Tea as Disease-Fighter

Can tea help fight the flu? Dr. Weil investigates. He also addresses green tea's potential in fighting tooth disease when used to replace sodas and citrus drinks. (I just wish he weren't always so focused on green tea specifically, as most true teas provide similar benefits.)

Also, here's an interesting debate about tea, disease and urbanization. The initial proposal (the idea that tea-drinking lead to urbanization in England) is somewhat intriguing (though probably wrong), but the follow-up comments are what make this page really worth reading.

What do you think about these issues?

Fortnum & Mason Sale

Fortnum & Mason is having a 10% off and free shipping sale for all Daily Candy readers through January 31st. Be sure to check out their tea collection and tea accompaniments, like biscuits and jams in their Food Hall section. Yum!

Daily Candy is also offering a 30% off sale for "previously featured" items on the Target "Red Hot" shop, which includes a cute star-shaped mug. Rad.

Nuclear Tea Shortage, Heavy Metal Tea

Here are two tea news oddities I recently stumbled across:

British Feared Nuclear Tea Shortage

Egyptian Tea Contained Heavy Metal

How odd! Have you seen any weird tea stories out there on the internet lately? If so, please link them!

UK Day

For some reason, I feel like talking about the UK today. Perhaps it's because I recently saw this funny little Cultural Guide to the UK that features tea (and is by the guy who did the Radiohead dot matrix printer remix). Or maybe the BBC tea documentary I saw in a fellow blogger's post the other day. Or the British dim sum menu (complete with hot tea, iced tea and tea cocktails) that my Londoner sister sent me last week. Or even the fact that I keep meaning to update my articles on afternoon tea and high tea with information from helpful British readers and from Ellen Easton's NYC Coffee & Tea Festival lecture and book "Afternoon Tea... Tips, Terms and Traditions." (Soon, soon...) Or the responses from people who read my recent Tea & Sympathy tearoom review, saying things like "I totally LOLed" (which I find to be a very humorous cultural juxtaposition in and of itself). At any rate, I suppose I've talked about it now. Readers, care to add anything? Interesting links? A story or two?

$6.9 Million Teacake Dispute

Recently, popular UK retailer Marks & Spencer fought against the British Customs and Excise Department (their equivalent of the IRS) in EU's European Court of Justice (rough equivalent of The Supreme Court) for $3.5 million pounds ($6.9 million) in court over one of their treats, chocolate-covered teacakes, which had been misclassified (and over-taxed) as biscuits (cookies) for over 20 years.* Who knew that a little sweet could cause such a big fuss? From Yahoo News before the verdict:

"In a case dating back to the to the early 1970s, the Marks & Spencer retail chain is seeking a refund for sales tax it paid for 21 years on chocolate-covered 'teacakes,' which British authorities wrongly classified as cookies instead of cakes. Britain taxes sales of chocolate-covered cookies, but not chocolate-covered cakes...

British tax authorities acknowledged their teacake mistake in 1994 and reclassified the milk-chocolate-swathed domes of marshmallow and biscuit as tax-exempted cakes.

However, they refused to pay back the full 3.5 million pounds that the retailer says it paid on the products since Britain introduced Value Added Tax in 1973.

Instead, the Customs and Excise department offered just 88,440 pounds."


Of course, it was the CUSTOMERS who paid the tax, not the company. According to BBC News, The VAT (Value-Added Tax) and Duties Tribunal (like The US Tax Court) argued that any more than 10% compensation would be an "unjust enrichment" to Marks & Spencer. (Be sure to check out their article's chart on the giant headache that divides British sweets into taxable and untaxable categories. Example: Gingerbread cookies with only two dots for eyes for decoration are untaxed. Any more decoration, even a little icing smile, means a 17.5% tax.)

Drama, drama!

In the end, the court decided to award Marks & Spencer the full $6.9 million. According to The International Herald Tribune:

"Tax experts said that the ruling ended a situation in which the government could claim unjust enrichment for not refunding wrongly paid VAT but a taxpayer could not.

