Random thought of the day

[pasithea]

Linking some un-related ideas together.

I've been drinking really good tea for the past week or so. It's heavenly and has made me strangely contemplative of tea.

Lately we've come to know that green tea is a powerful anti-oxident and can reduce your risk of cancer, it actually slows or prevents cancer cell growth. Neat. There are several other medicinal properties to tea, but maybe the most important one is that it is made with boiling water. Not so much today but a few hundred or a thousand years ago?

Europe didn't adopt tea until the 17th century and even then it was largely for the wealthy at first. Coffe came even later. In the far east they'd had tea for centuries. I'm wondering if tea had any impact on plagues in eastern asia. cholera, typhoid, dissentary, e coli... Boiling water kills them all. So what happens if it does have an effect?

Disease, famine, war. These three are linked. Disease could mean not enough people to work the fields and become famine. Famine makes populations more suceptible to disease. War ruins crops, solidiers carry disease. Reducing any part of that triangle can reduce the whole drastically. It's breaking part of the cycle.

Since I invariably consider how things relate to religion, I'll just throw out a completely unsubstantiated opinion. To me, *it seems far eastern religions are much more mellow than middle eastern and western religions. Is it possible that tea is partly responsible for this? I mean, if you have less war, less faminine, and less disease, you have less need for a violent war god or to believe that cruel devistation serves some purpose.

On the other hand, perhaps I've just been drinking too much tea. :)

*opinion may be stupid, naive, and culturally biased as I have far less exposure to asian cultures.

Comments

[sci.livejournal.com]

Hmm, tea as the solution to war. I rather like that. :)

But no, it's probably more cultural for one reason or another. Though while Japan is a very peacefull place right now, they haven't allways been. There's a long history or civil wars and fuedal warlording. What about the organised crime? China, again not hugely peacefull. Tibet? Hmmm, perhaps. Only conflict I know of there's the one where China invaded.
People are people the world over. Good and bad.

If you're after some good tea, try rooibos (african red-bush) tea. No caffine or tanin, but 40 times the anti-oxidants of fermented black tea. Lovely with a spoonfull of honey and with or without milk. Same goes for honeybush tea. :)

[apoidea.livejournal.com]

In europe they used alcohol instead of boiling. There was an article in the fortean times awhile ago with the theory that that was the reason china was more stable than european countries, who would go to war faster due to their constant slight intoxication

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

MAKE TEA NOT WAR