Green Wizardries, Tea by Maxine Rogers
I was brought up a tea drinker. My parents were of British extraction and our family drank a lot of black tea. It was a big thing when I was a little kid and got my first cup of tea. My father made a little ceremony out of it and told me the story of his first ever cup of tea when he was six. I really felt like one of the big kids when I was allowed to drink my first cup of tea.
Back then, the tea bags were made of paper. I don’t know quite when this changed but a number of years ago, I started finding tea bags, quite unchanged after being composted for more than a year in a high-heat compost pile.
I found out ,then, that what I thought were paper tea bags were actually made of polypropylene which is a type of plastic. These tea bags release micoplastics and nanoplastics in each cup of tea. Why would a tea company deliberately poison its customers? I expect they make a fraction of a penny more per box of tea by this dastardly act. Plastics inside the body upset the balance of the endocrine system.
Have you seen those fancy-looking transparent, pyramid-shaped tea bags they use in cafes? Well, someone served a cup of tea with such a bag in it to Nathalie Tufenkji. Nathalie is a professor of chemical engineering. She began to study these bags and found that if you brew a cup of tea at 95 degrees Celsius, the bags will release approximately 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics. Nanoplastics are 150 times smaller than a human hair and may be small enough to permeate human cells.
I wonder if this plastic poisoning is one of the reasons people have such a lot of chronic disease now. The rate of chronic disease is skyrocketing. In any case, I was disgusted by this rapacious act and stopped drinking tea made from tea bags. This is easy to do. All I needed was to go to a tea shop and buy a metal tea ball. The ball opens up and I put tea in, close the tea ball and put it in the pot or cup.
Then, I found caffeine was not great for me so I began to drink decaf tea and coffee which is kind of pointless because the pleasure of tea and coffee drinking is the chemical rush from the caffeine. Once I was no longer addicted to caffeine, I found coffee tasted vile. I still like the taste of black tea but rarely drink it. I have my doubts about how wholesome tea is after the chemical process to get rid of the caffeine.
I find it very easy to grow all the tea I need for my family here on Denman. Lemon balm, Jimmy Tait, may she rest in peace, gave me my first lemon balm plants from her garden. I gave some lemon balm plants away to a young woman who grew up on Denman and when I told her they came from Jimmy Tait, she whispered Jimmy’s name reverently.
I doubt Jimmy used lemon balm for tea. Jimmy liked to plant lemon balm by the paths where people would brush against it and release the lovely lemon scent. Jimmy was all about the scented garden. When I first tried lemon balm for tea, I was disappointed as I had hoped for a flavour more reminiscent of lemon grass. Lemon balm does have a nice flavour but it is mostly consumed for its pleasantly calming effect.
I grow heaps of lemon balm for export to family members in the city. I also grow German chamomile which is an annual and looks very nice at the front of the border or lining paths. I rake out the blossoms with my fingers and dry the flower heads which make an excellent, tasty and calming tea. Chamomile tea is also used to make cosmetics to soothe the skin.
Last summer, a lovely friend also gave me some Roman chamomile plants which are very pretty and low-growing and have a lovely scent and flavour. These chamomiles are perennial and the clumps get bigger every year. I look forward to growing a large plantation of these excellent flowers.
Finally, I have a couple of wooden half barrels that I grow chocolate mint and French woolly mint in. I cropped them several times last spring and summer and kept them watered and fertilized. They grew back very strongly and I love the tea I have from them. The chocolate mint and the French woolly mint make a delicious tea with none of the hard edge of spearmint.
By being self-sufficient in tea, I am saving a little money each year but I am also saving my health through avoiding plastic poisoning, avoiding the toxic sprays that contaminate most black tea and I am saving the Living Earth from these toxic burdens. My spent tea leaves go into the compost and make the world a better place.
