The Rise & Fall of My Love for Bubble Tea

Last week I discovered the enigma that is bubble tea. My friend from China, who drinks it all the time, insisted I try some and made a special delivery from Euro Yogurt.

Basically, it's tea with milk and a little sugar with tapioca pearls at the bottom, which look like marbles but taste like nothing. One of my friends compared them to fish eyes, which admittedly I can understand. It was the first time I had to chew a drink, which freaked me out a little bit, but after the initial shock I really liked it.

I felt pretty good about choosing the bubble tea over a fatty/sugary smoothie, especially after seeing the Euro Yogurt website boast about all of its health benefits. However, I was still confused as to what the tapioca pearls actually were.

Then I googled it...

And I was very sad. Honestly, I can see how ignorance can sometimes be bliss. A German study found traces of PCBs (a cancer-causing chemical banned in the U.S.) in a certain brand of tapioca pearls made in Taiwan. First I tried to justify drinking it--maybe it was just that one brand, or maybe it's only a problem if you intake excessive amounts of it. Then I realized how dumb I was being all for a drink that I hadn't even tried before last week. I read a little more about PCBs and unlike a lot of the other chemicals in makeup and stuff that are just speculated carcinogens, this one was scarily real. One hundred percent of the animals they tested that were exposed to PCBs got cancer. With this knowledge, I probably wouldn't even be able to enjoy it if I had it again.

So, public service announcement: don't try bubble tea because you may fall in love with it and then it will be snatched right out from underneath you when you find out that it may be deadly.