"Blue tea, Darling?" your beloved would ask you in the 18th century. How romantic.
Americans and Europeans expected better colour in their tea and started adding Prussian Blue to it. Prussian Blue is toxic iron ferrocyanide. Often they added other substances, too, including verdigris, a poisonous green compound that was used to paint OUTDOOR BRONZE STATUES!!! Yummmm!!
There were, at that point, no standards or checkpoints for tea. Tea smuggling was rampant, tea tax was unbearably high. So tea merchants were guilty of 'adulterating' their teas with substances that were not tea, essentially thinning them out. They included: dyes, second hand tea leaves (often smuggled out of aristocratic homes by the maids) sand and gypsum.
"The working classes were especially prone to being sold adulterated teas." (Chrystal)
Eventually the British turned away from green teas, thus decreasing the demand for the welcoming blue tinge. They started drinking black teas. In 1784 tax decreased from an enormous 119 to 12 percent, making tea available to even the working class. Standards came into play for teas being imported. "The 1875 Customs Act required that all imported tea be subject to inspection, thus effectively ending Chinese adulteration, but not British." Adulteration was still a problem within Britain's borders.
The invention of the tea bag and the reduction of sales of loose leaf teas reduced adulteration tremendously! It's all about quality control!!
It makes you wonder, doesn't it, about all the dyes we add to our own food supply to make them look 'pretty'?? People will be blogging about how crazy we are in a hundred years. Hmmmm.
Works cited: The True History Of Tea (Mair, Hoh)
Tea: A Very British Heritage (Chrystal)
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