Gospel According to Starbucks Living With a Grande Passion

The Brew of the Soul Your Spiritual Life on Drip How do you take yours? Chances are that you take it some way. I know I do. I'm an eight-aday "cupper." And even at that, I'm a wuss in my "attachment" (a Buddhist usage that I feel works much better thanaddiction). At least when my habit is compared to the eighteenth-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire, and especially the nineteenthcentury French novelist Balzac (called by Baudelaire "the novelist of energy and will"),who drank more than fifty cups of coffee a day. (He died at age fifty, some say from caffeine poisoning.) People around the world drink more coffee than any other drink besides water: four hundred billion cups a year. And more people are drinking more coffee more frequently with every passing year. Second only to oil as a USAmerican import, coffee is the drug of choice for the majority of North Americans, with 167 million USAmerican coffee drinkers alone quaffing five million tons a year in this nineteen-billion-dollar industry.The average coffee drinker admits to 3.4 cups a day. But remember: a "small" Starbucks cup is "tall." Looked at another way, every USAmerican over eighteen years of age swills one and four-fifths cups of coffee a day.But compared to either the Viennese or Swiss, we're teetotalers. Our per capita consumption of more than ten pounds of coffee beans per year looks puny compared to the Austrians (14 pounds) or the Swiss (15.5 pounds). In the Netherlands, each citizen (birth to nursing home) downs on average an amazing four cups a day. A HEALTHFUL JOLT OF JAVA Of course, coffee consumption in USAmerica pales in comparison to soft drinks (70 percent of which are carbonated). Soda pop and other such beverages add up to 574 cans for every man, woman, and child. But unlike soda's sugar high, java jolts are actually good for you. Historically, physicians have been of two minds about caffeine. When they were not warning of its harmful effects, they were prescribing coffee for healthful impact on an astounding variety of diseasesfrom kidney stones and gout to smallpox, measles, and coughs. Now that sophisticated studies are being conducted to find out the real impact of caffeine, it seems the harder researchers work to detect the bad things coffee does to you, the more they unearth coffee's health benefits. It is known, for instance, that coffee delivers more health-giving antioxidants to our diet than fruit, vegetables, and nuts. At six cups a day and under, coffee reduces your chance of getting Parkinson's disease, liver and colon cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, Type 2 diabetes, and, if you are a fast metabolizer, heart disease. As a bonus, coffee improves male fertility. Caffeine can also protect you against skin cancerbut you'd have to smear it on your body for it to work. COFFEE AND YOUR SOUL Unlike soda, coffee improves creativity, fights fatigue, and has a long half life (six hours). Just ask a college student. Also unlike soda, coffee is a hospitality drink, a sign of welcome and openness to sharing. There are few things I enjoy more in life than what I call soulcafes: sharing good stories over good coffee. I've had my share of bad stories over bad coffee too. But either way, a soulcafe represents some of the most memorable moments of my life. I've had soulcafes with mysterious brews I call airport coffee over vinyl tablecloths, hospital coffee over waiting-room chairs, cowboy coffee over bare picnic tables, and thermos coffee over workshop benches. My favorite soulcafe is communion coffee, which fuels passionate brainstorms with other dreamers and schemers. CoffeeSweet, Leonard is the author of 'Gospel According to Starbucks Living With a Grande Passion', published 2007 under ISBN 9781578566495 and ISBN 1578566495.