The International Sweet Tea Line
The Washington Post has an interesting blog entry here asking where the International Sweet Tea Line actually crosses the eastern seaboard. He defines the International Sweet Tea Line as the point where you “enter sweet-tea territory, where genuine sugar-added-during-steeping tea is available at every restaurant.”
First, it should probably be called the American Sweet Tea Line and I would put it a bit further North, but Marc Fisher notes:
This is not just a culinary question, but a social one. The ISTL is the frontier line of the South, and presumably it’s receding, a regional glacier shrinking as cultural homogeneity spreads in the form of franchise restaurants and cookie-cutter development.
He has an interesting point. But where is the actual line? He’s not sure:
I think the ISTL is probably still somewhere in Virginia. I know I’ve been asked the “Sweet or Unsweet” question by waitresses and cafeteria slingers in Richmond, and also in Norfolk. But not always. And I’ve been forced to resort to table sugar as far south as Roanoke and was once stunned to be handed a packet of Splenda at a diner near Danville.
Maybe we need a social scientist to get involved. This is an important question for tea-drinkers who don’t want to have the faux pas of asking for sweet tea north of the key International Sweet Tea Line. Right?
I have been faced with this tea line myself. I always know when I have hit “The South” because of Sweet Tea line. It amazes me when people don’t even know what sweet tea is. I had a friend go to Chicago and ask for tea meaning iced, and they brought her hot. So there seems to also be a Ice tea line too.