You’re familiar with cookie fortunes, and possibly with coffee-cup bible verses, now there are tea-tag aphorisms:
(#1) A cup of inspiration from the Yogi company
Yes, you get a teabag, plus an earnest aphorism to guide your life. Some others in this series:
Think seriously and think honestly.
May this day be the day to lead us to peace, to happiness and to joy.
This life is a gift.
Forgiveness is an act of consciousness.
The essence of life is to communicate love.
From the company about this tea:
(#2)
Bright and delightful, Yogi Green Tea Kombucha tea is uniquely formulated to support overall health. This delicious blend combines Green Tea with Kombucha to supply antioxidants, while Spearmint and Lemongrass harmonize with Plum and Passion Fruit flavors for a light, fruity taste.
… Kombucha comes from north central Asia. It is a strain of one bacterium and three or four different yeasts. When grown properly, the culture produces glucuronic acid, acetic acid, and many vitamins and amino acids that can help support the immune system. It is valued by herbalists for its ability to support intestinal function, supply nutrients to promote balanced intestinal flora and its ability to help circulate the energy in the body. It can be detoxifying to the entire body and can help to support elimination and support metabolic harmony.
Cookie fortunes. The ur-messages accompanying food or drink are of course the fortunes in Chinese fortune cookies. From Wikipedia:
A fortune cookie is a crisp and sugary cookie usually made from flour, sugar, vanilla, and sesame seed oil with a piece of paper inside, a “fortune”, on which is an aphorism, or a vague prophecy. The message inside may also include a Chinese phrase with translation and/or a list of lucky numbers used by some as lottery numbers …
(#3)
Fortune cookies are often served as a dessert in Chinese restaurants in the United States and other Western countries, but are not a tradition in China. The exact origin of fortune cookies is unclear, though various immigrant groups in California claim to have popularized them in the early 20th century. They most likely originated from cookies made by Japanese immigrants to the United States in the late 19th or early 20th century. The Japanese version did not have the Chinese lucky numbers and was eaten with tea.
Cookie fortunes have fgured in many postings on this blog — and in postings of my XXX-rated collages, many of which are ornamented by inscrutable messages from fortune cookies. But here’s a big composition that’s not X-rated or close to it, a circuit party gathering with cookie fortunes serving as speech balloons:
(#4)
Fortune cookies now come with fortunes adapted for all sorts of audiences: snarky fortunes, raunchy fortunes, nonsensical fortunes, techie fortunes, and so on.
Coffee-cup bible verses. More recently, we have the earnest Christianity that unobtrusively cites biblical verses on fast-food restaurant coffee cups. From Wikipedia:
In-N-Out Burger is an American regional chain of fast food restaurants with locations primarily in the American Southwest and Pacific coast.
… In-N-Out prints Bible citations in small print on areas of packaging. This practice began in the 1980s during Rich Snyder’s presidency, a reflection of the Christian beliefs held by the Snyder family.
(#5) John 3:16 (KJV): For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
November 26, 2018 at 8:20 am |
Everything Old Is New Again: One of the mass-market brands of tea (Salada?) put such aphorisms on their tags in the mid-1960s. I know this because this tea was served in the Harvard Freshmen Union, and I had a roommate who drank it, and would sometimes find an opportunity to work the aphorism from his teabag into the ongoing conversation.
November 27, 2018 at 1:01 pm |
[…] Zwicky takes a look at tea, starting with tea-time aphorisms and going further […]