Nutrition counseling for those who want to feel healthier

Tea -- Elixir of the Gods?

Or Elixir for the Mortals who Want to Feel like Gods?

PUBLISHED MAY, 2009: www.cambridgenaturals.com

            How would you design a world-conquering drink if you wanted it to be as follows: available, affordable, invigorating, thirst quenching, safe, and even healthy? This is what Alan Macfarlane, author of The Empire of Tea: the Remarkable History of the Plant that Took over the World, provocatively asks us. Add ease of storage and of brewing and you get your answer: camellia sinensis, commonly known as tea.  And then you can improve on several of those attributes, as two early 20^th century American purveyors did, by inventing the tea bag (as a way to deliver samples to customers) and iced-tea (as a way to sell your brew at a sweltering World's Fair in St. Louis).  Bagged or loose or hot or cold, tea is drunk regularly by two thirds of the world's population.

            As a tea addict myself, I lap up news bites about centenarians from tea drinking cultures in places like the Caucasus and Okinawa and I dwell on news about polyphenols and antioxidants in tea.  Macfarlane observes that "Tea is an addiction but...most unusually, it is good for the addict." (p.31) Besides the antioxidant benefit, there is the fact that water for tea gets boiled and is therefore safer than non-boiled water in many parts of the world.  Researchers seem to agree that tea -- black, green, white, oolong or pu-erh -- has antioxidant properties.  However, the pendulum swings around in terms of which has most, in part because the level of oxidation varies significantly.  White and green tea, which undergo less oxidation (sometimes questionably called 'fermentation'), have been getting top billing in recent years.  However, Heiss and Heiss report in their book The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide, that "some researchers believe that the activation of tea enzymes during the manufacture of black tea may result in the formation of antioxidant compounds that are more powerful in preventing some disease than those contained in green tea." (p.354)  My take on this?  Drink the tea you enjoy most and try to find it organically grown and fairly traded.  Cambridge Naturals is well stocked in both.

            A word about antioxidants for those who can't remember why all the buzz.  They help quell inflammation, something we may well have too much of because of diet, stress, environmental pollution, etc. Tea provides antioxidants shown by research to help neutralize free radicals, those trouble-making molecules looking for extra oxygen atoms to kidnap.

You can't be around dedicated tea drinkers long before you bump into some quite fixed opinions about milk, sugar, water temperature, and so on.  The English can get rather stirred up about milk first or tea first when pouring.  Apparently the English writer George Orwell railed against sugar in tea.  And the Chinese also have their opinions, but they can be engagingly poetic about it.  As you heat the water, you know when to pour it into the pot according to these cues:

• Green or white tea: "column of steam steadily rising" (170-180F)
• Oolong: "bubbles like fish eyes" (180-200F)
• Black tea: "bubbles like a string-of-pearls" (190-200F)
• Pu-erh: "turbulent waters" (200-212F) (Heiss & Heiss, pp.284-5)

For those who want the benefit and pleasure of tea but fear the caffeine in it, there is the half-minute trick: after half a minute of steeping, throw that tea away or give it to someone else and pour in fresh hot water.  You will have avoided over half the caffeine.  You will know whether this works well enough for you by how you feel.  It is safer than using chemically decaffeinated tea.  Three methods are described in The New Tea Companion: A Guide to Teas Throughout the World, using carbon dioxide, methylene chloride, or ethyl acetate.  The first of these three might be your best choice as "the benefits of this method are that no chemical residue is left in the tea and the flavor and tea compounds are relatively unharmed." (p.51)  The amount of caffeine in any cup of tea depends on many variables, including when the tea was plucked, which leaves are used, how much oxidation occurs, and whether the leaf is broken or not -- the finer the particles, the stronger the tea.

            One of the labels for leaf grades is "orange pekoe."  Orange has nothing to do with the citrus plant; it harks back to the early Dutch traders representing the House of Orange.  The derivation of pekoe refers to the downy leaf above which grow the more succulent tea leaves.  How succulent? T for "tippy," G for "golden," and F for "flowery," become prefixes to OP (Orange Pekoe).  So connoisseurs mull over choices like FOP, GFOP, and TGFOP.  To most, however, it is just tea -- if you speak English.  Because England's tea first came via the Dutch, who traded tea in Amoy (now Xiamen) where the name for tea sounded like that, the word in Dutch and English and other languages influenced by the Amoy trade sound similar.  Those nations which traded tea elsewhere in China, e.g., India, Portugal, Russia, used the Mandarin or Cantonese pronunciation and brought home 'cha' or 'chai.'

            All of the books listed below agree on one thing: the life of the women tea pluckers is hard.  They are often paid only subsistence wages.  For that reason, it behooves those of us who can afford it to buy fair trade tea whenever available.  In Massachusetts we're lucky to have our own fair trade organization http://www.equalexchange.coop/ so we can enjoy our tea in good conscience!

Annotated Bibliography: Tea

The Book of Tea (preface by Anthony Burgess), Flammarion, 1992, 2005.  This coffee table book with beautiful, engaging photos and interesting captions covers tea from bush to cup.  The text is informative albeit secondary.  The book ends with a list of tea rooms. None listed in Boston, though we do have them.

The Empire of Tea: the Remarkable History of the Plant that Took Over the World, Alan & Iris Macfarlane, Overlook Press, 2003.  If you are interested in the political and sociological history of tea, this tale-well-told is for you!  It starts with a description of the life of a tea planter's wife post WWII and is then picked up by her scholar son, who wrote the rest of the book.

Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West, B. Hohenegger, St. Martin's Press, 2006. This is a charmingly told narrative history of tea, ending up with fair trade and why it's important.

The New Tea Companion: A Guide to Teas throughout the World, Pettigrew & Richardson, Benjamin Press, 2008.  This guide lives up to its name as its glossy pages give close-ups of the loose tea and the brewed that comes from it, by country, as well as some history, brewing instructions, and so on