Here are some things I am mulling over recently.
Venice and that screwed up Mose Project, that is being built to protect Venice from severe high water conditions. The Mose Project is far from completion and has a huge cost overrun, now looking like costing $8 Billion dollars. The project began in 2003 and completion date is pushed back to 2023. It is a series of gigantic gates that are meant to rise from the sea floor and protect Venice in time of need, but thus far they can't get the gates to rise. The metal parts are very corroded from being submerged in the sea for three years and mussels and other sea creatures are causing damage to the hinges too. Thus far the gates don't work.
In contrast, the Netherlands built a huge project recently for a mere $500,000,000 dollars, it took only 5 years to complete and it works. Maybe some Dutch engineers could fix the Mose Project?
Did you know that Mose Project is dogged by massive corruption? A former mayor of Venice and 35 other people were arrested. This failure of Italy really bothers me because Venice is a world treasure.
Will the project ever be successfully built?
Above are my favorite new kitchen utensils. This kind of infuser is easy to use and to clean and the mesh is fine to hold in most tea.
Tea in Tea Bags
Did you read the article in the Washington Post on September 27, 2019, about how almost all tea bags are sealed with polyproplene, a sealing plastic glue, and when we steep the tea in hot water, microplastic particles get into the tea we drink? These tea bags each release billions of plastic particles into our tea, researchers at McGill University found and a quote from a researcher is "Some of the particles, she noted, would be small enough to potentially infiltrate human cells." I want to see more research on this. Maybe these researchers are wrong!
So when the paper tea bags are "crimped" a plastic glue is used. You can understand that regular glue might not hold up when immersed in hot water. Also some "silkie" tea bags higher end companies use, and that I often buy, are not made of silk but of Plastic. Who wants to immerse tea in a plastic bag and end up drinking plastic microparticles?
So I have switched to bulk tea and tea infusers which work wonderfully well. I am using up my tea in tea bags by cutting open the bag and putting the tea into an infuser, and brewing it that way.
There are tea companies that do not use plastic glue or plastic tea bags. Clipper, Teapigs and Pukka Herbs do not use plastic. Some tea companies fold the paper bags and tie them with a thread. That sounds a lot healthier.
Good news is that most tea companies are hurrying to eliminate this problem and moving quickly to fold and tie the paper tea bags with string, so sealant is not needed.
What shocking news about the pleasure of drinking tea.
Still, if we use bulk tea we can avoid that problem.
Here is some delicious bulk tea I bought recently. It was harvested in spring of 2019 and I like that they tell you when it was harvested. The tea is grown in India and the company is run by a young man in his twenties.
