Stash’s Ginger Peach Green Tea is a startling blend of traditional tea and nouveau fruit flavor, creating a taste experience that is more than the sum of its parts. With its daring ginger overtaste, it’s brave. Bold. Maybe even pioneering.
It’s a taste found in reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. The story is chronicled by D-503, a cipher of the One State. He is happily obedient as worker-mathematician, toiling for the Benefactor. But by the meddling in his head of a woman, I-330, he becomes ill with a “soul” that torments him with feelings, laughter, confusion…love. In the end, has he forsaken one dictator for another?
Zamyatin was no stranger to Totalitarianism. This novel emerges from the time of revolutionary Petrograd. It took the Czechs to manage getting it to print. Zamyatin had been arrested and exiled from Russia, arrested and internally exiled (when they couldn’t keep him out), and put before a judge again who kicked him back out. All for his revolutionary writing. Some say Zamyatin is the inventor of Dystopian literature, and it may be true. We is rife with “cliche” plot twists and turns, but at its time of writing, it hadn’t become cliche yet. It was pioneering.
And like Stash’s Ginger Peach Green Tea, it’s brave and bold, too. As the flavors of the tea blend artfully into each other, so too does the “stream-of-consciousness” narration of the novel. At times it’s difficult to tell the difference between D-503’s imaginings and reality; true to the design of both tea and writing.
Deeper still, the overall flavor experience of Stash’s Ginger Peach Green Tea is nothing if not clean. Sip after sip, it complements the tragic–but aseptically unsoiled–life of Zamyatin’s ciphers living at the mercy of the One State.
Try both, the book and the tea, and let me know what you think!
To learn more about Jackie, visit her site, JackieGamber.com!
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