I HATE iced tea. Specifically, I hate sweet iced tea that comes from a powder mix, or any of the prepackaged varieties that are sold in Canada. I’ve never had the privilege of tasting proper Southern Sweet Tea, but after what I endured, I have a feeling I wouldn’t like it much either.
What did I endure, you ask? Let me tell you about the day I ruined iced tea for myself for the rest of my life.
When I was a kid, around four or five years old, I had a friend visiting me at my family’s apartment. We got thirsty from all the playing we were doing, so my mom made us some iced tea with that sweetened powder stuff. Her first mistake was telling us it was sweet enough, and not to add more powder. Her second mistake was leaving my friend and me in the kitchen to drink our iced tea, while she went off to do whatever it is twenty-five-year-old moms did in the mid-eighties.
Obviously the friend and I decided the iced tea wasn’t sweet enough, and of course we proceeded to dump spoonful after spoonful of the powder into our glasses until they were full to the brim of thick, syrupy, grainy, goopy, iced tea flavoured sludge.
That’s when my mom came back to see what was taking us so long, and why we were still in the kitchen. Just as we were about to dump the results of our ill-advised beverage tampering down the drain never to be seen again, my mom jumped in with some sensible advice. “You made it, now you have to drink it. Can’t let it go to waste.”
So... we drank it. We choked down gritty, goopy mouthful after grainy, gloppy mouthful, until our glasses were empty and our bellies were full.
Can you guess what happened after we drank all that disgusting goo? Yup. Vomit city. I have the worst memory, especially for things that happened to me as a kid, but I distinctly remember lying on the carpet in my bedroom, holding my belly and vowing never to drink iced tea again. I can’t recall what happened to my friend, but if I had to guess, I’d say my mom marched her down the hall to her own apartment to let her parents deal with the aftermath for their own kid.
So yeah, I’ll drink plain iced tea if I’m forced to, but never sweetened ice tea. Really, I just drink coffee these days. And water with caffeinated flavour added 😀
PS Can you imagine what would happen if a parent forced someone else’s child to drink the results of their disgusting iced tea experiment these days? Yeah. I’m not sure that would go over well 😂
