One of my favourite examples of local news fear-mongering happened a few years ago in L.A. The talking head warned that ‘dangerous bacteria’ may lurk on tea leaves, and that anyone who makes sun tea is at risk from a deadly infection. :eek: After a couple of minutes of talking about the hazard, the woman said that there has never been a case of anyone dying – and IIRC, nobody actually becoming sick from – bacteria-infected sun tea.
Christ eating an scone without jam! The local news (KNBC-4) spent time intentionally working people up over sun tea – a very popular beverage that has been enjoyed ‘forever’. Heck, I’d been drinking the stuff for 25 years when the story aired and I’ve never been made sick!
Anyway. I was unpacking some books that I’ve had stored, and I found one called Tea Basics. Here’s what it says on page 106:
I checked the copyright on the book, and it’s 1999 – probably about the time of the Sun Tea Can Kill You So You’d Better Watch Our News broadcast.
As I said, I’ve been drinking sun tea since the mid-1970s. (The desert is a great place for making sun tea.) Maybe all of this sun tea drinking has given my body antibodies that fight Deadly Tea Bacteria. Or else the DTB fear-mongers are full of crap.
Kidney stones? As a teen and Young Adult I’d go through as much as a gallon of sun tea daily, with no ill effects. But I’d sooner believe that sun tea may have components that cause kidney stones to form, than I would that sun tea is any more dangerous than the water used to make it.
Hm, add mrAru and myself to those doing sun tea for 20+ years as well … although I will admit that I now make my iced tea with an iced tea brewer. I have never gotten sick from sun tea, nor have mrAru or I ever had kidney stones. Heck, my urologist back when I was having serious kidney issues never said anything about sun tea to me, and it was in my food diary [what wierded him out was the sheer amount of what I drank regularly, around 3 liters of cold or hot tea, 2-4 cups of coffee, and around 1.5-2 liters of water a day. Then I explained I was diabetic and I actually am thirsty most of the time and drinking a lot has become a habit. I am simply not comfortable if I don’t have my water bottle around me.]
I do know that the process of making tea is not entirely sanitary in the american sense of food production - leaves are picked by hand and spread in the sun to start drying, then raked around and if fermented into black tea put into some sort of rotary drum and whapped around for a while while still damp and heated. More or less =) I just remember seeing a short film on tea production on teh food channel about 5 - 7 years ago when it was fairly new to me. Actually, what I know about raisin production is fairly similar, the bunches of grapes are cut off the fines, and laid out in the fields on brown paper and dried in the sun. Seen it happen on a friend of mrAru’s ‘grape ranch’ outside Kerman CA. ANybody know if they are processed any further than a quick wash and destemming? mrAru is asleep and I don’t think he would be amenable to being woken up in the middle of the night=\
I’ve said in so many threads about “oooohhh there are GERMS on it” If you’ve been doing whatever, and you aren’t dead, knowing about the bacteria isn’t going to kill you. Or make you sick. Or drain you bank account. John, I’m glad to see you too use a little common sense.
BTW, I’ll be going to the post office today.
I thought tea had an additional ‘built-in safety feature’ inasmuch as it was loaded with tannins and other noxious substances that make bacteria curl up and die?
I have real trouble visualising an aqueous solution of the stuff you use to tan leather being a particularly fantastic medium for rapid bacterial growth. If you were to put milk and/or sugar in it, or leave the pot with leaves in it sitting around for 24 hours or more, then maybe. Statistically, if enough people drink ‘sun tea’ (which I’ve never heard of before, btw) then I suppose someone will get sick from it, but the same applies to Evian.
I wonder what would happen if someone wrote a book called ‘Mouth Bacteria and the Potentially Lethal Hazards of Kissing’?
Whitechapel, England? No wonder you haven’t heard of sun tea! (Just kidding. It was sunny when I was in London.)
Americans don’t drink as much tea as people of other nations. (The book says that the Irish are the largest consumers per capita.) I think the book said that 80% of the tea consumed in the U.S. is iced. Not surprising really, since many places in the U.S. tend to be hot. For example, Los Angeles is about the same latitude as Casablanca – though we have that arctic current to mediate things. And if you’ve ever been in New Orleans in August… :eek:
Up here in the Pacific Northwest I don’t make sun tea. I tend to drink the excellent water my community offers instead. But when I lived in the high desert I was able to make sun tea most of the year. You say you hadn’t heard of it, but I assume you’ve looked it up. Just in case, this is the rundown: Fill a clear container with water. (I use a one gallon glass apple juice jug, but there are plastic pitchers complete with a spout.) Put in some tea bags. I used two in the desert, but other people used more – especially if they lived someplace less hot. Put on the cap or top. Put the container in the sun until the tea is the desired strength. Chill in the fridge and enjoy. (In the U.S. South people like about three kilos of sugar per gallon of tea. [Exaggeration.] Quite a shock the first time I ordered some at a café, since I drink my iced tea unsweetened.) Since I mostly drink water now, I rarely have iced tea. Virtually all of my tea consumption is hot.
You have to be careful about Evian water, BTW. There’s been a lot of talk recently about Evian Flu.
Now that you know it has some bacteria, would you feed it to your 1-year old baby? Or your 90-year old grandmother? How about an HIV-positive friend? Do you wish you never found out about it so you can feed it to them without worrying about it?
I do think it’s a little alarmist when they don’t quantify the dangers - with these news reports something is either it’s “good for you” or “dangerous”, never in between. Still, I think it’s useful to know so you can make educated judgements.
Of course. A baby is exposed to all sorts of germs. The news report said that no one had actually gotten sick (IIRC). Better to get his immune system working on it. A 90-year-old probably has been exposed to the same or similar bacteria sometime in her life. I don’t see any danger there.
Ummmmm, noooooo, it’s not even slightly akin to that.
Steak is an exceptionally good medium for bacterial growth, oozing with moisture that is filled with lipids and proteins for the bacteria to use as food. Because of the way steak is butchered and handled, the exterior surface is teeming with bacteria, which is why it will always goes bad if it is not kept cold and consumed in a reasonable amount of time.
Tea leaves contain little nutritional value (how many calories in a cup of tea, hmmm?). Tea also doesn’t come with a lot of harmful bacteria on it. Yes, it is handled a bit by people, and gets some dirt on it and stuff, but on a flippin’ tea estate, not a slaughterhouse. Then it sits, all dried out and shriveled, in a crate and on the shelf for a few months.
So, in fact, leaving tea out in the sun is somewhat akin to . . . leaving some dried out plant leaves in some water in the sun.
And the bit about tea being made with boiling water is a bit of a red herring, isn’t it? For one thing, it’s not like the tea is going to be sterilized in five minutes in water that starts out boiling, but surely drops below the boiling point when it hits the cup or the pot. For another, green tea should never be made with water that hot anyhow.
Not only are they making people worried for no good reason, they are also wrong - leaving water in the sun can actually help decrease the amount of bacteria in it (second paragraph of the article)
It’s the media. They don’t need no steeeenkin’ evidence, all they need is a good scare story.
Bah. They won’t be happy until everything we encounter is autoclaved for an hour beforehand. And then they’ll start banging on about how our health is being compromised from lack of bacteria and we should all drink Yakult.
(Just kidding. It was sunny when I was in London.)