Red Wine, Green Tea, and Pseudoscience

{ Red wine, green tea, and pseudoscience }  

Oh, for crying out loud. Red wine researchers apparently faking data about resveratrol, which is hoped to be a substance that can slow down aging and aid the body's ability to heal itself. There's big money in the health claims made by food and drink people (and I'm looking at you, green tea and pu-erh sellers), which can be undercut by these kinds of shenanigans.







(Photo found on a blog called, "Bloody Students," written by Merys, who is a newly minted pediatrician.)

TEA CONVERSION RATE: 1 in 7 billion. A personal record!

{ Radar and Thumbelina: Two other record holders }  

I've been drinking tea with growing seriousness for over 20 years. (Of course, readers of this blog may argue whether seriousness is a term that can be used to describe me at all, but we'll have to argue about that later.) In all that time, I've never, ever, converted someone to becoming a tea drinker. It's been strictly inside-baseball, preaching to the choir, kicking at open doors, biting the wax tadpole.

{ "I love flower tea!"
Kate gushes embarrassingly }

But my record is now officially 1 in 7 billion. My sister-- my annoying, bratty, smart-aleck sister-- has blogged about how she loves flower tea. "Loves," she captions, and she even uses an exclamation point under the photo she helpfully supplied. Not unlike certain feminine fans of Justin Bieber, who love him to, like, eleventy!!11!!!!

Throughout the years, Kate has mocked my tea obsession in earnest. But she "loves" flower tea? Bwa-ha-ha! Please go over to her blog and cause her to repent her Snidely Whiplash routine whenever I talk tea, and because she has publicly outed herself as a tea drinker-- nay, luuuuuver.

{ Kate Prouty Hearts Justin Beaver }

Something Beautiful: Happy Birthday, Karen Wray

{  Karen Wray, "Purple Iris," 20" x 20", oil on canvas }  

I have talented siblings. My older sister, Karen Wray, lives in Los Alamos, NM, and she creates quite beautiful regional art, focusing on local (hopefully nonradioactive) flora; haunting landscapes from the area in which she lives; and gorgeous, photorealistic representations of basset hounds in tutus, or playing the guitar, or dancing flamenco. She sells her work and that of other local artists at her studio, Karen Wray Fine Art Gallery. If you ever get to the greater Santa Fe area, look her up. Los Alamos Laboratory and the town that supports it are about a half hour or so from SF. You can also buy her work online at her website, which includes pricing and so on.

Karen is 10 years older than I am, and I'm happy she did not kill me when she had the chance. She had the unfortunate job of babysitting me when I was a kid, and I remember saying to her so often, the moment my parents closed the front door as they left, "You're not my Mom. I don't have to listen to you." From that point on, it was war.

But eventually we grew out of it. In college sometime. She moved to Los Alamos, and as a family, we fell in love with this lovely region, so different from the Southwest suburbs of Chicago. "Look! Non-flat rock things! Non-gray skies! The color brown! It's a dry heat!"

{ Karen Wray, "Summer Thunderclouds," 18" x 24", oil on canvas }  

Karen opened her gallery a couple years ago, and she's been filling it with works by talented friends of hers from the pretty vibrant Los Alamos arts community.

You know, I never imagined Karen would end up as a painter when I was a kid. She worked at the lab, doing horrible number-crunching work as a budget analyst or something like that. When she left her position at the lab because the rheumatoid arthritis she struggles with became too much of a problem, she reinvented herself as an artist. She's faced so many medical procedures, operations, pharmaceutical regimes, therapies, and so on; and yet, she doesn't complain about it. She doesn't whine, or act self-pitying, or let herself off the hook for living a full and happy life with her dogs, her husband Bill, her beautiful home, and her paint. And her dogs. Really, she's a superhero to me, and one of the most brave, admirable, smart, and tenacious women you'd ever meet. I miss her, and New Mexico is a long way away.

Karen, happy birthday! XOXO

(And thank you in advance for not suing me because I posted your pictures without your permission.)

NOT Karen Wray's Painting.
I'm just sayin', they'd be a cash cow!

Something Beautiful: Teaboard by Mirko Randová

La Voie du Thé, a French-language tea blog, features a lovely tea table today, which was created by ceramicist Mirko Randová. Just beautiful to look at, no? Hit the link above and look at the table (lovingly photographed) from a variety of angles. Look at how the circular holes are echoed in the surface design. The artist can be contacted here.

