Is Tea a Necessity?

From the Illustrated London News, 12th January 1918.

LADIES’ PAGE.

LORD RHONDDA [the Food Controller] has set down as the maximum allowance of tea per week suggested for each person only one-and-half ounces!  Of sugar he allows half-a-pound, and of butter or margarine a quarter-of-a-pound.  These quantities are exactly half in the case of the fat and the sugar, and less than half in the case of the tea, of what our domestic servants used to expect as their weekly allowance, if the domestic system was to ration them in these articles.  In many households they were practically allowed to consume what they pleased of such things, and then usually they much exceeded the quarter-of-a-pound of tea.  How are they now to be confined .to an ounce-and-a-hall of it, I wonder?  No scheme of rationing can work satisfactorily unless it can be enforced on everybody; and unless we mistresses are absolutely compelled to diminish the servants’ food to the ordered amount it will be useless to suppose that we can do it.  Voluntary partial efforts will merely result in those who are loyal to the national needs being left without domestic workers; while the numerous selfish, well-to-do women who would, in order to keep servants, give them any-thing they can get hold of, disregarding patriotism, will surreptitiously supply far more than the rations.  Indeed, I cannot see how any mistress, unless backed up by strict State compulsion on one and all of the community, can dare to say to her servants "Yon are only to have an ounce-and-a-half of tea for a week."  Once they realise that they cannot get any more than that allowance by changing places, it will be all right; but this will only be true if all mistresses who supply more (from stores already put by or surreptitious sources), are very severely dealt with by law.  Otherwise there simply will be an exodus from the loyal households.

Is tea a necessity?  There is almost a mutiny in the Government offices, where thousands of women are employed, at the threat that the tea which has hitherto illuminated the middle of the afternoon's weariness shall be abolished.  The excuse of the authorities for this dreadful threat is the time that is wasted by the girls in preparing and consuming the little meal.  But, as a practical fact, the brain works so much more freely and rapidly after a cup of tea has cleared it that the time spent upon taking the vitalising beverage in the afternoon is by no means wasted.  Every serious brain-worker knows by experience the powerful, invigorating, and awakening influence of the precious herb.  One of the Chinese legends as to the origin of tea is that the shrub sprang up for the first time on the spot where a devoted son had thrown down his eyelids. which he cut off to prevent himself from sleeping while watching over his sick mother; which thing is an allegory.  A royal poet of the native land of tea, China, the Emperor Kien Lung, wrote an ode in its praise; he counselled, "At your ease drink this precious liquor, which will chase away the five causes of sorrow; One can taste and feel, but not describe, the state of repose produced by a liquor thus prepared."

Whether there is any real value in tea as nutriment of the nervous system or whether it is purely a passing stimulant cannot yet, strange to say. be considered settled question.  Liebig claimed to have demonstrated that "tea and coffee have become necessaries of life"—not mere luxuries, observe—"by the presence of one and the same substance in both vegetables, which has a peculiar effect upon the human system.  By contributing to the formation of bile, they have become a substitute for animal food to those eating little meat, and to the large class who are unable to take regular exercise."

[Justus von Liebig was a 19th century chemist and food scientist.]