My boyfriend, who does not drink tea, once* went to Africa and found himself on a tea plantation. Having absconded with my good camera while I was on a family holiday in Malaysia (apparently a compact zoom is a minimum requirement for a ‘safari’ whereas taking photos of ‘Club Med Cherating Beach’ only requires a point-and-shoot) he thought buying some tea direct from the plantation might be a nice thing to bring back for me.
He then found out the plantation supplied to Lipton. “Never mind,” he said.
If my non-tea-drinking (not-at-all-interested-in-tea) boyfriend knows how terrible Lipton is, I’m trying to figure out who’s buying the stuff it calls tea.
Courtesy Wondermark
In all honesty, though, I’m agnostic about the tea that people like. If you say you’re a tea-lover and only drink Lipton, I’m not going to question your love for the stuff (…but I may question whether the stuff deserves to be called tea).
Personally, I’ve moved on. While not everything I drink is handpicked (as opposed to machine harvested), loose-leaf (as opposed to in a teabag) or fresh from harvest (as opposed to stale when it hits the supermarket shelf), I now choose to drink nothing if Lipton is all there is on offer.
And occasionally I get to chuckle at complaints about Lipton following its recent change in packaging where many consumers commented about the tea going stale quicker (’twas already stale, love!) or tasting bad (ditto!).
*Actually he’s been twice, and so has my Panasonic Lumix camera, Tobias II. But I have not been to Africa. Tell me how that’s fair.