September 2017
Volume 15 Issue 9
The Liberty Leader Newspaper
Unsweetened Iced Tea Is Un-American
Story Time
by Warren Dixon
Liberty Public Library Wednesdays @ 11:00
It’s seldom that I take on a political cause. As a matter of fact, the last one I espoused in this column was the littering problem. The campaign, an attempt to encourage North Carolinians to litter more, was successful, more so than my wildest expectations. You only have to look at our roadsides to tell the impact one movement can make. It gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling every time I see a pile of trash along side the highway. The campaign resulted in the non-profit organization TRASHIT, Throw Refuse Away Safely on our Highways, Interstates and Thoroughfares. The premise of this organization was that since North Carolinians are not going to stop littering, we might as well make it legal. Besides, the nice people who adopt highways clean it up anyway. And what they don’t get and what the mowers don’t grind up, gets lost in the summer weeds. Some of those weeds are so high there are probably families living by the roadway. So successful was this littering campaign, that it became too much for me to handle and I had to put it on hold during the recent basketball season, during which I might remind you, Carolina won the National Championship. If only I’d had those “no show” courses when I was in college. Now, I am rested and ready to take on another problem, one that has regional implications. This cause may be closer to Southern hearts than anything else dear to the Southland, with the exception of NASCAR racing. I’m talking about sweet tea. Now you’d think the sweet tea tradition would be firmly entrenched in the South and that it would not need anyone to take up its cause. But we were in Charlotte one Saturday night not too long ago. The restaurant in which we wanted to eat had a three hour wait. We’ve usually eaten twice in three hours, so we went to a nearby restaurant with no wait. The reason it wasn’t crowded may have been the fact that it served no sweet tea. The waiter was profusely apologetic, as well he should have been. But the incident left me disturbed. I tried to reason with the waiter, explaining that he wouldn’t serve a beer and ask his customers to add the alcohol themselves. Or he wouldn’t serve Diet Coke to someone who had ordered a Coke and ask them to add the sugar. I explained to him that iced tea is only good if it has been sweetened while hot. The preferable method is to boil the sugar with the tea bags. It is not humanly possible to sweeten tea once it’s cold. Sweet tea has long been a Southern staple. It helps give us our sweet, lovable, hospitable disposition. On the other hand, the lack of it makes our northern neighbors surly and ill tempered. The deeper you get into unsweetened tea country, the more you can tell its effects. By the time you get to Massachusetts, people can hardly stand each other. A small group attempted to introduce sweet tea to northerners before the American Revolution. The group threw unsweetened tea into the Boston Harbor in protest, an act later known as the Boston Tea Party. Sweet tea did not catch on, however, and the people north of Virginia have been a gruff and shorttempered lot ever since. Several years later, Washington surprised Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia and defeated the British to end the war. Cornwallis had discovered sweet tea and was sipping the beverage on the front porch of his headquarters when Washington attacked. “I so loved the drink,” Cornwallis wrote in his memoirs, “that I cared less that we lost the war.” At the Battle of Gettysburg, General Lee wrote home that “the boys are pretty demoralized, having been forced to drink unsweetened tea for weeks…” Now the bitter stuff is slowly working its way southward, brought across the border mainly by uncaring restaurant chains, undetected by our customs officials. Of course, you have to remember that these are the same customs guys who let Japanese beetles, kudzu and killer bees into the Southland. Georgia lawmakers have also recognized the problem several years ago. Representative John Noel, D-Atlanta, became upset when he couldn’t order sweet tea in Chicago. Then he came home and, of all things, couldn’t get it in the Blue Ridge Grill in Atlanta. He was so troubled by the incident that he sponsored a bill in the Georgia Legislature that would make it a misdemeanor “of a high and aggravated nature” not to offer sweet tea in any Georgia restaurant that serves iced tea. The bill proposed, of course, that the tea must be sweetened when it is brewed. and carried a sentence of up to 12 months in jail. This is not enough punishment, but it’s a start. I don’t think there’s a restaurant in Randolph County brazen enough not to serve sweet tea. But if they’re doing it in Charlotte and Atlanta, we could be next. Talk to your representatives, write your senators. Boycott restaurants that don’t serve sweet tea. You don’t have to be able to read the tea leaves to see the handwriting on the wall. If they take our sweet tea away, can our grits be far behind?
Ph 336-795-0054 / Cell 336-404-9791
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