Cancer causing teas.

How is roasting with charcoal harmful for you? The charcoal is not in direct contact with the tea leaves, unlike BBQ-ing meat. No carbon gets stuck on the leaves, unlike blackened meat, which is supposed to be unhealthy (black carbon being a carcinogen). Besides, aren't most nong xiang teas get roasted in electric roaster nowadays?

Shen wrote:

Mydnight,

I buy teas from Upton and Silk Road and Jing. All these vendors declare that they have organic teas, which usually means that they were not grown with pesticides nor processed or "enhanced" with synthetic colors or preservatives.

Now, are you asserting that the availability of organic teas, as defined above, is a myth in China? I'm not suggesting that the vendors are lying to me; I'm saying that, based on your information, the suppliers are lying to the vendors or somehow bribing or fooling the organizations that certify "organicness". Is this what you're suggesting?

Regards, Dean

Seems impossible to me unless I am living in a different China then they are.

Organic foods are just starting to become popular in HK now. China is also just starting to pick this up, but there is currently no organization/governing bodies that certifies a farm organic or not. All one would have to do would be to get a sticker that says "organic" on it, put it on their product, and nobody could say different and there would be no backlash even if they were found out.

To find who the culprit is exactly is extremely difficult and you have to know a little about the flow of new tea into the market here. First level is the farmers; you run the risk of them soaking down the crop with stuff to keep insects from eating the raw leaves. Second level is the factories; you run the risk of them adding coloring and chemicals in the processing of the leaves to make the tea look better to the wholesellers and people in market. Third level is the wholesellers at market; you run the risk of them further tampering with the tea by adding coloring or even adding flavoring or scent or recooking tea to make it fresher. The final level is the vendors whom many take a sort of no-holds barred view in how to run their shops; you run the risk of further tampering(especially pu'er), information being withheld about where the tea came from/what type of tea it is, price gouging, and more customer service types of things. And, this is extremely simplified. There are other variations as to how tea gets on the market that are much more difficult to describe.

I am not saying that your vendors are bad. I met Jing in person once or twice and drank tea with him. What I am saying is that the concept of truth in China is relative. As more and more people begin to drink tea, the more tea that the farmers/factories will try to produce; vendors/sellers will try to sell. One way to create this output is by not being organic. So, are you being lied to by some vendors? To be frank, yes.

"Mydnight" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

I have read online tea descriptions where the vendor says something like "these farmers are too poor to be able to afford pesticides" but the teas are not sold as organic, which is a neat if despicable trick

-- playing on the fears of the public, implicitly inviting them to exploit the producers.

Not to get too Marxist, the retail premium for organic produce of all kinds is an incentive to cheat which is present at all levels of the production-distribution chain. Not just in China, but universally. The negative consequences for fraud, if any, are one deterrent factor; if there really are none, then you would expect more people to do it, regardless of culture, concepts of truth, or economic status.

Ozzy

China isn't the only country guilty of pollution,pesticides,additives,misrepresentation. However nothing has hit the consumer fan yet like a tea version of mad cow disease. Tea is an agricultural crop and subject to some minimum standard such as you see printed on boxes of Puer and more from USDA import. You can get sick but it will probably be from bacteria which is why you should always boil water for tea and hope pandemic bird flu poop isn't resistant to boiling water. If you want to be absolutely sure about organic grow it yourself.

Jim

Mydnight wrote:

There are a bunch of problems. First we have agricultural contamination, from overuse of agricultural chemicals in the growing process. But then, more seriously we have deliberate adulteration of the material after growing.

That deliberate adulteration can include things like dyes to make the liquor color better, glues to make the shape of the leaves better, and all sorts of artificial flavourings to make a cheaper leaf taste like a higher grade tea.

We had similar adulteration problems in the US once upon a time, but it came to such a head and there was so much bad publicity that the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted in 1905. China is basically at the point where the US was in 1900 or so, and there is an increasing amount of publicity in China about adulterated food.

What is different between the US in 1900 and China in 2007 is, of course, the fact that modern technology allows many more options to adulterate food than were available in 1900. The whole process of making soy sauce from discarded human hair is actually kind of ingenious if you can think about it as an industrial process and hide your revulsion at the whole idea.

I predict that there is going to be a big backlash over food adulteration in China soon, just like there was in the US.

--scott

Damn you , Scott! How can I get this shit out of my head now??!!

Sasha.

The only thing that I have heard (up until now, of course), is the flouride levels in tea. This is because of pollution, apparently, and the tea plant is very good at soaking up minerals, so the flouride accumulates in the tea plant. This would not affects buds, and fresh growth as much as the stems or twigs (as in kukicha twig tea), and the large leaves that are not fresh spring growth (large leaf puerh). There was one study that found that puerh didn't have anywhere near as much flouride as did what the study called "brick tea", which is apparently a much lower-grade tea that contained many stems and twigs and things like that. Often used in Tibet to make yak butter tea.

There's really no way to know other than to go in and do the measurements yourself, probably. Do tea farms at higher altitudes have less pollution? Good question. Are the flouride levels increasing year by year as the pollution situation gets worse? That was the feeling I got. Does the water which is being used to irrigate the tea bushes affect the flouride levels? Probably. I have seen advertisements that many remote area tea farms/trees are not irrigated, but simply rely on rain water. Would these types of teas be safer? It would seem to me that they might be. I definitely try to purchase pu-erhs made from a lower grade leaf (smaller leaves) - yes, they don't age as well, but I would seriously doubt something like a 7542 (grade 4) would have much flouride. Getting up to grade 7, 8, 9, or off the scale, as some puerhs are, I might tend to avoid those. Until I hear otherwise, that is. I fully realize I could be wrong and might simply be being paranoid.

