I prefer my tea black, just as Mme raised me, so I never acquired a taste for milk in my tea. Lately, though, I have dashed it with a few drops of lemon juice. And that’s the joy of drinking tea, you can enjoy it with many infusions, such as mint, honey, turmeric and even vodka on a cold night.
What makes the daily ritual of drinking tea pleasurable is tuning my senses – taste buds and olfactory nerves – to hone in on the sweetness, bitterness, scent and flavour.
I have also found tea’s hydrating properties useful, particularly after a night of heavy drinking.
I switched on the kettle this week for a round-up of the news of the day when a truly shocking item caught my eye. “Drinking tea causes cancer”, screamed a headline.
My shock was exacerbated by the sheer number of foodstuffs that are blamed for cancers. Just last year, polony and braaied meat joined the list of cancer-causing foods. Surely the research about tea was wrong. After all, the World Health Organisation had absolved coffee from the cancerous list.
At this rate, I expect to read that breathing oxygen causes cancer of the nose hairs. I don’t need research to tell me that getting out of bed increases my chances of dying. But I was pleasantly surprised that it was not tea that caused cancer, but drinking it piping hot that increases the odds of catching esophageal cancer. The esophagus is a long tube through which swallowed food travels to the stomach, so it figures that pouring any scalding liquids into your gullet every day would cause damage.
Henceforth, I will be taking my tea with cold milk.
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