Care for Some Tea?

Over the years I’ve brought you stories about a number of products that can only be described as laughably over-priced for what they are. I personally enjoyed mocking the $200,000 bottle of scotch, the $72,000 mattress, and the $40 bottle of water, but nothing quite touches the granddaddy of them all, the coffee beans that were eaten and then eliminated by a member of the civet family (it’s a cat-like relative of the weasel) before being cleaned, roasted, and sold for up to $200 an ounce. Most of the other products are simply charging too much – the scotch may actually be the world’s best, for example; I just question whether it’s actually 250 times better than your typical super-premium scotch. But from where I’m sitting, not only would I refuse to pay you a 1200% markup on coffee for having it pooped out by a weasel, I’d actually prefer that it wasn’t. I’m not sure how much extra I would pay you for tea that wasn’t grown in panda dung, however…

An article running this week in the London Daily Mail’swebsite tells the story of a Chinese entrepreneur who decided to produce tea grown exclusively in panda manure, which he claims adds “a mature and nutty flavor” and also has valuable anti-cancer properties. To this end, Mr. Yanshi purchased 11 tons of the stuff from a panda preserve, and is looking for national and international distribution partners. These efforts are being complicated by his asking price for the product, which works out to about $35,000 USD per pound, or a little under $2,000 an ounce…

Now, in fairness, an ounce of tea is enough to make more beverage than an ounce of coffee would, and tea (green tea, anyway, which is what the panda tea is) does actually have some nutrients, although its exact medicinal properties remain in dispute. It’s also only fair to point out that most tea (and, in fact, a great many other agricultural products) is grown using fertilizer made from animal droppings, which makes the use of panda dung no more gross than usual. But I still have to question whether the 733,300% markup (that’s right; 7,333 times the price of regular premium tea) is actually worth it. Especially since the only claims for either flavor or medical properties are being made by the guy who purchased 11 tons of panda dung for this purpose…

I suppose that to be absolutely fair about this we should insist on both blind taste-tests and double-blind medical tests (panda tea versus tea raised in the droppings of various other animals) to see if any such properties exist. Hot beverages made by steeping the leaves of a green plant grown in exotic animal waste may sound odd, but people also pay huge sums of money for the eggs of specific fish found only in remote parts of the world – and it’s hard to imagine that anyone who had cancer wouldn’t pay whatever they could afford for a drink that would improve their odds of survival. If such properties are ever conclusively proven I would expect to see lively debates about whether insurance companies should be obliged to cover payments for obscure types of tea, whether there should be a specific Medicare program for panda tea, and whether the government should fund research into other types of animal dung that could be used to raise cures for various diseases…

Until then, however, I think I’ll stick to diet cola…