Three hundred cups before lunch, by Bethan Royce

An original contemporary magazine article.

On a long white table in a warehouse near the docks in Bristol stand three hundred small china bowls, each with a pinch of dry tea leaves beside it. Lydia Fairweather will taste every one of them before lunch.

Fairweather is one of only a handful of professional tea tasters in Britain. She trained for five years before she was allowed to buy tea on her own, and she now decides which leaves go into a blend sold in supermarkets across the country. The job, she explains, is to make every box taste exactly the same, even though the tea inside comes from different estates in different seasons.

Her method looks strange to visitors. She fills a large spoon, raises it to her lips and slurps loudly, spraying the tea across her mouth. ‘The noise is the point,’ she says. ‘Slurping pulls in air and spreads the tea over the whole tongue, so I can taste everything at once.’ Then she spits it into a tall metal bin on wheels which follows her down the table. If she swallowed, she would drink several litres before lunch.

She does not eat curry or raw garlic during the working week, and she has not smoked a cigarette in her life.

(a) How long did Lydia Fairweather train before she could buy tea on her own? (b) Why does she slurp the tea loudly? (c) What does the final sentence suggest about how she treats her sense of taste?