Tamara’s Reviews > The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World > Status Update

‘Spring water, just coloured with the leaves of the lowest-priced tea and sweetened with the brownest sugar is the luxury for which you reprove them. To this they have recourse from mere necessity, and were they now to be deprived of this they would immediately be reduced to bread and water. Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequence of the distresses of the poor.’