Tea in, tea out

Do you ever think about where the things in your life come from and where they go? Take this cup of tea, for example. I know the tea has come from the Nilgiri hills of South India because it says so on the packet. Yes it's Earl Grey what of it? The bergamot is only flavouring, not from genuine Italian oranges, so we can ignore that. I like to imagine the tea bushes being hand-trimmed by ladies in saris on hilltop terraces beneath a beating sun, but that's probably an opinion I got from a Ladybird book decades ago. A more realistic illustration would still involve fields but probably more automation, maybe shear harvesting, maybe full-on mechanical harvesting, I'm not buying top-tier tea here. Also it'll have rained a lot, ultimately retaining water from the Indian Ocean in my tea leaves, not to mention nutrients from the soil, all transported over 5000 miles from there to here. Then the leaves get processed, I guess on site or nearby because it makes sense to trim the unwanted parts…

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