I bought a big box of Foo-Joy green tea bags from an Asian market recently and when I opened the sealed mylar pouches I could swear it smelled like some synthetic chemical.
The tea is imported from China and was supposedly some special Lunqching (sp?) imperial Dragonwell tea or something, but I wasn't impressed with the quality and it smelled funny and I'm pretty sure I detected an odd flavor.
I went to see a weird indie movie called "All in This Tea" about an American tea trader who went to China, India, and elsewhere in pursuit of the finest batches of tea for his company. In one scene he is complaining about a chemical smell in a batch of supposedly quality tea that the official Communist tea collective is trying to sell him, and he thought it was either fertilizers or pesticides. The tea collective refused to let him buy direct from the farmers, so he had no way of contracting for supplies of uncontaminated teas.
Should I continue drinking the tea or buy some some quality organic brand? And since most of the green tea in the world comes from China and since Chinese certifications of quality, safety, organic, etc. are meaningless, why should I pay more for "organic" tea that likely is from the same contaminated fields in Communist China?