Prioritization and Reasonings: Is the tea likely to be healthier?

TLDR: The Tea Tavern prioritizes products that are more likely to be healthy, when comparing across options.

The Tea Tavern finds the following to be current situations.

• There are many methods of farming tea.
  • Use of pesticides to prevent being killed by insects
  • Use of fertilizers to improve growth in various areas.
  • (TODO: Find terminology and research) Plants are cut for the purpose of producing more leaves from the plant
    
  • Farming in different elevations
• Tea is not always good for people
  
  • Some teas are not stored well, thus get undesirable growths.
  • And different people have different tolerances to the chemicals within tea.
  • Some teas make people sick (there are various possibilities for this).
• There are beliefs about the health of drinking tea (research is needed to prove these are true)
  • Tea is useful for health in some form like "helps with digestion".
  • Has more, less, or equal amounts of caffeine compared to coffee. 

Due to the wide variety of tea that exists, how do we know that a tea will be better for our tavern patrons and local community?

The Farming Process

(TODO: Obtain the following) Research has been done to show that pesticides used to protect plants have the capability of ending up in plant, and if it ends up in the plant, it can end up in those who drink it. (TODO: obtain research) We have seen cases in the past where pesticides were toxic to humans, as well. Similarly, the chemical composition of whatever we eat determines how something is going to taste. As a result, it is believed that some teas make people sick because of the pesticides that were used during the farming of the tea; the plant absorbs the pesticides, which is not worth removing or can not be removed from the leaves before brewing into a beverage. They may not only make the tea taste different, but has a greater likeliness to cause harm to our tavern patrons.

As a result, the default choice for the Tea Tavern should bedefault to teas that were grown without the use of pesticides.

Similar to the idea behind the use of pesticides, farmers who want more tea to sell more tea will use fertilizers to support the growth of more tea. (TODO: Find research for this) It may support the growth of more tea, however it also increases the amount of chemicals present in the soil that the fertilizer comes with. This would alter the proportions of chemicals that the plant would otherwise have. This is not inherently problematic, but we do not know what is being used by the fertilizers nor what the actual effect on the plants would be. For example, if a plant is provided more nutrients for growth, and it starts growing more, then the "healthy" chemicals in the plant are likely producing different proportions of chemicals. To further the point, the more of the plant there is the more resources are needed to maintain them, spreading the beneficial chemicals in tea across more of the plant, if not expending them, too. The teas become less potent, if not only "different".

In line with the concept of decreased potency from the plants, another harvesting practice used to accumulate more leaves is cutting of the plants (stems?) in ways that make the plant produce more leaves (TODO: Find the terminology for this). This requires the plant to expend resources in growing back as well as expend resources in supporting its additional leaves. As mentioned before, it would be reasonable to assume the leaves from a plant in these conditions will be less potent in general resources, thus less healthy and possibly less flavorful.

As a result of the above factors, we attempt to learn about the farming process of the tea from our vendors to attempt to get healthier, tastier teas. As a clear example, some of the Tea Tavern's inventory is from wild grown plants.

 

On General Health Beliefs of Tea

(TODO: Find the following) Research found that a chemical within Green Tea has benefits for a person's longevity, and likely was a large influence on the world's consumption of green tea. This research, however, detailed a large enough quantity of the associated chemical that it would be unrealistic for a person to consume enough of the chemical from green tea to make a significant difference for a person's longevity. As a result, we do not encourage the consumption of green tea for this purpose.

Similarly, there is always caffeine in tea (camelia sinensis), unless it was chemically removed. So any chemical that is beneficial for health in tea will be paired with an increase in caffeine consumption. Similar to caffeine, if pesticides or fertilizers were used in the farming process, then one will also be consuming an increased amount of those chemicals. In this way, tea becomes similar to medicine. Is tea "beneficial"? Are the "benefits" of drinking tea significant enough to accept any possible negatives that could come from the consumption of the tea? This is up to the individual to decide, but the Tea Tavern is about making improvement. If the trade is not clearly better for a person, it should not be portrayed as better. With this said, some people may truely see beneficial effects from tea, and as a result, we would take what the individual has found to be better for them and can make recommendations from there. 

An example concerning chemical for many people is the caffeine, too. Healthier tea plants may have more caffeine, thus individuals who have a legitimate concern over caffeine should not be offered caffeine containing herbs. For them, a "better drink" may not be tea (camellia sinensis). For this reason, it behooves the Tea Tavern to supply other plants such as camellia crassicolumna, a cousin to the tea species that has not been found to contain tea, or  Roobios.