Tea Bags and Plastic

I do not live a decadent lifestyle. If I drink, it is usually a glass of $10.00 wine. I don't gamble. Except when I am travelling, I almost never eat in restaurants and my definition of fine food is a plate of brown rice with some broccoli and mushrooms on top. I really try to keep my life as simple as possible. When I relax, all I want is a cup of tea - a drink that has been drunk for centuries around the world. In fact, according to Wikipedia other than water, tea is drunk more than any other beverage. (https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Tea). Plain tea is very simple - boiling water poured over the leaves of a specific plant that originally came from Asia but now grows in various parts of the world. That is all. How can tea not be good for you - or at least harmless?

The answer is plastic. Tea and plastic - two words that should never be used in the same sentence. Tea is natural, plastic is made from oil. But the purveyors of high-end teas have decided to use plastic tea bags for their best teas. And it turns out that those plastic bags release literally billions of microbeads of plastic into the tea which then end up in our guts (Globe and Mail).

Life is incredibly complex. There are all kinds of disasters happening all around us. Some of those disasters are, at least initially completely beyond our capacity to predict. But surely, with all of the discussions as to the number of micro bits and pieces of plastic that are floating in our rivers, lakes and oceans, some bright person at the tea company would have realized that using plastic for tea bags would potentially cause problems. Don't they test things before they release them to the public?

On the other hand, perhaps it is some sort of far-left dastardly plot to kill off all of the capitalists drinking their premium brands of tea.