Are you concerned about pesticides in your teas? If so, how much?

There was s thread about this a while back. Puerhshop also tests at least some teas for pesticides as do I think a couple of others.

Unfortunately we live in times where pesticide free food is a rarity and tea is no exception to it. It is not just limited to Chinese teas, I therefore try to buy certified teas as much as possible or do research into the plantations on the web before buying my teas.

Yep, chemically produced tea is a deal breaker for me. With very few exceptions, I stick to vendors who sell sustainably farmed tea.

I’m not particularly worried, but I typically drink teas that I already know a lot about, or from people I know really well. Use of pesticides can depend a lot on the farmer and how they manage their trees/bushes. There are some out there, especially those who have precious old/ancient/wild/other-special-magical-quality trees on their land, who practice responsible farming and don’t use pesticides, don’t use fertilizers, don’t over-pick the trees, etc. You can verify this a bit better when you see the land and the condition of the “garden” (for lack of better word).

Seeing the land first hand is not an option for most end consumers though, and ultimately no words are going to hold up as well as a (legitimate) piece of paper that certifies there’s no pesticides.

Yunnan Sourcing test all their Pu-erhs in a lab? Wow that must cost them a fortune!
I am more concerned about pesticides in my vegetable then my tea.

I eat Taco Bell weekly… Even though I like my goood leaf, I don’t even think about this topic here.

I believe it is possible to buy your own pesticide testing kit, probably sold on Amazon, but I have no idea the price.

Matters to me quite a bit. So does lead in Chinese tea, though I haven’t researched it!
I just signed in today to see if anyone had a rec for organic matcha…
When I first joined steepster I just wanted to try great teas but now I’m reining in the desire for any that aren’t organic. I understand the official certification is expensive, so if I find that the producer/importer has paid attention to growing without pesticides that’s good enough, at least for now.

I’ve worked at an herbicide and pesticide production plant so no I’m not worried about trace amounts from my tea. A farmer would have to have to be doing some egregious spraying with some nastier than needed pesticides in order for my tea to have levels harmful enough to affect my health.

Drink enough tea and you’ll be able to taste the chemicals.

The amount of pesticides in tea “may” be negligible, but you don’t live on tea alone do you? But drink enough tea with pesticides over many years and can have an impact on your long term health. Toxins are called toxins for a reason…they’re toxic.

Add pesticide residues from your tea to the benzene fumes you breath in while sitting in traffic with your window down, or the fumes from pumping gas, the whiff of formaldehyde from your natural gas stove every morning when you cook breakfast, the pesticides in your broccoli/apple/carrot, the antibiotics in your chicken dinner, the BPA and petro-chemicals from your water bottles and ziplock bags, the obesegens and hormone disruptors used as preservatives in other foods you eat, chlorine/chloramine and fluoride in your tap water, heavy metals in your tuna…etc etc etc…altogether the pollution adds up to a LOT of toxin exposure in your day to day. Now add the pesticide laden tea? Just another source of exposure.

If you don’t care, then don’t care. Drink whatever. But if you’re concerned, why stop at tea? Root out the toxin exposure everywhere in your life.

So yes, I am concerned about pesticides in my tea but do not think tea alone will cause significant harm. Its a cumulative effect being bombarded from all areas of life with toxins. So a reduction of any exposure will have a positive impact on long term health. Sometimes, the effects of prevention cannot be measured immediately, but need time to see their effects.