A TikToker has made it his mission to ruin the lives of all tea lovers by exposing their favorite tea brands as being run by cults or having shockingly sordid histories. Given the contentious history of tea and colonialism, this shouldn’t come as the biggest surprise, but some of this stuff is still pretty wild.
Take, for example, Yogi Tea, which was founded by Yogi Bhajan, famous for introducing his version of Kundalini yoga to the U.S. After his death in 2004, he was accused of sexual abuse by dozens of women, and as Youth Pastor Ryan explains in his video, Bhajan’s organization also sent the children of its members to schools where many were neglected and abused.
Meanwhile, the company behind Sleepytime Tea, Celestial Seasonings, is also run by a cult. It follows The Urantia Book, which was written by a man who claimed to be able to talk to aliens; that man, however, wasn’t L. Ron Hubbard — a lot of people in the mid-20th century were into alien-based cults, I guess. The group believes that Adam, Eve, Lucifer and Jesus were all aliens or part-aliens who came to Earth to wipe out the “inferior races.”
In a more recent video, Youth Pastor Ryan discussed the history of Twinings tea as well, which was founded in 1706. Two members of the Twinings family, Richard Twining and his son Richard Twining, became directors of the East India Company, a company whose name became synonymous with capitalistic colonialism throughout Asia. The founder of Twinings, Thomas Twining, was also an investor in the Royal African Company, which, as the name would suggest, traded slaves; it’s estimated that the company sent more enslaved people to the Americas than any other company.
Youth Pastor Ryan does note that since then, Twinings has donated heavily to charity and invested in an ethical sourcing program for its products. Or as he jokes, “We’ve been trying to make up for a few things — even our website notes that we’re very sorry.”
It’s wild that so many tea companies are so weird that the one with a history of connections to colonialism and slavery is somehow the least offensive of the bunch. Is there a single tea company with no skeletons in its closet? Hopefully Youth Pastor Ryan will let us know.
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