They are Out to Get Us

I hardly sleep at night on the best of days, and last night I got red eye after making the mistake of trying to read the New York Times to pass the time. This is a habit I absolutely must quit, but in the meantime check out the newest of horrors about to descend on us import law abiding puerh drinkers. A couple of years ago we had the “soapy artichoke lady” to contend with, now we have the genetic food researchers coming for us. In an article titled “Your Spit Might Help You Learn to Eat Your Greens,” assistant food science professor Cordelia Running, PhD from Purdue looks at the ability to taste bitter foods, and supposedly discovered a way to force us to endure bitter foods.

Even though the Purdue research is done on rats, all this is based on the newest genetic DNA studies from places like 23andMe collecting spit from people to supposedly track their ancestry, which includes the possibility of having one, two or three bitter taste detector genes. You know where all that data collection is going because the founder of 23andMe is married to a Google spouse, and selling the data is the whole idea. But never mind that, the point here is that the ability to taste bitter flavors is tied to how many of these genes you actually have, adaptations really, intended to help humans detect and avoid poisons such as in mushrooms or your Carbolic Soap wielding neighbor like myself. The variability in how many gene strands you have to taste bitter explains why someone like me is pounding the sofa in pain from the 2008 Haiwan LBZ and some other blogger writes on Steepster “this tea hardly has any bitterness to speak of.”

But Dr. Running found out if she feeds cocoa to her rats that saliva can change to interpret bitter as sweet. “Bitter taste tends to be rejected,” she says in the article, “but this is something you might be able to change about yourself biologically.” 

No, bitter taste is not really rejected as we know. The scary part: the goal of this whole project now is, you guessed it, to do more studies, and next up we have

"The researchers hope to try future studies with something even less tasty to drink. Eventually, Dr. Running said, the idea would be to study of whether the effect crosses over to other foods: could regular doses of cocoa, for example, “make a really bitter terrible-tasting tea taste better?" [Ibid]

I will leave it to the social science people to pull apart the conclusion that society wants poor people on food stamps to eat more veggies and this is the way to get that to happen while lowering the amount of food stamps at the same time. My job is to point out the obvious, for what is a “really bitter terrible-tasting tea?” Can you think of any other than puerh? Didn’t think so.

Regular doses of cocoa, people.

Now we have government funding involved, and that always goes nowhere good. We know what is next up in the water supply real soon. Keep in mind this cocoa will be American cocoa, at this idea our European friends will stop reading right now and hop a train to Brussels. That’s all they need to hear to start a good protest, but the rest of the world likely requires things spelled out a bit more.

For those boutique people enjoying their fresh “oolonged” puerh, the whole world government idea here is that leftover summer tonnage is coming your way and the good stuff cordoned off forever from your grasp, and to accept it without complaint you will chew your Hershey’s unsweetened, brew it from the brown water tap and expect to cut it in your lamb chop too because you know it’s going in the feed supply. Get out that spoon, because cocoa is the new quinine for tea rickets.

Now, don’t think you factory pu preferring peeps are off the hook here. That summer tonnage is coming for you too, and gone are the days you will care to age anything. You won’t find aged tea to buy from Taiwan anymore, because who needs the actual basement when you can drink sheng right from the factory, and the whole point is so you can taste your vegetables? Well, and of course the teapals will still pay over $1k for the privilege of “whatever” because you won’t taste the difference.

Really what’s happening is all the good spring tea can just disappear because we won’t be able to taste anything anyway, and we will therefore accept any new tea and people like me will probably end up writing about the wonders of Xiaguan once again, and straight off the drying rack this time. Whole categories of food go worthless when people think everything tastes like chicken, so the same happens for tea with a cocoa-numbed palate.

The real kicker is the researchers saying that in order to keep up the saliva-changing effect of cocoa, you have to keep consuming it indefinitely. This is not just an annual spring dose of de-worming, we have population change as the goal, read that last paragraph in the article carefully. You can say I am crazy, but look at the tea vendor offerings this year. We have the choice between Laoman-er and Hekai just about everywhere. Do you not see the test before us?

Many of you have done your due diligence by posting as much Laoman-e as possible on social media. PhD’s only listen to each other so don’t worry, I am all over this research which WILL be presented at the American Chemical Society this week. Researchers need to get back to normal trying to prove puerh prevents diabetes, which is supposed to keep them busy indefinitely. But I am one step from the nursing home, and soon enough I won’t be here to lay it out when we see the writing on the wall. This is the time to post the photos of your tea and vegetables and email them to Purdue. Right now I need sleep, and once I manage to get some I will be back with a new tea review and a completely revised perspective.