While the (American) man who invented the tea bag at the beginning of the last century may have been thinking, above all, of being helpful, of making life easier, it must be acknowledged that tea, with its countless beneficial properties, deserves much better than a careless infusion, a trivialization within the ritual.
A return to the good old days of the teapot, or the stainless steel infuser and the tinplate square box that goes with it, has more going for it than an Amish belief that everything the slightest bit modern is the invention of the Prince of Darkness. In this case, it is a potential public health issue. Given that the fish in our seas have great difficulty in digesting plastic, there’s good reason to believe that swallowing billions of minuscule particles of the stuff several times a day might cast serious doubt on our likelihood of making it to fifty without coming away from a doctor’s appointment with a long face because he’s just told you the party’s over.
