Here’s a totally boring statement about tea: it is enjoyable, healthy for you, and inexpensive. That’s about as interesting as saying that that guy Rembrandt sure could splash paint around. How about instead: Rembrandt was a clown who couldn’t draw straight, made everything look dark and only portrayed ugly people. His paintings were done by hired unemployed art students. Hmm. Interesting…
So, no more boring stuff about tea. In the spirit of curmudgeonly provocation, you need to know this: Tea is Evil and Awful. It’s unhealthy, encourages bad habits and is a force for social unrest. We’ve been fed with too much propaganda about tea and health, how soothing it is and all that cosy cuppa nostalgia. Reality is darker.
The infamy of tea
As early as 1744, Eliza Heywood, the pioneering, prolific and much-respected playwright, novelist, journalist and published, alerted society to ways in which tea erodes character, especially among working class women. “It is the utter Destruction of all Oeconomy—the Bane of good Housewifry, and the Source of Idleness…”
William Cobbett, one of the most famous social activists of the 1820s, noted that tea led girls into prostitution and strongly argued that every house be stocked instead with “its good and wholesome beer.” He provided plenty of figures and scientific data to show that tea was far more expensive than the daily 4-10 pints of beer the average family needs (less during cold months but ten in summer). This “corrosive and gnawing” poison destroys health, encourages effeminacy and has no nutritional value.
He presented “undeniable proof” of this in his striking example of how tea kills pigs. If you feed a hog a diet of the malt used to make beer, the pig will produce fifteen times its weight in bacon. Feed it the left over tea “messes” and it will die in about a week.
Cobbett was a leading social reformer, political organizer and writer. His “Rural Riders” is still in print. His is just one of the many influential denouncements of tea published in the 19th century. The Dean of Bangor in the 1880s attacked tea-drinking for destroying the calmness of the nerves and acting as a revolutionary force among us. “Renewed three or four times a day, [it] made men and women feel weak, and the result was that the tea-kettle went before the gin bottle… ended in ruin, intemperance and disease.” So, like the claims about marijuana leading to cocaine, tea is a gateway drug – Earl Grey today and Long Island Iced Tea tomorrow (tea bag plus, typically, vodka, tequila, gin, rum and triple sec.)
That authoritative journal of record, The New York Times, continued the alerts into the next century. It summarized the scourge in 1910, as “The liquid has the properties of a slow poison. The use of tea is now carried to such dangerous excess that it ranks before alcohol as an enemy of the public health.”
Tea: A forerunner of Internet trolling
The tea party degraded from social gatherings to gossip attack organizations. It became a medium for “originating and promulgating petty slanders.” Reformers tried to end the tradition of tea breaks, where women ignored their domestic duties and were open to political agitation and even rebellion. Tea eroded the strict etiquette about what topics were suitable for discussion in social groups. In the 18th century, commentators noted that foreign teas were creating a “nervous society.” Coffee was associated with masculinity but tea was very much centered on women, eroding their roles, consumption of food, and meeting of their family duties.
Tea abuse was rampant among laborers and encouraged mental stimulation that depleted their physical energy by diverting it from the body to the mind. Many observers felt that this was a major factor in the nation’s loss of greatness (a complaint in both the US and UK) and was illustrated by the racial decline and decadence of China. Torrents of tea were fueling Radicalism and as nations began to drink it, “they promoted eras of reform and revolution.”
All in all, as a pioneer in the emerging science of occupational medicine noted in 1872, “tea-drinking is a form of animal indulgence which is as distinctly sensual, extravagant and pernicious as any beer- swilling or gin-drinking in the world.” It was not coincidental that tea was sold in liquor stores. The only solution was abstinence.
Writers and their love for tea and alcohol
A disproportionate number of American authors were paralytic drunks: William Faulkner, who hired a nurse to look after him on his three-day benders, Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote all died from alcohol.
While there is no apparent medical record of deaths from tea, many great writers were tea devotees. Dostoyevsky (“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”), Dickens, Auden, CS Lewis, Henry James, George Orwell and Jane Austen are examples. Tolstoy built his daily routine around it. The most famous creative instance is Marcel Proust’s evocative memory of dipping a madeleine in a tisane, a herbal tea of primarily lime-blossoms. (This is a more refined version of dunking a cookie or bikkie in a mug of strong Assam.)
The two addictions of tea and alcohol are clearly related. Writers seem to have been either drunks or tea gluggers. This reflects the addictive nature of writing. (Cobbett usefully describes teas in drug terms, as a weak form of laudanum.) The Teapot lobby has conditioned us to think of tea as a nice addiction, that is easy to break, harmless in moderation, and a rarity in its being good for you. As the scientific and social commentary summarized in this short review makes clear, this is anodyne blather.
As for health…
Tea originated as a medicine that became a beverage. That was the basis for marketing it in Europe. The very first print ad in Britain, in 1668, pushed it as curing or preventing scurvy, liptitude distillations, griping of the guts, hot livers and stones and gravels.
As we now know, this was false. Coroners’ reports throughout the coming century list “tea abuse” and “tea poisoning” as the cause of death. One historical study describes the crescendo of concern over the links between tea drinking and the “dramatic” increase in insanity in Ireland, which was a subject of a special inquiry by medical authorities and asylums in 1894.
The problems were most acute among poor rural families where pots of cheap tea stewed all day on the hob and consumption per person often exceeded 150 cups a day. (Dutch physicians in the late 1660s recommended 200 cups a day as “not too much” to ensure good health.)
All this is both interesting and resonant in its implications. Consider it as you sip, say, a cup of that really lovely Thurbo Spring Chinary – very light and fresh as well as inexpensive. What you are doing may feel good and socially responsible, but to restate the old line that the Path to Hell is paved with good intentions, it is littered with tea leaves. Nor will switching to, or worse adding, a cup of the bargain price and much fruitier Rishehaat Summer black put you on the road to redemption. (A quick recommendation: the Thurbo improves with a slightly longer brewing time at a little below boiling point.) As for High Mountain Taiwan Alishan oolong… Well, just see what it does to a pig.
PS: Every single instance and quote in this blog piece is real and from published sources that were influential in their time.
Featured banner illustrated by Tasneem Amiruddin
