ANTI GRAVITY
Coffee Talk by Steve Mirsky
Clearly, things have now officially gone too far. Incontrovertible
evidence that coffee mania is out of control could be found in February
at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, where that august body devoted an entire
session to the liquid the Food and Drug Administration should really
consider designating as a "caffeine delivery system." Such a session was
in keeping with the setting, for this year's meeting was held in a town
where French Roast is easier to score than french friesthe Medellin of
caffeine, Seattle.
[Insert: cartoon of Latinotype with shades and ponytail driving
"Espresso Ambulance" pickup truck (!) with giant espresso machine
loaded on the bed]
Actually, the time was vineripe for a scientific look at coffee,
what with it trailing only oil as the world's most widely traded
commodity and what with caffeine being the world's most widely used
psychoactive substance. Its insidious effects can be seen at virtually any
of the legion of Seattle coffee bars, where burly, bearded, plaidshirted
timbermen wait patiently in long lines only to ask contritely for
concoctions such as a "tall, 2 percent mocha latte."
Kate LaPoint, chief editor of Coffee Talk, a Seattlebased trade
publication serving the coffee industry, told the AAAS session's
audience of her own experience with what we can only hope is the limit
of the mania. "I was driving down the highway," she said, "and I saw
an ambulance driving really slowly. It was an ' Espresso Ambulance.'
They carry emergency espresso." Then again, perhaps even more
fanatical is the coffee brewer she spoke about who checks the
barometric pressure before brewing, so he can finetune his alchemy.
Jeffrey Parrish of the U.S. Agency for International
Development noted coffee's influence on the switch from an industrial
to an informationbased culture. "I would contend," he remarked,
"that the higher education and computer revolution that have become
the very fabric of our society would not exist if a cup of java were not
beside the keyboard." An ornithologist by training, Parrish went on to
give a talk as eyeopening as the four varieties of coffee the session
attendees were free to sample. Because coffee consumes 44 percent of
the permanent arable cropland in northern Latin America, real
environmental concerns surround its production. In particular, growers
are moving toward environmentally hostile "sun coffee," grown in fields
open to sunlight, and away from "shade coffee," where the fields still
include a canopy of trees. Suncoffee fields give higher yields but
harbor as little as 3 percent of the number of bird species that shade
coffee areas do. The change thus eats away at wintering grounds for
many songbirds familiar in the U.S. (Note to baseball fans at Camden
Yards: as suncoffee plots have become more common, oriole
populations have dropped, so drink enough joe and the last oriole you
see could be Cal Ripken, Jr.)
John Potter of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center talked about coffee's health effects (which for the average
drinker, having one or two cups a day, are few) and gave a brief
history. "The world's first coffee shop opened in Constantinople in
1475," he stated, "and shortly after that a law was passed making it
legal for a woman to divorce her husband for an insufficient daily quota
of coffee." (The headline in the Constantinople paper had to have been
"Coffee Grounds for Divorce.")
The event that must get credit for giving rise to the current
coffee frenzy, however, is Pope Clement Vlil's decision 400 years ago,
when he was urged to ban the substance because it came from the
Islamic world. "He tasted it," Potter explained, "decided it was
delicious and actually baptized it." One can only wonder what
Clement, known for his piety, blurted out when he realized that he had
watered down one terrific cu p of cappucci no.