I visited the Sydney Tea Festival which was held for just one day under a large covered roof. Most of the stalls were devoted to Chinese tea and flower shops. There were a few stalls showing Darjeeling tea and almost a total absence of anything resembling Indian black teas. I imagine none of this should be surprising when you look at the make-up of the visitors to the fair. My estimate is as follows:
Visitors of different age groups by sex – estimated percentages
Age 15 to 35: 55%, 65% female, 35% male
Age 36 to 50: 40%, 55% female, 45% male
Age 51 plus: 5%, 50% female 50% male
How did it come to pass that the tea industry of a few decades ago of mainly black and green teas has changed into a festival of green tea and flowers? No clear analysis exists but I suspect that the combination of several factors helped to shape the modern tea industry.
- The increasingly shrill articles about the dangers of sugar and how it was full of calories and would make you fat.
- The increasing number of articles which influenced young women into thinking that their body should be of model proportions and that they should give up all fattening foods, including sugar.
- The fact that most tea had been drunk in the British Empire made with small leaf black tea from India, Ceylon, Kenya and Indonesia, made with milk and sugar, meant that it was now unfashionable. The search was on for a healthy tea that could be drunk without sugar.
- The marketing effort of the Chinese and Japanese tea industry was to offer green tea as a healthy beverage. Although black tea has equal health benefits, the black tea Tea Boards did not promote as well.
- The result was that the specialty tea industry, which developed to satisfy the needs of a younger, more health conscious generation, concentrated on green tea and herbals made with flowers with vague health benefits. The common factor was that they could all be drunk weak and without sugar.
- It seemed to be important that the tea was organic, natural and free from all bad social influences.
- The notion that caffeine was bad for you gained increasing momentum and tea, with less caffeine per cup, and herbals with no caffeine at all, were seen as alternative beverages.
- The growth of New Age medicine, holistic therapy and herbal medicine from the 1970s was almost certainly a factor. Better to cure a supposed symptom with a supposed cure of a herbal tea at a low price than go to a conventional doctor and be told that there were no symptoms and no cure and pay a lot of money.“It’s cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery,” says Steven Salzberg, a prominent biology researcher at the University of Maryland at College Park. “These clinics throw together a little homeopathy, a little meditation, a little voodoo, and then they add in a little accepted medicine and call it integrative medicine, so there’s less criticism. Alternative medicine wouldn’t be quite so bad if it were harmless, Salzberg says, but it isn’t. “If the treatment is herbal tea or yoga, fine; it won’t help, but at least it won’t hurt you,” he says.1
If this is the future for the tea industry, the prospects for a prosperous black tea industry in India, Ceylon, Kenya and Indonesia do not look good. These teas will eventually be relegated for use in teabags where the current brewing time in England is 18 seconds and the tea extremely weak. The propaganda battle is being lost before our eyes.
The Sydney Tea Fair was held on August 16th, 2015.
Featured photographs: Alana Dimou, Sydney Tea Festival
1The Triumph of New-Age Medicine, The Atlantic (2011)
1 Comment
Growing up as an ex-pat in Australia, where the only choices for tea were dust speckled Lanchoo, Lipton and other “aberrations of tea” as my mother called the only commercially available tea in Australia, I was accustomed to “proper tea”, that is, tea leaves, brewed in a tea pot and enjoyed in a cup and saucer. My mother would somehow procure tea leaves, via the post, friends travelling etc., and past customs officers. And if you are wondering, it was black tea.
And what a long way Australia has come, from the tasteless muddy waters that was tea in a tea bag to a veritable cacophony of teas, tisanes, infusions and all manner of gadgetry. With Asia on our doorstep, a society of ex-pats in one form or another, no wonder there is an abundance of experiences waiting to be had.
Whilst we can all be condescending to those that do not drink what we drink, I think most of us rise above the mire, and do not deride those who choose to experiment and enjoy their tea, tisane or infusion in a manner of their choosing.
There is no right or wrong in tea. If it were not for those intrepid tea explorers, perhaps we would still be limited to tea dust in chlorinated bags.
The Sydney Tea Festival is a good opportunity to see how far Australia has come and how much our multicultural heritage has and continues to influence us.
I love my black tea with a drop of milk. But I also enjoy a herbal tisane. Some tisanes are grounded in age-old remedies. It can do us no harm to be cognisant of the benefits of tisanes, infusions and black and green teas.
We can spend our lives in boxes, limiting ourselves to one thing and foregoing the opportunity to experience the world seen or tasted through another’s experience. The Sydney Tea Festival gives us this opportunity.
Well done to the organisers for bringing a world of experience to people irrespective of gender, age or culture.
And my mother who has tea sets galore enjoys not only her favourite black tea, but a Vietnamese Green tea and tries ice tea infusions. Go mum and go everyone for trying. Black tea will live to see another day despite the doomsday prediction above which appears, incidentally, to be based on gender, age and an undertone of cultural bias.
Will be at the next tea festival with bells on!