The two best things about the South are
- It’s not the North
- Sweet tea
Does anybody drink iced tea without adding something to it? All tea serving restaurants in America have a holder for sweetener on the table to house packets of potentially cancer causing chemicals to add to your tea. I can’t honestly remember if I’ve ever seen somebody drink unsweetened iced tea straight.
If natural sugar is thrown in with the artificial sweeteners on the table, most people are likely to pick the artificial sweetener over the natural sugar because you can’t get cold unsweetened tea sweetened with sugar. To properly sweeten tea, the sugar must be added while the tea is hot. Offering unsweetened tea without a sweetened option encourages sweetened tea lovers to choose artificial tea sweeteners over natural sugar.
Why? So we can keep a few calories out of the mix? You make me sick. We’re talking tea, mates. Not damn pixie sticks or candy bars.
I once heard a lass speak of a time when she worked in a restaurant near an interstate. The dump was frequented by travelers making their way north and south. She had a request one day for tea, the lass waitress responded “Sweet or unsweet?” The traveler looked back at her and said, “I know we’re in the South now, at least we have the choice.”
“Unsweet”, what a ridiculous word anyway. Unsweet presupposes that whatever is unsweet is supposed to be SWEET in the first place! Come on, it’s right there in the language, plain as day.
I can’t stand restaurants that don’t have sweet tea. In fact, I propose to make this complaint a repository of sorts of restaurants that don’t offer sweet tea so that these places can be avoided by those who agree with me. If you come across a restaurant that does not offer sweet tea, please list it in the comments to this complaint so that we can avoid injustice altogether.
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I love iced tea but HATE it when it’s sweetened.
I despise the fact that if a vending machine or convenience store has 9,385 different flavors of everything, Unsweetened is NEVER one of them.
I get frustrated when I go to a restaurant, ask the waiter/waitress if they have iced tea, and they say, “Yes! We have blackberry, raspberry, or regular.” I don’t even know if the “regular” is unsweetened, and neither do they.
Is it SO rare for someone to like PLAIN iced tea? I don’t want artificial fruit flavoring, sugar, or “lemon.” I want plain.
SoCalBoy on July 1st, 2007 at 2:21 pm | Link
I live in the South… Memphis, TN to be exact. Here it’s the common thing to be asked about whether or not you want sweet or unsweetened tea. I myself am glad I have the option since I am insulin-dependent diabetic and have been since I was a child. 30 years without sugar and you get used to it.
On the opposite end of the stick, I HATE restaurants that have specialty drinks, but they’re all loaded with sugar. McAlister’s Deli is a popular one around here, they have damn good tea (sweet or not), and fresh-made lemonade daily, but the lemonade is so syrupy sweet I can’t even stand a single sip of it. Granted it would have to be sweetened with aspartame or the other stuff, but at least give me the option of getting it since I like lemonade.
And finally, when you go to a restaurant, and you get a lazy waiter/waitress that doesn’t bother to tell you that they’re out of diet soda or regular tea at the moment, and they bring you the regular stuff. That just puts me off to no end.