Your cup of tea

Tea has been a part of Aboriginal people’s diet across North America since the coming of the Europeans. I grew up drinking tea from the time I was a baby, which was the norm for Cree families up the coast. I recall my mom feeding my younger brother Paul with a baby bottle containing tea when I was just a boy. This drink was considered a must in every Cree household and it was shared in a very social way. There was always a huge pot of tea on our stove and it was kept hot and replenished all day.

Today we know tea in so many handy bag forms and we can purchase black, green, caffeinated, non-caffeinated and a number of products based on flowers and herbs. In general, the standard teas are caffeinated and have been used as a sort of energy drink over many years. It was always considered a healthy drink and could warm a person up in cold, damp weather and it provided a bit of a spark of energy when needed. A hot cup of tea for my people was comforting and often it was shared in social circles out on the land around a fire or back home at the kitchen table.

China was the original tea producer and exporter. Tea came primarily from China until the beginning of the 19th century, when India and Sri Lanka also became major tea exporters worldwide under the colonial management of the British and various other European countries. Tea was a big deal in Europe and an important commodity. Today India is the world’s largest exporter of tea.

I recall my parents explaining that during the 1940s and 50s, tea came loose leaf in cans and packages. They talked about buying tea from the Hudson Bay Company that was scooped from large wooden crates into bags. Tea was cheap, easy to carry and something to look forward to when my people were out on the land in the wilderness. In the 1960s, tea was formatted into handy little bags, which made it even easier to consume.

Today tea is still a popular drink among my people, the Cree of James Bay. However, it is a drink preferred mainly by the Elders while younger people now prefer coffee. Coffee has replaced tea in many homes back up the coast, but it still has a place when my people are out on the land. Tea is still the drink of choice when people are gathered around a campfire. I have often found that I prefer tea for its subtler spark of energy as compared to the jolt that coffee provides. Many times over the years when I have not felt well I always turned to tea and a little toast or bread to see me through a flu or cold.

Tea is still considered a more-or-less healthy drink and in the last few decades iced tea has become popular during the summer in North America. Iced tea is found just about everywhere these days as an alternative to soda drinks, but this tea includes a huge amount of sugar. People tend to think that iced tea is healthier than soda pop, but in reality if you read the ingredient labels you will find that the sugar added is equivalent to popular sodas.

One thing you won’t find anywhere on tea package labels is the content of pesticide residue that is found in most teas. These days tea is grown in many countries where there are no strict guidelines and restrictions on the use of pesticides. These toxic pesticides are used to ensure good crop yields of tea plants, but it also makes the resulting tea less healthy to consume.

In research by expert analysis over the past few years it has been found that many tea products exceed the safe amount of pesticides as set out by Canadian regulations. This does not mean that tea in moderate amounts will cause problems for people, however we need to be cautious not to consume too much of this cherished drink in our diet.

We also have to educate ourselves to understand which products have the lesser amount of pesticides so that we can make good choices. You can google “tea and pesticide concerns” and find out for yourself. There was also a CBC Marketplace episode that featured this issue.