I am becoming a connoisseur of iced tea. I got out of the habit of drinking soda pop and stronger drinks when I was in treatment for and recovering from cancer. Pretty much every book or article about the general “living with and avoiding of” cancer will tell you that alcohol and sugary drinks like soda pop are to be avoided. Sugar is now a main target of anti-cancer diets. Sugar, processed foods, fast foods (same thing).
My new food philosophy: if a cockroach won’t eat it, why should I?
It’s easiest to go to the grocery store to pick up huge jugs of the pre-made tea. Iced tea is very popular now; people are trying to be healthier, after all. It’s also reasonably simple to make: get some dried camellia sinensis leaves; add boiling water.
For me, it is necessary to add sweetness. Yes, I remember what I just wrote about sugar being a bad idea for a cancer patient. I’m complex. I also switched to agave nectar, whenever possible. It’s what they make out of the cacti that produce tequila, when they’re trying to make money out of the New Age food crowd.
[Artificial sweeteners have always tasted bad to me. They’re also creepy — I mean, what the heck are those chemicals anyway? The simple fact of not being sugar is not good enough for me. Honey is too rich for me to like it in tea. Agave nectar is not artificial, and just right. There is also plenty of it in the organic grocery stores.]
However, since the people who bottle the bulk iced tea are food processors, they have to mess with it. Better living through chemistry, right? Right. Some cheap tea leaves from like Argentina somewhere, powdered and diluted, high fructose corn syrup in there somewhere, and whatever else. I haven’t read the ingredients on the label; I can taste them. This is a taste that would remind me of the taste of household cleaning products, had I ever been the sort of child that tried to drink them. We’ve got a picture of simple green leaves on the label, though, so it has to be good for you: so goes their reasoning. (I am guessing.) (But you know I am not far off.)
It’s going to do me good in the extremely near future to haul myself out of the chair and boil some water and find me my own dried camellia sinensis leaves.
white pebble 