The Utne Reader

 

The Utne Reader served us cof­fee afi­ciona­dos a treat this month, by devot­ing the November/December issue to a study of the enig­matic bean. Of the nine pieces included in the “Coffee Madness” sec­tion, Mark Schapiro’s “Muddy Waters” is the most enlight­en­ing. He reminds us that the cof­fee we pay up to three dol­lars for at a cof­fee bar, costs about seven cents to make (twenty cents if you include sugar, spoons, etc.) and invokes Faith Popcorn who calls this the “small indul­gence syn­drome.” Another good piece decon­structs a Starbucks cof­fee bar, ana­lyz­ing the “unclut­tered, Zenlike empti­ness” of prep areas, from which the quirky per­sonal touches of a true cof­fee­house (fam­ily pho­tos, per­sonal art­work, post­cards from bud­dies on the road) have been elim­i­nated to make way for mod­ern, Scandinavian-style fur­ni­ture that restricts long rumi­na­tions over a cup of cof­fee, while ensur­ing an aver­age of 893,148 cus­tomer trans­ac­tions per week. A cof­fee chronol­ogy traces cof­fee his­tory from 1000 A.D. (but over­looks the Genesis story of Kaldi, the Abyssinian goatherd who found that after his ani­mals nib­bled the fruit of the Coffea’arabica tree, they “aban­doned them­selves to the most extrav­a­gant pranc­ing.” He and his fel­low goatherds tried it too, and Abyssinia hasn’t been the same since). “Coffee Madness” also includes stills from those goofy Taster’s Choice TV com­mer­cials with Sharon and Michael, a cou­ple of didac­tic pieces on how cof­fee affects both our bod­ies and the envi­ron­ment, and some per­sonal reflec­tions on the rit­u­als of cof­fee drink­ing. For any­one keen to study the cur­rent cof­feegeist, the November/December Utne is a good place to start.