Category: Writings

This title comes from an essay by Umberto Eco, the famous Italian writer (among many, many, many other things).
In it,  he argued that when two different cultures meet, there are 5 solutions: conquest (either to make them like us or to destroy them), cultural looting, exchange, exoticism or the false identification. Obviously, the reality is usually more complex and you usually end up with a mix of them.

I can hear you boiling and wondering what is the link between Umberto Eco and tea (unless I missed something he never wrote anything about tea) but to know the answer, you will have as usual to bear a little more with me.

Camellia sinensis in Köhler’s Medicinal Plants

Tea is said to have been discovered by Shennong when he tasted hundred of herbs to see if they had any medical value. The result is said to be compiled in The Classic of Herbal Medicine. Tea being said to be efficient against a great number of poisoned herbs.

Tea appeared quite often in medical books or under most lists like a medicinal plant. For example, in 1887, Franz Eugen Köhler published Kohler’s Medicinal Plants in 3 volumes and guess what plant was in it? Yes, Camellia sinensis.

I am sure you begin to see a pattern here and perhaps see where I am heading.
Why do I say that? It is just because I noticed a trend of false identification in tea, one that has been going for a long time now and I think that if I look at some old ads, it was there even before my time.

Ad by the Tea Council (thanks to @scandaloustea for this ad)

If you read the paragraphs above, you can see that this trend has its roots in how the tea was said to be discovered; how it was first perceived and how it was first sent to and distributed in Europe (in private chests by seamen trying to improve their income and then distributed as a pharmaceutical drug).

False identification means that we explore and discover the world based on what we read about it and I would go as far as saying what we expect to find in it.
Tea was considered from the beginning as a medical herb and in an era where obsessed with well-being (which reveals something else about us too) this shows as tea is now said to have all kind of virtues. I won’t bother you with a list of all of them as I would probably forget a lot of them.
Therefore, we are expecting a lot of tea leave and we are interpreting everything about it with this focus in mind.

Aren’t we trying too hard to find something in tea?
Umberto Eco concluded his essay by saying that instead of focusing on finding unicorns, we should perhaps try to understand the nature, the habits and language of the dragons.
Perhaps we should stop trying to find anything in tea and just “listen” to it, enjoy it and let it speak to our tastes and our soul.
After all, traditional Chinese and Japanese tea drinking methods are all about water, leaves,  simplicity and nothing more.
I think there is something that the Long and the Nihon no ryū are trying to tell us.

No I didn’t fell for Star Wars, since that title came to my mind before finding this picture on the Internet.

Snowtrooper drinking tea,

photoshoot by Mike Stimpson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/)

But who could blame a Snowtrooper from drinking something warm between patrols on cold worlds? Certainly not me.

And no, this title has nothing to do with Blade Runner (I don’t even think they know anymore what tea is in this book/movie).

What I will try to do here is to bring a little imagination to our tea world and try to think about what would happen in the far future if mankind was to explore and colonize space. Yes Space, the Final Frontier (I hear someone telling me this is another show and that I should keep the focus on what I intend to say).

Since this topic is so huge and complex, I will go through a small set of hypothesis and examine what their impact on this topic is.

Obviously, it will not be that much compared to the full set of possibilities that the real Universe will bring us but I had to begin somewhere.

Since we are talking about a huge number of colonies, units, spaceships, all of them spread in the known universe; there are three obvious problems : getting there (wherever there is) with the needed quantities of tea and the right quality/freshness.

The first obvious answer to this problem and to all logistical problems can be found in Star Trek with the generalised use of replicators.

I can hear the less Trekkies among us (including me before I made some research before writing this post) wondering what is this device. In an obvious answer, I will tell you that it does what its name implies: replicate. Working from whatever raw organic materials are available onboard and what can be recovered from the close ecosystem of the ship, the replicator can generate all kinds of food, including Earl Grey, the favourite drink of Captain Picard.

This doesn’t sound too glamorous but if we managed to analyse the tea leaves or more likely a good tea cup, we would be ready to have a ready-made and yet perfect cup of tea.

Unfortunately, there would be no tea ceremony and we would lose this wonderful feeling of having managed to make the perfect cup of tea. But there is a solution to this “problem”, just focus on the tea leaves and be ready to get your cup of tea with you everywhere and on every ship.

This was the easy solution provided by technologies and by some soft science universes.

What about the other universes where Faster than Light Travel is not available? Or where technology is advanced but not that much?

The first answer would be to bring it with us aboard ships or on some advanced automatic depots available for whoever needs them.

This would mean freezing the tea (I don’t see any other solution) be it in leaves or in bags (yes I know it sounds strange) through exposure to cold freezing gas like liquid nitrogen (or any other that would be used for this purpose).