End of Days Predicted as Coffee Becomes Rare and Expensive

{ Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! The Zombies Are Nigh! }  

At Forbes online magazine, tech writer Alex Knapp (Repent! the End of Cheap Coffee Is Nigh!) is in a dead panic. And by dead panic, I mean that he's having nightmares of a slow-zombie apocalypse slouching toward his cubicle to be born. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, Alex; for it tolls for thee, the rest of the coffee-drinking world, and thus, civilization as we know it.





(Strangely enough, IMDb has no record of any movie entitled, Dead Panic. With all those zombie apocalypsi (fast or slow), sparkly vampires, and other delightfully sexy undead creature features, why has no one written a direct-to-DVD thriller with that name? I blame the exquisitely marbled Michael Moore, who would make a great entree in Dead Panic.)


What was I talking about? Oh, yes, a zombie apocalypse brought on by "peak coffee." Alex's nightmares began when he read an article by Zak Stone, editor of The Daily Good. Stone starts by discussing the high-end coffee market, where at Intelligentsia Coffee, in Venice, California, their baristas and "coffee groupies" sound just like tea drinkers displaying their obsessive-compulsive side. They have a "Slow Bar," where they do coffee in much the same way as my tea-drinking friends and I.

The idea of the Slow Bar is to “give the customer an experience that expands their idea of what coffee is,” says Charles Babinski, who trains the staff in different brewing techniques and hosts educational events for customers. It’s a place where customers can sit down and ask questions about coffee, but it’s “not meant to be beating people over the heads with education as much as just creating different coffee experiences.”

See? Doesn't that sound just like us? And here, we've been thinking that coffee swillers just slam their way through their vente cinnamon chokeaccinos without noticing the subtle nuances or using language such as the following: “Lychee, persimmon and botanical notes bring a weightlessness to the muscular and expansive Tegu. Marmalade and sweet herbs float in the background while the finish hangs onto a hint of spice.” Doesn't that sound like something Wojciech Bońkowski might have written on his blog, Polish Wine Guide, which-- name aside-- discusses tea with his rare and discerning palate?

Stone notes that for those willing to spend $5 or $6 for a cup of coffee, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. But for those unfortunate enough not to be willing to spend that kind of dough, they're likely to find that the cost of coffee is going to skyrocket to the point that they'll have to either cut back how much they drink or live with lower-quality stuff than they're used to. Increasing demand plus decreasing production volume equals extinction-level event. We're all gonna die.






Consider: What would Western civilization be without coffee? Would Bach have written those finger-tangling toccatas and fugues without a caffeine buzz to keep him going? Would Picasso have spent his life creating art objects like, Still Life from One Angle at a Time, Thank You Very Much? Would the sainted Steven Jobs have discovered the secret to making sleek, shiny objects that can hypnotize mass audiences into giving him all their savings?

I doubt it.

{ Peak Coffee: Batten Down the Hatches }  

Stone points to anthropogenic climate change (predictably) and not enough high-mountain acreage as the culprits for the decreasing supply of high-quality arabica beans. What he doesn't take into account are the possibilities that the decrease in volume may be a temporary aberration, or that human ingenuity may allow us to develop new cultivars in much the same way that the chocolate or tea geniuses have done. Or that people may just switch to drinking other beverages entirely, so there may be hope, after all. Nevertheless, short-term supply problems may trigger the zombie apocalypse predicted by jittery fanboys.

At the exact moment that rare beans are becoming all the rage, all beans are becoming rarer. The price of a cup of coffee—whether it be a $6 pour-over, a $2.50 dark roast at Starbucks, or a $1.50 mug of diner swill—is being driven up by a complex combination of weather events, pest and fungus outbreaks, speculation on commodities exchanges, an unstable labor market in the developing world, and an unprecedented thirst for good coffee among a growing global middle class. The problem, in simple economic terms, is that supply has gone down and demand has gone up.

Now, tea drinkers deal with some similarly troubling reports. A couple seasons ago, the Taiwanese dealt with horrible landslides that killed many, because the high-mountain Li Shan tea farms had increased in number and acreage to the point that the topsoil could not withstand a terrible storm. A burgeoning Chinese middle class is starting to demand coffee and tea (as well as other luxury items), which puts pressure on international markets. Unsustainable farming practices endanger some Indian tea-growing plantations' ability to produce high-quality leaves over the long term. And don't even get me started on the fake aged puerh phenomenon. And so on.

