Q: What do you think about tea drinking? Doesn't it have less caffeine than coffee? Also, tea is drunk for social reasons, and not just the caffeine.

A: Black tea has less caffeine than coffee. To find out if you're drinking tea for the caffeine, stop for three days and see what happens. If you get headaches, stomach upsets, and mood swings, you're addicted (and experiencing toxic withdrawal, so don't despair).
Some teas appear to be really good for you, in moderation. For example, my wife is from southern Africa, and she has been drinking RedBush (Rooibos) tea long before it was popular in the States. I like herbal ice teas in the summer (just put a few tea bags in a pitcher, stick it in the sun, keep the bugs out, and add ice in a couple hours.

But the interesting thing is the social aspect. There's a lot of pressure on us to eat when and what others eat, probably from the old days when we all hunched around the kill and thought that anyone who was near us but not visibly chowing down was going to attack us from behind and steal our hunk of meat. That's a theory of mine, and I like it.

Some social rituals, like the Japanese tea ceremony and the way lots of us do tea in the West, encourage relaxation, connection, and awareness - all good things that contribute to our physical, emotional and spiritual health. Other social rituals, like the collegiate experience of getting sloshed every Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, aren't so great.

I'm also not a huge fan of regular participation in eating contests, or for that matter anything that takes the focus away from awareness of the miracle of food and eating. Done properly, eating is as sacred and reverential an act as any religious sacrament. Many traditional rituals reinforce this aspect: saying grace, sharing the bounty with the less fortunate, etc.

But since we live in an environment where 93% of what people eat is downright deadly and our rituals have become largely about speed and quantity, we have to become good at navigating, deflecting, and dancing through that social pressure.