being eaten by insects and other herbivores. They also have not yet fully developed their photosynthetic apparatus, to capture energy from sunlight and convert it to food or usable energy for the plant, so they risk being damaged by this high-energy radiation.

The red color in these leaves is due to pigments that is designed to absorb harmful high-frequency radiation (like ultraviolet light and blue visible light). The pigment is red in color because it reflects red light, a lower-frequency type of radiation, less likely to cause cellular damage. This cultivar may have been selected to enhance or bring out the red color, much like a copper beech has been selected for the same reasons, but the same phenomenon is frequently observable in wild plants. Go out in nature and look at plants, and you will see a number of plants that have a reddish tinge to the newly sprouted leaves, that is not evident on the older, tougher leaves. Interestingly, many of these red pigments, such as anthocynanins, function as antioxidants, just like the antioxidants in tea.

In the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, caffeine is manufactured as a method to protect the plant against being eaten by insects. Large animals like humans can metabolize the caffeine, which is essentially a poison, but smaller animals like insects cannot, as it is too cumbersome to manufacture and carry all the enzymes necessary to metabolize caffeine and all the other chemicals the insect may be exposed to. This explains why tippy teas tend to be more caffeinated. This phenomenon also explains why many insects are specialized, eating only specific plants, whereas large herbivores like deer or elephants, eat a larger variety of plants.

Why are there ants on the leaves?

Let's take a closer look at the ants on these Camellia leaves:



These ants are tending aphids, small insects that feed off plant juices. The aphids exude a honey-like substance which the ants eat. In exchange, the ants protect the aphids from predators, and carry them for larger distances than they could easily walk. This is an example of symbiosis, a relationship that benefits both species.

Are they conspiring to exploit the plant? Not at all. Notice that the plant in this picture looks very healthy, and shows no evidence of any damage to its leaves. I have gardened for years, and observed this ant-aphid pairing on numerous plants, and I noticed that the ants not only tend the aphids, but they protect the plant from other herbivores. When ants and aphids take over a new plant, the ants clear out caterpillars and other critters feeding on the plant. The aphids only feed near the tip of the plant, on the tender, new leaves, and the strong ant presence here deters other herbivores from the part of the plant that is most vulnerable. The relationship benefits all three species, and is an example of a form of mutualism that involves more than just two species.

I have also noticed that aphid infestations are more likely to kill indoor plants, where there are no ants, whereas I have never seen them kill an outdoor plant; I can't help but wonder if the ants help to keep the aphid population at the optimum level for the plant's health.

What does this say about tea cultivation, and agriculture in general?

People often see insects on a plant, and think "it's an infestation, there's a problem", but this is not necessarily true. In some cases, having insects on a plant can be beneficial. Our modern agriculture has relied on brute-force "pest control" methods which destroy not only all the insects and other small animals around a plant, but often have other negative ecological impacts as well.

Tea was successfully cultivated without the use of any synthetic chemicals, for hundreds of years. Tea was discovered as a beverage, and tea cultivation was developed into a complex art, long before modern organic chemistry. Synthetic chemicals are not necessary to grow tea, and in fact, not necessary to eat any of the food crops that are part of the rich, older traditions of plant cultivation.

I would like to invite people to think more about ecological relationships in all aspects of your life. Look for them, and you will see them all around you. Even if you live in a city, you can see ecology all around you, in the relationships between the plants growing up in cracks in the sidewalk, the insects that eat them, and the birds that eat those insects. Ultimately, the more aware we are of ecology and how ecosystems work, the more likely we will be to make responsible choices and decisions that will lead to a sustainable future for all of us.