It seems that some trends are coming around to see my side of things… or at least things that I enjoy are appearing in the press/world a little more obviously.

In September, the New York Times printed an article by food critic Florence Fabricant about the changes in tea. The article is now marked as premium content on NYTimes online, but I managed to find it reprinted in a foreign publication in toto. Here ’tis.

Humble teabag finally gets a makeover, fuller and longer leaves
New York Times

The tea bag, a clever enough idea at first, went terribly awry somewhere along the way, at least in the view of people who love to savor their tea. Now it is in the process of large-scale reinvention, and some of those who currently shun it with almost ostentatious disdain are very likely to be won over.

At age 100 or so, the old bag is increasingly being filled with fine whole leaf tea, the kind connoisseurs brew in their teapots, and the bag itself has been redesigned in shapes that are not only elegant but constructed to allow those flavourful leaves to show what they’ve got.

With tea sales in the US now four times what they were a decade ago — about $6.2 billion annually, according to the Tea Association of the USA, a trade group — the American tea drinker seems ready for a change for the better.

The change, some say, is overdue. Look closely at a conventional tea bag in your cupboard or in the paper cup from the local deli. Chances are that instead of leaves it is filled with indistinguishable bits, the detritus left after tea leaves are sifted and graded. The tea industry calls it dust, and the beverage it makes is likely to be rusty-looking and often bitterly tannic. But it no longer has to be, nor is it necessary to brew a whole pot of tea to achieve something better tasting.

Perhaps the surest sign that the tea world is changing is this: Lipton, the world’s largest tea company and a division of Unilever, will start selling tea bags containing long leaf teas in supermarkets nationwide next month.

Instead of paper, the leaves will be enveloped by nylon mesh bags in a delicate pyramid shape.

Lipton is following the lead of American businesses like Harney & Sons, Mighty Leaf, Adagio and the Highland Tea Company, which for several years have sold tea bags filled with high-quality full-leaf teas, ones with complex, often floral, herbaceous, spicy or fruity nuances.

Smelling a trend, new companies, like Revolution Tea, Numi Tea, Two Leaves and a Bud, and Tea Forté, have formed expressly to sell fine teas in tea bags. Harrisons & Crosfield, from England, and the luxury Parisian tea purveyors Le Palais des Thés and Mariage Frères have also introduced tea bags.

“We decided to put some of our teas in tea bags because that’s the way most people drink tea,” said Wanja Michuki, the president of the Highland Tea Company, in Montclair, N.J., which sells fine teas from Kenya, the leading exporter of tea worldwide.

Lipton’s new line, called Pyramid, took the company two years to develop. It offers six varieties of long leaf tea, all but one flavored with bits of dried fruit or other seasonings. Only Black Pearl, a black tea blend, is unflavored.

Even the best tea companies have introduced flavored teas in response to consumer demand, but over the years their reputations have been based on the quality of their oolongs, Darjeelings and senchas.

Joseph P. Simrany, the president of the Tea Association of the USA, said tea sales are projected to grow 10 percent a year for “the foreseeable future,” fueled in part by ready-to-drink bottled iced tea and by an increasing belief that tea, especially green tea, is healthful. Tea bag sales are lumped in with figures for loose teas, so there are no statistics for the growth of the tea bag segment of the market. But, Simrany said, “the new tea bags are changing consumer attitudes toward tea; the snobbism is gone.”

- FLORENCE FABRICANT

Yay, tea!

Another little something I noticed the other day is a trend towards books ABOUT Jane Austen and retellings/different views on “Pride and Prejudice.” Clearly, I’m a little late getting on board with noticing this trend since I just discovered a blog called, AustenBlog. Appropriate. They have a page on the blog called, “paraliterature.” Also an appropriate term. Some of the titles listed there are titles I saw this weekend at Barnes and Noble and Monday night at Borders.

For example:

•Darcy’s Diary
•Mr. Knightley’s Diary
•Darcy’s Story: Pride and Prejudice Told from a Whole New Perspective
•A Single Man, Good Fortune (Must Want Wife)
•Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife
•Mr. Darcy’s Daughters
•The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy
•The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

These are all fairly recent publications - within 2006 - with the exception of the second and third from the last, I think. There were others, but this was only a sampling for all y’all.

I just got “Iris” from Netflix, so I’m going to watch that:

Iris Murdoch was l’enfant terrible of the literary world in early 1950s Britain — a live wire who thumbed her nose at the conformity of the era via a voracious sex life that included male and female partners. In this snippet of her life, Murdoch (Judi Dench) faces the onset of Alzheimer’s disease alongside her adoring husband (Jim Broadbent). Kate Winslet portrays the young, free-spirited Iris in flashbacks.