diamond geezer

Do you ever think about where the things in your life come from and where they go?

Take this cup of tea, for example.

I know the tea has come from the Nilgiri hills of South India because it says so on the packet. Yes it's Earl Grey what of it? The bergamot is only flavouring, not from genuine Italian oranges, so we can ignore that. I like to imagine the tea bushes being hand-trimmed by ladies in saris on hilltop terraces beneath a beating sun, but that's probably an opinion I got from a Ladybird book decades ago. A more realistic illustration would still involve fields but probably more automation, maybe shear harvesting, maybe full-on mechanical harvesting, I'm not buying top-tier tea here. Also it'll have rained a lot, ultimately retaining water from the Indian Ocean in my tea leaves, not to mention nutrients from the soil, all transported over 5000 miles from there to here.

Then the leaves get processed, I guess on site or nearby because it makes sense to trim the unwanted parts before transporting the tea any distance. The process starts with withering with warm air to dry the leaves, then rolling to release their juices, then oxidation to develop flavour, then drying with hot air to seal the deal. My tea will then have been sorted and graded so I got the medium quality leaves, not the very best, not the value dregs, and at some point chopped into small granules because we're only making teabags here. It's the sort of thing Play School would once have shown through the square window, had four year-olds been interested in tea, and which you can now watch on YouTube if you're not too busy laughing at kittens.

The back of my teabag box says 'Tea from India. Packed in the UK', so stage two happened closer to home. They could have flown it over because it's only light, but I bet it came by ship because that's much cheaper, also these are not rapidly perishable goods. These container ships depart from ports like Cochin or Nhava Sheva and take weeks to travel thousands of nautical miles from there to here, tucked away in boxes in the hold or stacked on deck. Likely they came via the Suez Canal because it's relatively safe through the Gulf of Aden at present, but given the time lag they might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope instead. The tea that I drink is ridiculously better travelled than I am, perhaps having crossed the equator twice or cruised the Mediterranean which is more than I have.

It'll have arrived here at a huge coastal terminal like Tilbury, Felixstowe or maybe Thames Gateway Port. Somewhere inside a huge stack of containers, amid the fridges and lawnmowers and Temu hoodies, was the stash of tea that ultimately brewed my mug of tea. I suspect it was transported next by road, not rail, perhaps thundering down the A12 or A13 on the back of a great big articulated lorry. Most UK supermarket retailers don't do their own packing, they use external suppliers, so maybe the raw materials went to Tetley at Eaglescliffe, Typhoo in Gloucester or PG Tips in Trafford. It's quite possible these tea leaves came round the M25 a dozen miles from where I'd eventually drink them before whizzing far away for manufacture.

The bagging process is another mechanised wonder worthy of Play School, inserting precisely the right amount of tea leaves (about 2g) inside a permeable pouch of something resembling paper. These days it's all plant-based and biodegradable, usually polylactic acid but also potentially woodpulp or cotton, replacing the former plastic evils of polypropylene or nylon. Then the right number of bags has to be placed in the right sized box and a stash is dispatched to the distribution centre, which could again be a considerable distance away. My tea likely spent hours or days in huge sheds at Waltham Cross, Rainham or Purfleet, these being the three Tesco distribution centres closest to where I live. At some point a delivery will have been made to the supermarket at Bromley-by-Bow, then one of those gentlemen I regularly see wheeling pallets will have stacked a shelf in aisle 7 where I eventually picked it up. Of the incredibly long journey these tea leaves made to my home, I was only responsible for the supply chain's last half mile.

Then there's the milk. Who's to say precisely where this came from but it'll be from one or more dairies, each of which supplied a blend from dozens or hundreds of cows. The dash of milk that finished off my cuppa will thus have originated as blades of grass in an unknown number of fields, could be six, could be sixty, and been responsible for a finite amount of methane entering the atmosphere. I might even have walked through one of those fields, if not for this particular brew then for one I've drunk in the past. Thankfully I don't have sugar in my tea else that'd be another lengthy global story, so I think I've dodged at least three more paragraphs there. And of course the vast majority of what's in the mug is water, all heated by my kettle, so I could at this point launch into a lengthy retrospective on where water and electricity come from but let's not go there.

After brewing I dispose of the tea bag via the usual route. We don't have food waste collections here in Tower Hamlets, not yet, although they are finally on the brink of introducing them. I also don't have a compost heap because I live in a flat, so all my used teabags end up in general waste and are carted away by the municipal dustcart. If I lived in a neighbouring borough I might have a food caddy and my used leaves would end their lives in a recycling facility where they'd be turned into fertiliser or biogas used to power homes - apparently 6 teabags can create enough electricity to boil a kettle. Instead they end up on some landfill site somewhere, likely down the estuary, meaning the tea leaves that started out in the beautiful hills of Kerala end their days under a stinking heap in Thurrock.

As for the tea itself, I'll have urinated most of that out. From my toilet it'll have made its way under the streets of Bow and down the Northern Outfall Sewer, ultimately finding its way to Beckton Treatment works (or, if I go to the toilet elsewhere, some similar facility). But some of my mugful of tea will have been absorbed into my body instead, not just the water but stimulants and nutrients from the tea leaves and the milk. A lot of these molecules don't hang around but some will have been converted into energy or broken down into something else my body needs, meaning there are cells in my body that contain compounds that originated on the Indian subcontinent. At an atomic level I am part tea, but also part milk, apple, tuna, Club biscuit, Riesling, aspirin, grass pollen, diesel and microplastic.

It's amazing how all these compounds originate in such diverse locations across the globe and ultimately end up in our homes, in our food and in our bodies. We barely notice where it comes from, we never stop to think, and yet an enormous supply chain operation is required to bring these things to us and every day it does, such is humanity's economic excellence. Of course not everyone is so fortunate as those of us with a supermarket around the corner, but hurrah for global logistics and its impressive ability to bring nourishment from across the planet. Every mug of tea is a freight distribution triumph, at least so long as fragile international systems permit, and how we'd miss them if disruption ever intervened. We are all made of where we live, but also half a world away.