#691 Unstrung Tea

The other day I was at a coffee house with a friend and I decided to have tea. They had a bunch of different kinds in jars and it was cool to watch them take a measure of tea, place it on a piece of tea bag paper and fold it into a little diaper.
After pouring a cup of blank water, they gave it and the diaper to me. What, no string? I asked.
They looked at me with the scorn only people in the know have for the uninitiated.
It was like the first time I went to a peel-your-own-shrimp place. I really hadn’t expected to get my fingers that messy. So it was with stringless tea bags. I couldn’t figure out how to squeeze the bag enough with only a spoon so it wouldn’t create a sopping puddle on the table when I took it out.
And I really didn’t want a hot tea bag bouncing off my lips every time I drank if I left it in the paper cup.
So I wondered, is there some environmental crisis I hadn’t read about with teabag strings? Some exotic animal being choked with all the string littering the landscape.
Some bird perhaps, regurgitating the tangling remains of a teabag into the unsuspecting throat of its young, only to watch that bird-child waste away from the avian equivalent of an impacted colon?
Maybe a landfill-adjacent pocket gopher accidentally garroted by two teabags strung across his hole.
These are concerns.
And then I had another, because all of a sudden I wondered about the staple. So I went home and rummaged through my pantry for an old-fashioned stringed bag. I found some traditional medicinal herbal tea and, yep, my memory was right. There was not only a string, but a metal staple holding it to the bag.
Ah, that explains the taste that’s missing from all those fancy hand-diapered teas—aluminum. Or possibly nickel or some other base metal.
In any event, a probably toxic-in-enough-quantities metal leeching its poison into each and every cup of, um, soothing herbal tea.
So how do you fold those diapers?
America, ya gotta love it.