Type A Nation?
Where would America be without coffee? It’s our beverage of choice, the one that boosts us out of bed in the morning, drives us to work, pumps us through a long working day, perks us up for the evening, and then squeezes the last drop out of the night.
Can I serve you a nice little cup of steaming hot cafe, topped with a dollop of cream? Or would you prefer an iced latte, with perhaps a sprinkling of cinnamon? Dropping into Starbucks, or Pete’s, is a treat that gives us a minute of pause and makes us feel better. Coffee is our friend. Or is it?
A recent article in the New Yorker wrote about the use of ‘neuro-enhancers’. These speed-based drugs, originally prescribed for ADHD, are now increasingly being used to enable people to perform uber-normally. Sounds anodyne enough until you read the spine-chilling tale of one employee whose boss warned him that by comparison to his colleague, who used neuro-enhancers to work regular 12 hour days and pull all-nighters, he was under-performing and needed to improve. Or he’d be fired. Will we all have to take speed in the future, asked the article, in order to remain ‘competitive’? What choice will we have if this becomes the norm? Will normal humanity get branded as ‘not good enough’?
It begs the question of whether this has already happened, in the land of 40-60 hour weeks, in which people are lucky to get two weeks vacation a year, or time off sick. Coffee is the neuro-enhancer of the masses, the one we don’t think about, or read about in the intellectual press. It’s the gas that fuels the capitalist machine.
Coffee, according to my nutritionist friend, gives you that great little high because its toxicity stimulates your body. It goes into overdrive to eliminate the toxicity of the caffeine. So we feel perky because we’ve been poisoned, just a little bit!
Kinda like a symbol for the entire system, isn’t it? It makes you feel good to go along with it, but it’s poisoning you at the same time. The pay cheque is great, but your life is sick. The SALE is exciting, but the consumer society is killing us. The food looks great, but it’s not nourishing.
And it’s the same thing on a wider scale. Coffee is a cash crop that acidifies the soil and destablises food-security when farmers who previously grew mixed crops of food switch to planting mono-crops of coffee. Fortunately we can now buy posh shade-grown, organic, free trade* coffee–if we want to pay several times the price of basic Joe. But I’m growing mistrustful of these expensive exceptions to the rule. Sure, I can opt for them as an individual consumer choice, but ironically they reinforce the system rather than changing it in any substantive way.
Coffee has always been the drink of empire. In the old days it was grown by slaves on plantations, and then sold in Europe to be drunk by working people (slaves by any other name), who used it to keep going when they couldn’t afford bread to eat–read Zola’s GERMINAL for a detailed, and incredibly depressing portrait.
Has anything changed? What would America be like without coffee? If we couldn’t use it to drug ourselves out of our normal human fatigue, or sadness, or laziness, or softness, who would we be? If coffee was not on hand to turn us into a Type A Nation, how might we behave in the world?
If we weren’t all, essentially, on speed, we would slow down. If we slowed down, we’d feel more, and then what would we feel? What might we pay attention to? What might we decide to reach towards, if we weren’t reaching for Joe?
*This mistaken term is an interesting Freudian slip. Of course I buy Fair Trade products when I can, but I remain sceptical about how much exceptions to the rule of massive consumerism driven by biggest quantity for lowest price can really change the system. I opt for these solutions, but I don’t allow my choice of them to enable denial about what is really going on–which is monster capitalism, on a global scale.
Tags: coffee, fair-trade, neuro-enhancers, sleep
Jul 20, 2009
Most of this article consists of a bunch of half-baked recycled generalizations about greenie beliefs of what makes sound agriculture. Sound bites, if you will. The main “fact” here is:
“Coffee, according to my nutritionist friend, gives you that great little high because its toxicity stimulates your body…”
My nutritionalist friend? That is an attribution? Sorry, that is merely a silly opinion of some friend of the author, a friend with no name and no qualifications
This article is not even worth wasting the electrons it took to send it. It is just a baseless ploy to play into greenie herd mentality. Why is it that people supposedly concerned with health, with sustainable practices, with a sound basis for living life are so gullible as to accept a bunch of strung-together myths like this? It is disheartening.
Jul 20, 2009
@Steve Peterson:
You bash the article, yet provide no references of your own to refute the article’s claims? Why would anyone take you seriously, either?
If you don’t agree, that is fine, but you won’t make anyone think beyond “what a jerk” if you don’t provide cited counter-points.
Jul 20, 2009
There are many good insights in this piece, and I am all for relaxation.