'The court is setting aside some of the unjust enrichment argument put forward by a member state,' said Chas Roy-Chowdhury of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

'It makes it less of a one-way street and much more of an evenly handed approach to incorrectly applied VAT, as before the odds were stacked against the taxpayer,' he said."


Let me reiterate that in this case the tax payer was NOT Marks & Spencer, but the end consumer. I never paid the tax-added price, so I feel no qualms about buying a box of these argument-inducing "cakes" the next time I hop the pond. However, I can only hope that Marks and Spencer will offer a lower price on these treats for some period of time to at least symbolically offset the customers' overpayment. After all, the most loyal customers end up feeling the most resentment over this kind of thing, and no one wants another iPhone rage incident.


*Personally, I think they look like tiny bits of cookie inside chocolate-covered marshmallows, which I wouldn't classify as a cake OR a cookie/biscuit given the choice. If I absolutely had to pick one, I'd say cookie/biscuit. Then again, I am part British only by blood and never ate a crumpet until I was a teen, so my opinion on the semantics of British foods' terminologies doesn't really matter.

Campaign for Little Britain

A recent trip to Tea & Sympathy tearoom in the West Village in NYC reminded me of the Campaign for Little Britain. Shops and residents in the West Village are trying to get official designation as NYC's "Little Britain" to support small businesses, recognize the area's traditions and identity, honor Tea & Sympathy (which has been there for almost 18 years), increase tourism, and more. <--pdf file, FYI.

A quote from the Campaign for Little Britain site:

"Tea & Sympathy, located on Greenwich Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets, is located at the heart of Little Britain. The owners, Nicky Perry and Sean Kavanagh-Dowsett, have dedicated the past fifteen years to creating a British community on Greenwich Avenue. Thirty million cups of tea, several thousand tons of chips served at A Salt & Battery next door, and seventeen Tea & Sympathy staff marriages later, we think it’s time to put Little Britain on the map of New York.

The couple is joined by Virgin Atlantic Airways, which flies over half a million people between New York City and the UK each year. New York is important to the history of the airline, which launched its inaugural flight in 1984 from London to New York, and has carried over 13 million travelers between the two cities since."

With deliciousness like this (and a surprizing number of vegan and veggie options for British food), how can you not support them?

Sign by May 2 to get your voice heard!

England Goes Foodie, Tea Prices on the Rise?

England is following and surpassing the American trend of "going foodie." Acoording to a recent article on CNN, they are getting ahead of the American trend towards for organic, fair trade, and local: the British govenrment has even asked retailers to develop "eco-labels" that indicate the environmental impact of each product. The focus is much more on sustainability than on personal health. (It seems to me that most Americans are more interested in their own health than the planet's when it comes to organic food production.) The ethical treatment of animals (still a mojor taboo in the US, despite all of PETA's well-meaning efforts) has also gained some attention in the press on both sides of the issue.

I wonder how the foodie movement in one of the world's biggest tea-drinking nations will impact the tea market. Will more plantations and gardens go organic/biodynamic? Will packaging be altered to be more sustainable and will marketing begin to reflect the (in many cases, newfound) sustainability more? As tastes change in England, will the ubiquitous teabag be replaced more and more by loose leaf tea?

As for the prices, it is already predicted that tea prices will rise in 2008 due to civil unrest in Kenya. Of course, most tea production in Kenya is CTC at present, so it may not impact the prices of loose leaf. Perhaps a price increase in CTC black tea (Kenya's main tea product and England's favorite cuppa) will actually encourage a shift to loose leaf. We shall see!


EDITED TO ADD: A new article on the UK's efforts to make grocery stores more sustainable, ethical, and healthy. Yay!

Tea Theives

We all know that tea is hot, but have you heard of tea being hot merchandise? Last month, theives stole about $32,900 in Tetley teabags from a warehouse in England. That's 7,000 boxes of teabags. The press hasn't said how many bags are in each box, but according to Tetley's UK site, their smallest box size holds 40 teabags, making the theft at least 280,000 teabags. Crazy! It seems like they would be very difficult to resell, given the publicity around the crime. It would take 77 people drinking 10 cups a day could finish that much tea in a year. I wonder what they'll do with all of it (besides getting caught looking daft)?