For centuries, man has searched for the elixir of life – a distillation that could bestow vitality, happiness and immortality. But it took US marketing specialists to discover the brew that eluded medieval alchemists, Arab mystics and the Ming emperors. It turns out that there is indeed an essence that ensures health, harmony and moral merit. It is called green tea.

To US commercial culture, green tea is yoga in a bottle – or in a can, candy bar, candle, lotion, soap, perfume or pill. Described as calming and gentle, it exists paradoxically at the red-hot intersection of New Age philosophy, health mania and industrial chemistry. Green tea is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous flavour upscale and down-market, available in a martini glass at trendy lounges in LA and in a styrofoam cup at Dunkin Donuts. In the US, eastern spirituality tends to blur together Hinduism, Buddhism and hucksterism. It inevitably involves something to buy and usually something to eat. Only this harmonic-entrepreneurial convergence can explain the invention of New Zen Green Tea Truffles and Green Tea Gummy Pandas, snacks that refine a foggy idea of virtue into hypocritical morsels of vice.