Life of a blog post

Just to prove I have ADHD, consider this: Yesterday's blog post started with the thought that tea bags contain way too much tea.

A single tea bag can easily produce 3 cups of tea (if judged by color alone).  And it can do so in less than a minute.  Yet I remember from "Angela's Ashes" that the mother steeped the tea leaves for five minutes.  So I wanted to know if tea drinking had changed over the years, but I never found an answer for that.

Instead I got a brief history of tea from the UK Tea Council.  They also included an 'FAQ' with some very interesting facts:
- Per capita, the largest tea drinking nation is Ireland, followed by Britain.  (I'm not sure where China fits on the list.)
- Brits drink 165 million cups of tea per day, compared to 70 million cups of coffee
- 98% of Brits spoil their tea with milk
- All tea comes from the plant, Camellia sinensis (although there are 1,500 varieties of that plant).
- The only difference between green tea and black tea is the amount of oxidation that occurs, which breaks down the tea leaves and turns them black.
- Tea was rationed in the UK during World War II.
- In 1953, Tetley introduced the tea bag.  Today, 96% of tea is from tea bags.

The Tea Council also had a grisly account of tea smugglers that make today's drug cartels seem pretty soft.  It also noted that when William Pitt the Younger reduced the tea tax in 1784, he made up for it by increasing the window tax.  (There was also a brick tax.)

From there, I got to reading about the East India Company, which lost its monopoly in 1834.  Faced with competition in China, it turned its attention to cultivating tea in India, and within 50 years tea imports from India where greater than those from China.

Competition among tea traders also ushered in the 'tea clippers,' fast sailing ships meant to get from London to China as quickly as possible.  They could travel at 20 knots (23 mph), compared to 5-6 knots (6-7 mph) for most cargo ships.  Even so, the return journey took over 3 months, often longer depending on the winds, and when the Suez Canal opened in 1869 -- shaving 7,500 miles from the journey -- they could not compete against the bigger and more reliable steamships.

(I also noted with pride that the clipper ships were pioneered in Baltimore, where they were used to outmanoeuvre the British blockade during the War of 1812.)

1869 was also the year the US trans-contintental railroad was completed, followed the next year by the Indian trans-continental railroad, making the world a much smaller place.  Prior to that, only a handful of people had circumnavigated the globe, with journeys between 2 and 9 years!  In 1873, however, Jules Verne wrote "Around the World in 80 days," which was actually possible.
(The book included an elephant, but the balloon was strictly an invention of the movie.)

It was also interesting that England went from taxing tea as a luxury, to excluding it from sales tax, considering it a necessity.  I tried to find a list of similar items exempted from VAT, but could not find anything consistent, but that led me to another court case in cakes. 

I mentioned years ago that cakes and biscuits were taxed differently (and apparently chocolate-covered biscuits are also taxed differently than regular biscuits) based on a court decision that about Jaffa cakes.  In 2008, Marks and Spencer won a 12-year legal battle with the tax man over their Chocolate Tea Cakes, which were originally classified as chocolate biscuits but have now been reclassified as cake.  The interesting bit, though, was that M&S was allowed to keep the £3.5 million (about US $7 million at the time) refund.

We're talking about tax paid by the consumer -- not by M&S!  So even if the tax shouldn't have been collected, it's not clear why M&S gets to keep it.

As for my original issue, I found there's about a teaspoon of tea in a teabag, there are actually 3 grades of tea bags (whole leaf, fannings (or broken leaf), and dust), and everybody else in the world thinks its disgusting to re-use a tea bag.  I still think it's wasteful, but I'm probably not going to abandon tea bags; I will just start a compost pile at the new house.

Oh, and I found instructions for a tea bag rocket to try at home. I hope Jessica's not reading this.