The Problems with Tea

If you read this blog, you probably enjoy tea for tea, and for that I am thankful, and feel free to read the rest of this post for a laugh. As this post is 100% serious, but rather laughable when viewed from the perspective of those of us that love tea. So here is a numbered list of the biggest problems with tea that I have found.

1. Tea is Healthy, I'd much rather have tea be somewhere on the over all level of health as somewhere between coffee and cigarettes, maybe settle for on par with soda (though most bottled teas basically are soda). I mean if tea was as healthy as cigarettes I might have reasons to restrain myself from drinking it as often as I do. But the thing I can not stand is tea being billed as some sort of wonder beverage. It drives me nuts, as the tea loving public that are the backbones of tea forums, and beacons of tea knowledge in the west, often have to answer mundane questions like "Will I get more of compound X if I brew my tea in fashion Y." While I actually have no problem with a person trying to be healthy, it is the fact that many people are saying they don't care about taste, while some of the methods of preparation would produce some nasty concoction I wouldn't want to call tea.
   
2. Boston Tea Party, I have no problem with the actual Boston tea party. It is the fact that it had to be tea that was thrown off the ships. While it might have been a waste of tea, and it made tea borderline Taboo in the United States for many many years after that, those actually are not my problems. It is the fact that modern political activists have taken the moniker "Tea Party" as their group thinking that somehow they are fighting a similar war against Taxation that happened in Boston all those years ago. As this is a tea blog, I will have no comment on anything political. But the fact that I can't even have a general google reader news search for "Tea" without coming back with articles mostly on the political organization with maybe 5% of them actually on tea. And Social networking sites such as twitter, have many people flooding the site with the tag #tea instead of tea party.
3. Tea is Asian! This one is really a joke, but the point behind it is the fact that the languages in Asian countries are completely different than most Western Languages. Do not get me wrong, I feel like getting exposure to languages is great, and that people should be fluent in as many languages as possible. But the fact that the differences between Eastern and Western languages are so great, it is hard to get proper translations of information from websites without being fluent in both languages yourself. Also with the Roman based alphabet being so prevalent across many languages I can begin to sound out most words in most European based languages without fully knowing the language, but I can not look at a Kanji character and be able to guess its pronunciation without already knowing the character which probably means I already know its translation. And not knowing how to pronounce the character makes it virtually impossible to look up a translation to a kanji character.
   

I hope you enjoyed this post, I felt I should infuse a bit of humor for us tea lovers.