I present the potato. It’s baked, fried, ground, roasted, mashed, puréed, steamed, and boiled (to name a few). In other words, we interact with our food in as many creative ways as we can manifest. Over the span of centuries, we’ve done the same with tea leaves and continue to process them by using age-old artisanal methods to produce various wildly complex and aromatic teas. This begs the question – how exactly does the tea plant of the forest become the beverage in our hands and why does whatever we’re doing work? Today, we’re scratching the surface, traveling the tea leaf’s journey, and breaking down the science of tea-processing. Let’s dive right in.

A widely known study in 2019 by McGill University revealed that “…a single plastic teabag at brewing temperature (95 °C) releases approximately 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles into a single cup of the beverage.” Anything at scalding temperatures evidently breaks down plastic, and yet it’s almost laughable (in the anxious kind of way) to relearn that we’re drowning in plastic and sometimes don’t even know it. This research shook the world of tea and continues to be a major topic of discussion in the food industry – how much plastic are we unknowingly consuming and how does this affect us? Today, we’re exploring plastic’s broader impact on tea, our food, and the world.

What even is sustainability? And how does that fit into tea? Should I be drinking organic tea or non-organic tea? We're diving deep into sustainable agriculture to understand the intersection between food production and our environment.