Tea vs Coffee. The eternal conflict.
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Two-update week because I’m running on fumes this week. Next Selkie will be on Monday, hopefully as usual.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
I still think that a lot of issues with tea in the US is cheap tea and not brewing it right. Getting it pre-made from any restaurant is likely to be bad tea since they used a hot water tap from the coffee machine (which is normally not the right temperature). Whole tea leaves also tend to have better flavor than the ones that are crushed into smaller pieces and put into bags for quick and easy brewing. Tea also has the benefit where you can get almost any flavor (eg: chocolate, spices, citrus, minty, fruity, nutty, etc), though that might be limited a bit if you remove herbal teas and only include teas with actual tea leaves in them. I also find that fog teas (tea made with steamed milk) or other milk teas are easier to get people used to the flavor of some, like earl Grey tea (sort of like people getting used to coffee with milk and sugar in it). I haven’t met too many people that don’t like chai, though I know that matcha can be an acquired flavor.
If I couldn’t sleep and got up at 1AM, mom would make me Sleepytime herbal tea.
That’s an easy introduction.
Also, biscotti. I can dip a cookie in hot liquid and act posh about it!
I bought cheap Lipton, and no matter what I did it tasted like I let it steep an hour.
Lipton works well for southern style sweet tea, served over ice with tons and tons of sugar in it, southern style tea is… not traditional to say the least.
I’ve been trying a few other teas and most are far less bitter than Lipton, much better in a traditional cup, but if you try to make them into southern style tea they turn out flavorless.
I don’t know if that was intentional or just a happy coincidence but it explains why Lipton is so popular in the US
I like southern style sweet tea but in the last few years a lot of the restaurants seem to have gotten into a contest to see who has the sweetest tea. It has reached the point where all you can taste is sugar.
There’s also the possibility of getting the cup size wrong. I prefer my tea pretty strong – as in, if it’s still warm when I get to it it’s not oversteeped strong – and I’ve run into tea brands that just didn’t put enough tea in the bags so the tea was weak when I made it the way I normally would. I presume the opposite is possible as well, but naturally I wouldn’t know.
Every tea I’ve ever tried just tastes like watered down coffee. If I pay someone $30 for a box of luxury tea bags I expect the tea to taste how it’s advertised. So far I haven’t had a single fruit based tea actually taste like the fruit.
It’s my general opinion that if I have to doll up the Adult Drink with sugar and/or milk then there’s no point developing a taste for it, let alone a taste that will lead to addiction. Ergo, I steer clear of coffee (bitter bean juice), and for tea… well… it *smells* great, I’ll give it that. Or at least, my mom’s herbal teas smell great, most of ’em.
From my experience, tea is water masquerading as juice until you taste it. The only strong-*tasting* tea I can recall is the thick, foamy green tea they serve at a Japanese tea ceremony. Despite my distaste for bitter things, that’s the tea I actually seek out when I can.
Though I can’t, now, since I developed a sensitivity to caffeine (anything like the amount in a Pepsi gives me a headache that lasts for literally hours). But yeah, the rest of the teas smell great and taste dumb.
What bugs me is that society seems geared to ignore anyone who doesn’t appreciate tea or coffee. Any time an event has free drinks, it’s almost always “here’s coffee, here’s tea, here’s maybe some water, oh you don’t like any of those options? too bad.” Annoys me to be left out that way, ‘cuz I’m far from the only person in the world who’s not hooked on the caffeine buzz.
I think that Selkie’s toxic saliva would be a bigger issue to taking a taste than anything.
Eh, Amanda’s developed a resistance.
What?! What kind of kid hates sweet things?!
She’s a sarnothi. Remember when they tried to feed her peeches?
From what I understand, humans evolved to love fat because it’s the taste of high-energy foods, and sweet because it’s the taste of easily digestible energy. Of course eventually we figured out how to game the system by making too many sweet things, and now we’re paying the price in health problems, but that was the core.
But different animals have different taste-bud profiles. I’ve heard that cats have no sweet tooth at all — they literally can’t taste sweet. Which makes sense, as an obligate carnivore. And cows think that grass tastes great (hence why they eat it all the time) — they get their protein from grass, digesting it in a way humans can’t manage with any efficiency.
I would expect that the Sarnothi digest meat proteins more efficiently than humans do, and that therefore these taste best. And that they evolved the taste buds for sweet not as a way to reward them for eating efficient food, but as a way to warn them against the taste of toxins — which is what most plants are, to them.
By the by, another tidbit: Horses LOVE beer. And since horses need tons of calories daily just to maintain body weight, they don’t have any of the problems we have with beer-belly, and since they’re large animals they can metabolize it better than we can (pint for pint).
Which is why farmers can add some beer to whatever healthy food they’re trying to feed the horse, to encourage them to eat. (I learned this while looking up the song “Beer for My Horses,” which I hadn’t realized was a real thing.)
Kind of a fun fact but some scientists think that cats might have lost their ability to taste sweet before they were obligate carnivores and that’s why they eventually became the hypercarnivorous little, and big admittedly, monsters they are today. Being unable to enjoy plant matter they eventually lost the ability to digest it easily. Similarly pandas lost the ability to taste umami and that’s why even though they technically can still digest meat they are almost completely herbivorous and almost all of their meat consumption is incidental.
We couldn’t develop our level of intelligence without it. The explosion in intelligence of our hominid ancestors coincided with evolving an omnivorous diet. The adult brain uses between 350 and 450 calories a day while at rest. It can push upwards of 600 for knowledge workers. Ever feel that weird buzz in your head after something like a hard test, long study session or a 10 hour day crunching numbers at work? That’s your brain burning serious calories.
Kids are even more extreme. Nearly 60% of calorie consumption goes to developing the brain. Without access to animal fats and sugars, a child’s mental development is stunted. This is why kids love candy and pizza and abhor veggies. They’re instinctively drawn toward ultra high calorie food sources and avoid low energy dense ones.
Our position as beings capable of higher thought, science and invention is entirely conditioned on our ability to metabolize animal proteins and dense sugars. Because our ridiculous brains need it.
And so, the eternal war of sister rivalry continues…
Both.