Agrochemicals And Tea
Our Bodies and How Our Tea is Grown
We care very much about how our teas were grown and how it can affect our bodies. We don't carry any tea in the shop that we feel is made with a level of agrochemical use that would have a negative effect on our bodies. There are some teas, like the ones listed as 'unsprayed' that are made without the help of any pesticides whatsoever. But some teas, listed as 'conventional', that are picked from plants that may get some amount of pesticide when the new growth is at its most tender in order to protect the harvest. Some of our conventional teas we have tested with the help of SGS, and the lab results show no pesticide residues whatsoever. There are many teas on the market with indiscriminate use of pesticides (up to a few days before), and it is a taste that you can actually identify if you train yourself (pesticides often taste like flowery soap that gets stuck on the roof of your mouth around your front teeth). In extreme cases it's not even just a taste, but a gross feeling of unease in your body. We would not work with any tea like that. Ever.
Absolutely No Pesticides...
The challenge is using absolutely no pesticide can lead to up to 90% reduction in tea produced. But even with those teas that have seen some pesticide in their lifetime, we are still looking for teas where the end product tastes and feels clean in our bodies. However I have come to believe that the special effect that completely unsprayed teas present -- a feeling of spaciousness and ease in the aroma, mouthfeel and body -- comes not from being free of pesticide taste, but from fighting the elements on their own season after season. They reach deep into the Earth for energy and nutrients. These teas are rarely if ever certified organic - they don't need to be, the farmers can't keep the tea in their storehouse long enough to worry about that.
What is Organic Really?
Our societal perceptions about agrochemicals usually focuses on pesticides, but I find pesticide use - when used mindfully of course - to have far less effect on my tea drinking experience than the use of weedkillers like glyphosate. We notice that our bodies react a certain way to tea harvested from soil that has been treated - an unpleasant sensation in the swallowing of tea broth or even headaches and an intense, racing heart beat. It's not a taste like pesticide, it's a feeling, and an unpleasant one too. What's crazy is I've seen farms get organic certification that still retain some of those negative effects of glyphosate (in one case I'd seen the plot of land before it was converted to organic and you can still see the effect of weedkiller in the field when they got their certification), that stuff stays in the land a long time. Of course, we would never knowingly buy or sell tea with that issue even if it said it was organic. Also, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is a big problem affecting tea production that we take care to avoid. It creates a glaring-neon, unnatural aroma in tea. I've come to understand by talking to farmers that in Taiwan you can use up to 50% nitrogen fertilizer and still get organic certification. That's all to say, the 'O' word can be deceiving. According to the USDA, organic certification only limits "compounds known to have negative effect on human health" (who makes those judgements?) and doesn't even ban the use of SYNTHETIC pesticides, not to speak of ones derived from natural sources. That's what we mean when we say we only sell teas that we would drink ourselves, regardless of whatever certification they may have. We can really only trust what our bodies are telling us, and we take this very very seriously.
Ultimately We Rely on Our Bodies to Tell Us
So, it's kind of a complicated answer and a bit of a minefield, which is why I took a long time to carefully write this article before publishing. But I can say with pride that all the teas we buy from our farmers are ones that we like to drink, and that we have taken care to train ourselves to be more sensitive than most to the actual physical effects of agrochemicals in tea.