阅读理解

At the end of a recent feast at Restaurant Revolution in New Orleans，I ordered a cup of hot tea and was presented with an elegant silver kettle filled with an intoxicatingly aromatic lemon brew. Another notable meal enjoyed not long ago at Fixe in Austin began with their house-iced tea, a black tea and fruit blend customized for them by a local "tea guru."

Tea has been a cherished beverage in the eastern hemisphere since the third millennium B.C., but didn't make its way to the UK until late in the 17th century, where it enjoyed immediate popularity. Another two centuries later, southerners in the United States began drinking their sweet and iced tea, but not until recently has tea appreciation started to spread throughout the rest of North America. These days, it's not uncommon to find Earl Grey in your cocktail or learn that your fried chicken was cooked in the stuff.

“ I believe tea is still in its infancy in our country，” says Zhena Muzyka，owner of Zhena's Gypsy Tea, a Fair Trade Certified™ organic tea company, now in its 13th year. "It's the second-most-consumed beverage in the world, but the sixth-most-consumed in the U.S."

But like a newborn, the U.S. tea industry is growing fast. Since 1990, Americans have quadrupled their tea consumption, bringing it to a US$10-billion industry in 2014, according to the Tea Association o f the U.S. Tea imports to the U.S. have grown by 70 percent in the last two decades alone. Starbucks, which started selling more than two dozen varieties of loose-leaf tea at their first location in Seattle, bought high-end tea-shop chain Teavana in 2012.

The concurrent artisanal food and beverage trend means that as more Americans learn to appreciate a cup of tea, they're also more interested in the source of the leaves, making "Fair Trade" tea particularly attractive. Fair Trade U.S. calculates that just between 2012 and 2013, Fair Trade Certified tea — produced by cooperatives and farms — imports jumped by 26 percent.

Fair Trade certification ensures that farmers are guaranteed safe working conditions as well as a sustainable wage and fair capital, determined by the prices they set for their products. All workers also receive a Fair Trade premium, which they may choose to invest back into their farm or community.

"I believe that Americans love Fair Trade — they've backed it and bought it even when the economy was trashed," Muzyka says, recalling when tea first joined coffee, bananas, and cocoa on the short list of available Fair Trade Certified products.

Muzyka has visited Sri Lanka, India and China many times, growing closer w ith each visit to the families who grow and harvest the tea she uses for her blends. On conventional farms，a tea w orker’s daily quota is 17.6 pounds of tea per day，or about 16,000 individual plucks of leaves，she says. This strenuous work is usually done on steep hillsides at altitudes of 5,000 feet or higher, and workers collect leaves into large baskets on their backs, which are held in place by a forehead strap.

Back when she was starting her company, Muzyka spent several years educating consumers and buyers at major grocery stores to choose Fair Trade suppliers over those without the certification. "I showed them the photos I'd taken in the conventional fields, and explained that the workers were being paid US$1.35 a day and unable to feed their families," she says.