dank wrote:
I bought a big box of Foo-Joy green tea bags from an Asian market
recently and when I opened the sealed mylar pouches I could swear
it smelled like some synthetic chemical.

My experience with Foojoy is it is the worst possible tea. This is the
company that sells the ten-pound bags of oolong for $7 that your local
Chinese restaurant uses to make their dishwater.

The tea is imported from China and was supposedly some special
Lunqching (sp?) imperial Dragonwell tea or something, but I
wasn't impressed with the quality and it smelled funny and I'm
pretty sure I detected an odd flavor.

I'm not surprised. I would not necessarily blame that on chemicals, so
much as just being really lousy tea. But if you got it in bags, God only
knows what went into the filter paper manufacture.

Should I continue drinking the tea or buy some some quality
organic brand? And since most of the green tea in the world
comes from China and since Chinese certifications of quality,
safety, organic, etc. are meaningless, why should I pay more
for "organic" tea that likely is from the same contaminated
fields in Communist China?

The "organic" label means nothing. Buy some quality tea that isn't
crap. I think what you are encountering is just plain crappy tea.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."