A couple points of clarification: The term “free trade” was coined by an ad agency, which is possibly why it stuck in the writer’s head. What the writer meant, presumably, is fair trade. It is a misconception to think that fair trade items cost more. Fair trade items cost the same as items of comparable quality which are not fair trade. Thus you can get FT or exploitive coffee for $6-12 per pound. While you can get coffee for cheaper than that, it is not the label that changes the price- cheap coffee, in addition to being lower quality beans to begin with, is not sorted before throwing it into the roaster. Therefore, cans of cheap, pre-ground coffee contain among other things: sticks, twigs, bullet casings, rusty nails, finger nail clippings, and cockroach parts.
Also, good quality coffee is produced in the mountains, in the shade of hardwood trees and fruit trees. Responsible coffee cultivation allows campesinos to make money to live on on land which, in order to produce vegetables or grains, would have to be cleared.
Finally, choosing fair trade items does change the system in a substantive way. Mainstream supply chains are impersonal connections that go through approximately 10 middle men between the producer and the consumer. The farmer thus gets a tiny fraction of the purchase price, and the consumer doesn’t know or care. Many, many fair trade items, including my favorite coffee roasters, are part of a much shorter, more personal arrangement: producer (grows and picks coffee–small farmer or co-op) sells to processor- co-op (dries and ships coffee, also provides evaluations, technical assistance, and financing), who sells to roaster (roasts and packages coffee), who sells to consumer or retailer. Thus, there are only about 3 “middle men” all of whom are actively involved with the product. The greater the percentage of the “market” which is handles through these more personal, accountable transactions, the more we change the real, macro-economy, slowly persuading it to be about people, not just profit. Keep thinking!
Jul 20, 2009
Thank you for the explanation of Fair Trade – I would like to reinforce this comment – and would have written the same info had I gotten to it first. While I understand that moderation is important, I believe that if we are to choose to consume coffee (and let’s not forget about all the chemically caffeinated beverages on the market like “energy drinks”), we can at least choose to do so in a way that improves the lives of the farmers who grow it. In addition, Fair Trade coffee practices encourage diversity of crops, as mentioned above, and often are an alternative to other types of stimulant crops, as documented in the film Black Gold (blackgoldmovie.com). Let’s keep improving by taking the steps we can. I certainly choose Fair Trade (and locally produced milk and Fair Trade sugar) coffee for my stimulant, when I need it.
Jul 20, 2009
While I love all the good info on fair trade it seems that the “point” was missed.
I whole heartedly agree with the authors statements on our cultures “type A” speed driven mentality. We worship the ability to “get it done” and “do it fast/faster”. Which is, I also agree, a sign of serfdom. American’s will not EVER want to see themselves this way.
We have a collective Fantasy Bond with our own mythology. We’re rough riders, explorers, FREE, and full of our own choices. Yeah…ok.
If everyone we’re to truly become aware of how deeply we’ve bought into the slavery of our workaday worlds the feelings would detonate the entire culture…so we don’t.
Our television/computer/cultural feedback is that Work is GOOD. Hard Work is BETTER. WEALTH is imperative and we want to spread the word to other less “enlightened” cultures who live closer to the earth and actually feel and have time to feel who and what they are.
Now, I’m no saint. I use coffee. Yes, I used the term “use”. I fully comprehend it’s drug like abilities. I have “focusing” problems…and it helps me. I prefer it to the pharma drugs. I’m VERY careful to only use it once or twice a day. But then again I’m very aware of what I put into my body.
Because I have children who prefer the American Lifestyle, I remain here. My husband and I have plans though to move to another country where they are more “sane” in their choices and more in harmony with the greater good of living a life more in balance with nature.
Will American’s (USA) wake up (without the use of neuro-stimulants)? It’s a young country, give it a couple more centuries.
Jul 20, 2009
My first visit to this blog, because I got the e-newsletter this morning (not sure why.) This article got top billing in the e-newsletter, yet it reads more like a tossed-off blog entry. I’d expect more meat. Also, three days after this was published and the flagrant ‘free trade’ typo hasn’t been corrected. Anybody home at actionspark?
Jul 21, 2009
Life is what you make of it, Mind Over Matter. Self control. Evolution…
Dec 15, 2009
Well I may be late to this comment discussion, but I feel like I should add to it. While there is no need to personally attack the author, it should be noted that caffeine is not highly toxic to the human body. It certainly does not stimulate humans by poisoning them.
Caffeine’s primary mode of stimulation is by inhibiting adenosine receptors in the brain. Adenosine is a substance that works to reduce neural activity in order to protect the brain. Essentially, it is the substance that makes you feel sleepy at the end of the day, and caffeine is a substance that blocks it.
Check out – “Caffeine as a psychomotor stimulant: mechanism of action” by Fisone G, Borgkvist A, Usiello A.
Feb 24, 2010
Wearing MBT shoes http://www.unbootssale.com provides many pro-body benefits: this is the result of an increasing number of international studies supporting the numerous health benefits of the “anti-shoe “. Here is a excited place—–discount MBT shoes