I’m sure you’ve heard this said a time or two in your life. Someone says they won’t do or sell something, “not for all the tea in China.” And I’ve never fully understood the logic. First off, I wasn’t offering you tea, nor any other drinkable dried-leaf beverage. And I certainly wasn’t offering China’s tea. I have no right to China’s tea. It’s China’s, and currently my trade relationship with that country is approximately zero.

But the real mystery to me is why anyone would want all the tea in China in the first place. This doesn’t sound like a good thing to have. It’s a storage nightmare to begin with. You’d have to rent out so many U-Stor-Its that it would offset any financial benefit you might gain from your sudden tea windfall. That’s assuming you could even sell any of the tea. People are willing to pay for tea from China, but I think they might question buying a big bag of Bob’s Homegrown Tea out of the back of your van. And if you are in fact getting all the tea, that includes the immature plants as well, so you’re going to need roughly twelve million acres of acidic soil, a massive irrigation system, a full-time staff to maintain and harvest the plants, shipping facilities, and on and on.

So since they’re apparently not the most savvy of businesspeople, the next time someone tells you they won’t do something “for all the tea in China,” counter-offer with “half the maple syrup in Vermont,” or “roughly a third of the potatoes in Idaho.” They’ll likely come back with “three-fifths of the cabbage in California,” or “an amount not less than one-eighth the corn in Indiana.” With enough back-and-forth offers of food-based barter, you might eventually talk them down to a can of Pringles and a couple of kumquats.

If you’re feeling generous, throw in a box of tea.

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Have you ever been dining with someone and they take a bite of something, then make this horrible, scrunched-up face? Their mouth kind of turns down at the corners while their eyes squeeze down to slits. They turn red, cords stand out on their neck, and they start beating on the table, chewing through sheer force of will until they finally swallow the offending food. Then they dive for their glass and drain whatever’s in it in three or four large gulps, liquid trickling out of the corners of their mouth in their haste to wash away the horrible taste. Then they sit there panting for a moment, trying to regain their composure and control their bile. Finally they look at you and say, “That was the most hideous, God-awful, fly-blown piece of rancid filth I have ever had in my mouth. Here, try some.” And you do!

I’ve decided I’m just going to take their word for it. Food, in general, shouldn’t make you cry.

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I don’t know, I just really think I would enjoy the irony of opening the newspaper one morning to discover someone had choked to death on Life cereal.

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