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Virgin Plastic meets Chinese Green Tea

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Delicious, isn’t it? Remember the smell when you unpeeled your first credit card?

If you have bought electronics, you will know the excitement of transparent sleeves and instruction booklets. Let us also mention polyethylene.

If I write here about the smell of new bin liners, you will experience something quite specific in your “inner nose”. Polyethylene.

It is the softer plastics that seem more generous to give off their scent. PVC raincoats and toy umbrellas. We all know the aromatic explosion from a roll of bubble wrap. Tiny seams of injected modernity.

It is amazing that alignments of hydrogen and carbon can create volatile compounds with such olfactory variety.

But the “meaning” of plastic is a very singular one. It denotes a higher order of cleanliness. Plastic packaging is hermetic protection, while the plastic products within the plastic packaging exude hermetic production; untainted by the intervention of mere people.

Such signifiers assailed me when taking a brand new bag of Pre-Qing Ming Long Jing green tea home last week.

The bag was cool to the touch ; evidence of good refrigeration. Good signs.

Cool to the eye, too. The aesthetics were exemplary. Strictly minimalistic, the font was consistent, in dark green against a two-tone silver background. No one in China ten years ago was packaging tea as classily as this. The same green-silver design values were also carried into the trickier medium of the paper carrier bag.

Superfluous. Not necessarily detrimental.

But this polished plastic was all-pervasive. Opening the bag, the plastic was all I could smell. Leaves poured, water added, infusion after infusion. That same polymer tang.

I am sure you will agree when I write that I do not want to taste burnt bakelite in my tea. I want the slight liquorice sweetness and the “roast chicken” umami of Long Jings I have loved.

Perhaps these leaves had little to offer anyway. Perhaps their youth was their only charm. Perhaps the damage was done when the heating tongs sealed the pack. Plastic smoke. But I fear it was the physical symbol of “quality” (air tight packaging protecting freshness) contributing most to undermining that quality.

I regret that “try before you buy” seems to be a dying tradition among tea sellers in my neighbourhood. And I regret being tempted by this local shop and its “New Tea 2017” blackboard winking in the bright Spring sun. Pre-Qing-Ming!

This is the same month Nintendo released a slab of polycarbonate so irresistible it added “bitter” chemicals to dissuade buyers putting parts in their mouths. Naturally, their precaution further fuelled the fetish, throughout the whole first week.

It’s the freshness they were slurping; the phenomenon of freshness, not the taste.

There may have been some very good examples of Long Jing picked before the Qing Ming festival, during which some of our readers no doubt enjoyed a visit to Hangzhou. Yet, for packaged tea, I can’t say that the picking time alone justifies the price premium or the clamour.

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