Fun fact: There’s 5x more vitamin C in a cup of pine needle tea 🍵 than an orange.
Pioneers learned about it from Aboriginal Americans, got steadied by it, made medicinal soda riffs off it and then devalued it once they’d patented the nascent varieties of Sprite like sodas, burying it in the sands of time.
(more on the history )
To me? It’s a weirdly repeated motif here. They got something that worked from people they saw as less than them. .. used it, profiteer-moded it, chemically synthesized it so it’d trigger latent cellular memory of health to passed down cells… & made it toxic as they pushed it as the drink of choice on its own people generations later.
It’s just a …weird flex.
It’s very popular still in Korea. That’s where I nabbed mines from (via Amazon, but with no fillers) , after hearing about it for the 1st time up in Santa Cruz in September 2021 due to its immunity boosting profile when I was building out my immunity tea splice that, grace of God, got me through Omarion, omicron & those other communicable brothers. Korea uses red pine alot, it seems.
This season I am letting pine needle tea take the lead (in lieu of diy quinine sodas, which work but can tax your liver when done to overkill. Too much of anything can suck), playing with making my own Sprite-esque riffs.
… It’s funny to me… I hate sprite.
But I always Have because I could always taste the corn syrupy sugariness, then the chemically heavy tongue fuckery.
The tree tea is fine as an ingredient in my mix & aight solo… but the #weirdscience #meanwhileintheLAB highs of vigorously figuring out the original Aboriginal omg-this is great-isms… makes me heady.
Oh.
& don’t be gobsmacked about Sprite not being as proprietarily mountain Dewey as we were all absently raised to believe.
It’s okay.
Most of those tales are false.
Even the psychological birth of “morning coffee” -that highly caffeine drenched black cuppa- was something deeply imprinted on the American psyche from the American soldiers getting their asses whipped by Seminole and attributing that ass whupping prowess To the black “tea” they chugged in the morning that made them superhuman.
It was something called cassina … that was made from a holly tree with caffeine in it. It was like yerba mate, just a diff variety. Something called yaupon that just got remembered as…wait for it… BLACK DRINK.
(insert all these motherfuckers here.)
God… bless America.
please.