However this means that depending on the total number of people, planets, stations, ships, units… that would drink tea (remember this is science-fiction, I can make all people drink tea if I want to), good old Earth would need to produce a really great amount of tea year after year for an ever expanding number of people and place, leading to both an exhaustion of the production capacities (intensive farming) and an over-stretching of the supply chain needed to bring them to the last people in the line.

Nowadays, this works in the corn business but on a much smaller scale thanks to a lot of silos and transportation but having to move things all along the universe seems a bit too unrealistic unless you focus on huge spatial mobile “silos” (along the lines of what you can see in Dune) that would need to have access to a lot of supplies.

Dune space ships

Which bring us to the next question: would it be feasible to have the needed production to supply everyone?

First of all, the question is whether or not there is a lot of terraformed planets or planets where our agriculture could be brought without having too much to do.

Given the right conditions, this could happen and since these planets would not have been exposed to our plants and seeds, it would be easy to see “our” products invading and destroying everything on perhaps an ecological catastrophe scale but this is not my main focus here. However, for those wondering about this, just look at what microbes did to the Native Americans way before they saw an European. A plant (or a seed) without natural predators or a limit to its grow (like those you can find on Earth) could grow and spread, slowly (or quickly it depends) destroying the native plants and seeds (or worst for us, mutating and becoming something else before we find about it).

If we had access to a lot of planets like this, it would be easy to produce a lot of tea (among other things but my focus here is on tea) and thus supply all this huge silos floating in space.

However since tea depends on the terroir (meaning among other things men, soils, weather…), what would happen if it was brought on other planets? The likely answer is that it might become something else, perhaps something we would not recognize any longer as tea.

An other solution would be to focus on tea already made that would be transported in huge containers. For this to become a reality, new huge factories would have to produce tea using every leave available. This could create problems while leading (but on a much lower scale) to an increase in the tea production needs, leading to other problems as there is a limit to how much we can produce with one tea plant.

The transport and preservation of this tea would be much easier to do. After all, it would just be bringing in and keeping cold enough bottles or cans. The only thing that would still be left to find out is how should we warm them without changing the taste? This is something people might still think about before mankind launches itself into space colonization.

But then like with the replicators, where is the fun in making ones tea if you do it like that?

After looking rather quickly at a few scenarios, the only conclusion is that “diversity is the spice of life” and trying to make everything uniform and to convert everyone to one food, one thought… is probably the best way to big catastrophes and problems that we might not oversee yet (I did mention terraforming and/or bringing plants and seeds from Earth and the possible negative consequences of such an action, didn’t I?).

Therefore, the best idea would probably be to let everyone free of drinking whatever they like and however they like it. After all, chaos and diversity lead to creativity.

I will share a secret with you: I am doomed. I know in the end, we all are but in my case, I am doomed earlier than you.

Why? Because a study said so.

Now you are thinking that I am really out of my mind but not at all. Once at school I read in my English a text that said that according to a study, left-handed had a shorter lifespan than the others because the world is made for right-handed, which will lead one day to a fatal accident.
This is why I only have a relative confidence in studies that show up from time to time telling you that something is that or something else is that.

Because they are based on maths or science but we (the whole of us) are lacking the information to know what is really inside them.

With luck, you might get access to the article and data that allowed someone to give you an information but most of the time, you will only get a summary like the one I made at the beginning. The other problem is that if you get access to all the data, you (like me) are probably lacking the background to double-check things.
You are probably wondering why I am speaking about this or why do I have a title that is somewhere on the road between a survey and a new version of Blade Runner (or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

The answer is simple: because I am reading more and more things about how green tea (and now even white tea) seems to be the new solution for almost everything (I am only slightly exaggerating).
Don’t get me wrong, I like when new people drink tea and I don’t have anything against scientists and new discoveries and findings.

What I don’t like is people doing things for the wrong reasons (unless they change along time) and under influence of people that are supposed to be experts in their respective domains.

To me this whole thing screams like marketing but the bad side of it, like when companies are trying to sell their products using whatever arguments they have even if they are false or more likely half right (the most famous example being the soap that washes whither than white (is that a kind of new colour that we don’t know about?)).
I have troubles with the concept of new discoveries being made of über product that do all for you, even more when this über product is linked to tea and when big companies jump on this opportunity to launch a new product (that is not at all what the scientists tried and tested) selling it thanks to these new arguments.
You can listen to scientists and to ads but please use your mind when hearing something and try to learn a little more about what they say (and not only through the Internet) and don’t fall for easy traps.

In other words, drink tea but don’t expect wonders apart from the taste and the experience (if it was so wonderful, it would be used in the whole world).
And now, it is time to tell you the results of my new study on robots and if they are more likely to have bad shoes or drink good tea…