Milk.

chillidoggy

I have a shit sense of smell.

Sambostar

Is that like the Midas Touch Chilli?  Or the bloke on the M&M's advert? 

Like everything you smell turns to shit?

xmrchi

My life would be horrible without milk, what would I put in my tea!

chillidoggy

I mean my sense of smell is not good. Taste buds probably shot after all the chili-infested foods, too.

Sambostar

Biscuits?  Phlegm? 

I quite like black tea, problem is English tea has loads of tannins, which not only stick to your teeth, but also make cleaning cups a nightmare.  Prefer green tea as it has less.  All tea is Camellia sinensis, which if you think about it is weird.  I mean, to look as your average Camellia japonica or Camellia sasanqua growing in your garden or whatever, you wouldn't think to crush up the leaves and drink them.  Camellia sinensis looks the same as these except it has smaller, courser leaves and small white flowers.  It makes quite a tidy evergreen shrub or low hedge actually, providing your soil is acid and it can grow well without poisoning or overdosing itself on  freely available elements in alkaline soil, obviously, as it has evolved in and adapted to acid soil.

But then I guess to look at Bay, Laurus nobilis, you wouldn't think to eat that either.  I mean, even Deer don't eat Bay.  But at least Bay smells nice eh, which is a clue.  Camellia doesn't even smell of anything.  Who thought of brewing up the leaves?  What were they doing?  How many people died of having too much time on their hands, brewing up various other noxious or toxic plants before they struck on tea?  It is very strange.

Sambostar

At the end of the day, I wonder how many people would continue to drink milk and tea if they had to extract it from a cow and a shrub in their garden?  I mean, I have no problems slaughtering a pig, but drinking udder juice and bland weird, scissored shrub mix?  Bizarre.

But then I suppose Nicotiana is a pretty noxious plant, to look at it, who would have thought, aye, be a good idea to smoke that eh.

And here I am, thousands of years later, on 20 Sovereign a day.  Very strange.

I think it is indicative of the quality of life they had back then you know.  I mean, how many people these days have the time to go around drying random plants and smoking or brewing them up to drink, for the hope a random hit?

Maybe, life back then wasn't so different after all then.

xmrchi

@Sambostar great answer, but you could say that about the majority of the foods we eat today, mechanically removed meats, fructose syrup in everything, any foods with e numbers which can damage us just so the food looks better, it's all shocking and comparing that to drinking tea and milk which are both natural compared to the nastiness we all eat on a daily basis, I'd happily sup it from a cows bladder☺

Sambostar

chillidoggy said:

I mean my sense of smell is not good. Taste buds probably shot after all the chili-infested foods, too.

It's probably OK, just that it is on it's way out at the 20Hz and 16KHz range, so you have to turn up the volume with Chilli in order to taste it.

On the up side, you probably could manage to eat boiled cabbage and potatoes at 300Hz

Sambostar

I think a lot, if not all of the nastiness, from colouring to flavouring, is actually originally of organic origin and not highly randomly processed in a lab by mad scientists as we are lead to believe.  Apart from hydrogenated, saturated fats I guess and those chicken nuggets and breasts that the Dutch are good at turning out.  Although the clue is in the name.

Is Lactose a form of sugar?  Maybe just a really low frequency one?

Emp_Fab

mrchi said:

I'd happily sup it from a cows bladder☺

Surely you're just taking the piss here ?

Sambostar

Be sure it is a cow and not a Stallion in a muddy field on a dark night, you could get more protein content then you bargained for and it will bugger up your dietary plans.

Phil_aka_Pip

I think the "tea" thing is more than just "why the earthman wants dried leaves boiled in water", as Eddie the shipboard computer once mused.

Water used to be a dodgy drink. In NE Europe and Britain somebody had the idea of fermenting wort to make a drink that wouldn't kill you or infest you with nasty wiggly things. In the mediterranean countries & the middle east they hit on the idea of using grape juice. In the far east they found that boiling various leaves in the water made it a lot more drinkable.

It was all in aid of getting a safe drink.