The upshot is that the very, very high-end Chinese teas are kept in-country for the consumption of Chinese millionaires and Party members; wonderful-enough-to-satisfy-everyone-else teas are still widely accessible, especially through the wonder of the Internet, for those willing to spend a premium; and cheap teas will probably follow in the path of coffee and have some kind of temporary spike in price (along with other comestibles), until markets react and come to a new equilibrium.

But until that point, when I'm around coffee drinkers, I'll still watch my back.

Kate writes about "Fictional Food" and other nonsense

{ Kate Prouty Flute Studio takes no prisoners }  

My younger sister, Kate, writes something like a blog, Some of This May Be True. It's better than mine, though, because she's funny, and she swears a lot. Plus, she writes about food, which is a broader subject than that of tea, and the topic tends toward a whole-life approach to writing. Perhaps I'll write about food-life on this blog more, and then ALL HER BLOG TRAFFIC BELONG TO ME. (The skull-and-flutebones picture above is the logo she created for her flute studio. It gives you a good idea of what kind of person we're dealing with, here.)

But she knows bally-all about tea, so that's one point for me, I suppose.

I hereby commit copyright infringement by copying a goodly chunk (with a picture) from her blog, a post entitled, "Clean Eating vs. Sloth: My Dilemma." Within the post, she mentions how she wants to write a series about this journey from sloth and despair to . . . whatever is one slot above that, I suppose. I hasten to say, a sluggard is quite unlikely to create an actual series about anything. Instead, I predict she'll write maybe one or two more posts about it before she gives it up. If you want, you could go over there and give her some encouragement to keep writing. Or to hang up the writing thing entirely and just stick to Shutting Up and Playing Her Stupid Flute, Already.

P.S.: I've made some typo corrections on her blog post, just to keep your eyes from bleeding. You're welcome.

"food"

4: FICTIONAL food. This is stuff that bears no resemblance to food, but is still marketed as edible. Cheetos. Fruit roll-ups. Kool-Aid. Pretty much anything with a cartoon character on the label falls into this category. 

I rarely branch into the Fictional Food category, because even at my most slothful, I realize that this is unacceptable. It's like trying to tell yourself that it's ok to eat Play-Doh because it's nontoxic. Crayons in tacos! Newspaper smoothies! Um. Don't think so.

UPDATE: For Alex Zorach (who was kind enough to comment below), here's a product I think might just be a great Christmas gift.

{ Alex Z., call your office. }

My new tea timer: The 10,000-year clock

As some of you may remember, I have appalling time sense. To me, a day is as a thousand years, a thousand years is as a day, and the three minutes it takes to make a typical cup of Darjeeling is an incalculable duration that my interior time-sense can make nothing of. So I've always got to keep counting in my head, or I have to employ a timekeeper to ensure I don't under- or oversteep a tea I'm working with.

BUT what will I do 10,000 years from now? I mean, once the Singularity has meshed us with computers, and we are living an incomprehensibly long life with all the tea browsing sites we could ever want just downloading into our brains, how will I keep track of tea-steeping time then? I must assume that digital watches will have gone out of style, and that living for thousands of years will make our routines like keeping tight schedules seem quaint and out of date. So what about tea, then?

Well, I have just the answer. I've decided upon the 10,000-year clock as my tea timer of choice, if only for pure aesthetic reasons. It's beautiful, designed to be so, so that people deep in the future would have reason to wind it up and keep it going for another century or so, even after all memory of us has vanished from the earth. (Except for the grudge the cockroaches will probably still be carrying about us.) 

"And what is this 10,000-year clock," you might ask? Well, first, it's gigantic, and it's buried in a mountain to keep it safe and sound. It takes two people to wind it up. and it's designed to be functionally beautiful and make us think about what the world might be like in the deep future, so we take better care of things now.

{ finally, a worthy tea timer }  

If your heart does not ring at the thought of your Space Darjeeling being carefully timed by such a lovely timepiece as this (the small-scale mockup of the real thing), then there is no help for you.

Lu Yu would approve. For those of us who can't keep count, that is.