On 2007-09-16, Dominic T. > wrote:
>
> There is no such thing really as organic tea (my belief in any so-
> called organic food is minimal at best anyhow though) Mainly for the
> fact that no one can control the ground/soil contents or the rain,
> atmosphere, runoff, etc. regardless of what they do. It is a fact of
> life today. This whole "organic" business is just that, a business.
Well the whole word is stupid, since anything containing carbon is
technically "organic". Even "organically grown", which is a little more
precise, doesn't really mean anything.
However, when people are talking about certified organic or organically
grown (or transitional) produce, they are talking about stuff grown
without synthetic pesticides. Most certifications require that a farm
not use chemicals for a certain amount of time (during which they are
transitional, but not 'organic'). So while they can't control the soil
contents, they can control the amount of pesticide residue likely to be
in that soil. The rain... of course that's impossible to control, and
will vary by region and amount of rainfall.
Is organic produce at least partially about marketing? Absolutely. Does
it guarantee that produce will be absolutely free of pesticide residue?
Absolutely not. Is everything "natural" (whatever that means) safe and
everything "synthetic" or "natural" bad? Of course not.
But is that a reason not to try and reduce the presence of chemicals
which have been proven to be harmful from the stuff we put in our
bodies?
What would be really great (to me) would be if someone on this group is
able to test stuff (for harmful chemicals and pesticide residue) for
free or cheap, and is willing to do this for some representative samples
of teas from various regions / merchants / ages / types of farm. I would
be happy to contribute samples of tea towards this project.
I also noticed Warren's post he
http://chadao.blogspot.com/2007/09/l...nd-purity.html
which is kind of an outgrowth of this thread, as well as this post:
http://chadao.blogspot.com/2007/08/a...-polluted.html
It would be interesting to do some tests and see if rinsing tea leaves
before brewing them actually results in a significant decrease in
pesticide residue etc..
w