So - misty mountain top remote area fresh growth buds - if you want to be really safe from flouride problems, I guess. Avoid teas made from larger old-growth leaves, I guess. Or maybe not? There's just really no way to know unless you do the testing yourself. And, unlike caffeine, flouride continues to be released from the tea leaves for up to 45 minutes of soaking or more (way after the flavor is gone). So you can't rinse it out. It's really quite a shame, actually. Depending on how much you drink, it can be really bad for you.

On another note, I have ordered rather high-quality old-style charcoal-roasted wuyi oolongs, and I do notice that I get a sort of unpleasant feeling in my stomach from them. Maybe it's just me, but I do have a fairly hard time with wuyi oolongs. They definitely throw me off balance in an unpleasant way. Unfortunate, really. Green tea from Wuyi, OTOH, I find to be very, very pleasant and wonderful, and tend to drink a fair amount of it. So I don't doubt that there is something about the charcoal. It's also supposed to be environmentally unfriendly. But I do have a lot of respect for Wuyi Oolongs, so I keep trying.

This does raise some questions for me - are they being adulterated? It wouldn't surprise me, I suppose. I think perhaps we just need to approach it with an open mind, and listen to our bodies, listen to what they tell us. I've never had an adverse reaction to pu-erh, but I definitely feel an unpleasant sensation in my stomach sometimes after drinking the Wuyi oolongs (not the Wuyi greens). So, that bums me out a little bit, but OTOH, there are so many wonderful teas out there, there isn't really anything to be depressed about.

Cheers to all, and may be learn more about these types of things with an open mind!

It's just spooky to think that stuff that is supposed to be "good for us" is actually causing us harm. These days, I ONLY drink green teas that I know for a fact come from a place with little pollution, some high quality new pu'er that i liked so much (and everyone thought it was awesome quality) that I bought 56 cakes of it, and some Taiwan Wulong that is bought from some of my close, personal friends of mine in the tea business. I am just more than a little bothered about all of this.

There was actually a period of time that I had a sharp pain in my stomach after eating. I could not figure out what could possibly be the cause; no previous medical history, was eating clean food at the time, and I was in pretty good shape. I then realized that the heavenly tasting tea that I had been drinking could have possibly been the problem. I stopped drinking tea for a week, and my pain cleared up. That's enough proof for me.

You know, when I started this thread, I thought I was going to get a lot of negative backlash from the folks that didn't want to think that it could be true. I am a little happy to hear that you see what I'm saying and put stock in it. But, I am unhappy that others have had the displeasure to see this information.

Ironically, there was more information on this exact type of thing that was on sohu.com/sina.com/21cn.com; China's big online News portals. To be brief, they did a study in the 3rd quarter of 2006 about some teashops around Guangzhou; some in Fangcun/Panyu/Liwang/ etc. It doesn't really matter where the sample was taken because everyone in GZ will have to get their teas from Fangcun tea market or have some contact with their teas. For everyone in Southern China, there is NO CHOICE. Unless you know exactly where your tea comes from, you will be drinking this tea.

Of the teas studied, they found traces of lead in some Longjing and some chemical in the TieGuanYin called Methamidophos which is a chemical found in some pretty serious pesticides. The levels of these chemicals in the teas are simply too high for human exposure, supposedly. If you are also interested, it also talks about some fake Chinese rice wines that can cause blindness. Sorry, the site is in Chinese.

So, in short. I don't drink teas unless they come from a private channel so that the tea can be traced back to where it was grown and produced. I do not buy from wholesale markets anymore, and will only do business with people that can assure me that their tea is clean by scientific proof.

supposed to be "good for

I haven't installed the Google toolbar, but I have used the Google Chinese-English translation site

and I'm mostly frustrated by its opaque English and its disregard for context in selecting which of a character's possible meanings to use. Does the toolbar actually use a different translator?

/Lew

Let me pose the question in a different way. Please go to the translator in the Google toolbar and ask it to translate this page:

What URL do you see then?

/Lew

Lew,

I've always wondered why Google couldn't do better. I'm starting to learn some Chinese grammar and I can see the problem with constructions like aspect markers, measure words and topics. I wished Google would give a literal pinyin translation which makes it easier to see the grammar. I've picked up some college Chinese grammar books but assumes you know the basics which I don't. Fortunately I found a couple of good books at the Library no longer in print which explain the basics. As one preface explained which I paraphrase People think Chinese grammar is easy to learn because there is no grammar like the West but the Chinese assume more by saying less which is really the grammatical learning curve in Chinese.

Jim

haven't installed the Google toolbar, but I have used the Google

I understand what you're saying: that would be useful for people like us. I admit that I actually have a tool like that, though I'm not releasing it publicly because it's kind of ragged and also because I pay for the bandwidth. But I think Google rightly is more interested in the far more numerous people who want a real translator.

The text I'm using, which is in print, is _Integrated Chinese_, principal authors Yao and Liu. I'm happy with it, but I have nothing to compare it with.

/Lew

Interesting...I tried a bagged ooling from a local asian store and it made my stomache really sick. I immediately threw the whole box out because I knew something was up with it. It was very smokey tasting...in a way that I really didn't like. I had terrible paid afterwards.

Pete