Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

I’ve never under­stood the cof­fee phe­nom­e­non. I tasted cof­fee as a kid at my aunts house I think. My cousin Émilie was crazy about it even as a kid and I always thought it smelled like burnt tire and smoke. Well it tasted exactly like that too. Every­one around me always drank cof­fee and touted it as a “grown up” drink.

I didn’t have many argu­ments to ridicule this at that age, but just like many “grown up” things it implies pre­tend­ing that you like some­thing repul­sive just because every­one else tells you its good. At the time I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t a con­trar­ian point of view. For me it sim­ply felt like all those things branded as “adult” for some ran­dom rea­son: smok­ing, drink­ing wine or liquor, eat­ing spinach, fish, snails (bet you most young Frenchies can’t stand that either) and seafood. Very few peo­ple actu­ally like eat­ing or drink­ing these things. But if you don’t, you must be a close-minded baby who’s too scared to try any­thing new and who’d rather drink Choco­late Milk — yes, I do.

I’ve never under­stood the cof­fee phe­nom­e­non. I tasted cof­fee as a kid at my aunts house I think, my cousin Émilie was crazy about it even as a kid and I always thought it smelled like burnt tire and smoke. Well it tasted exactly like that too. Every­one around me always drank cof­fee and touted it as a “grown up” drink.

I didn’t have many argu­ments to ridicule this at that age, but just like many “grown up” things it implies pre­tend­ing that you like some­thing repul­sive just because every­one else tells you its good. At the time I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t a con­trar­ian point of view. It’s the same as all those things “adults” love for some rea­son: smok­ing, drink­ing wine and liquor, eat­ing spinach, fish, snails (yep, hate it, still French though — promise) and seafood. Very few peo­ple actu­ally like doing these things. But if you don’t, you must be a close-minded baby who’s too scared to try any­thing new.

I know I’m being very anec­do­tal, but cof­fee, just like wine and cig­a­rettes, is branded as an “acquired taste”, some­thing dis­gust­ing you force your­self to have until your taste buds are numb enough to let you look cool with­out too much trou­ble. I find it very telling that blind con­formism is asso­ci­ated with notions like “adult” and “professional”.

In a very con­tra­dic­tory way I love Star­bucks. I first heard about it as a place where peo­ple went to read and write and then later dis­cov­ered it in Van­cou­ver as a place where you could order a deli­cious frozen choco­late milk­shake and watch the city’s heart­beat at night through win­dows fac­ing the street (some­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary for me at the time). I don’t love Star­bucks for their cof­fee, but I was there at the open­ing of their first store in Paris. I think I loved the idea of it, and it was a chance to skip a very bor­ing early morn­ing lec­ture on British civ­i­liza­tion at Paris 3 Uni­ver­sity. But after the fact I real­ized that while pro­mot­ing a silly grown-up addic­tion, Star­bucks actu­ally con­tributed to the kick­ing out of another one. One that both­ered me even more.

Cig­a­rette smok­ing was mostly for­bid­den in pub­lic places in France before Star­bucks started open­ing shop in Paris, but every sin­gle “Café” every­where in France was a smokey room with uncom­fort­able wooden chairs that didn’t seem that have been changed since the 1940’s. Before the gov­ern­ment declared that pri­vate prop­erty was actu­ally “pub­lic”, and there­fore they could pre­vent any­one from doing what they wanted (and what the owner pre­vi­ously allowed them to) in bars, cafés and restau­rants, Star­bucks came in a seem­ingly closed mar­ket 3 or 4 years before that asi­nine law and put a sign on their first store that said : “Please don’t smoke here, we’d like to pre­serve the taste of our cof­fee”. Of course every­one gasped, a Amer­i­can cof­fee store with no smok­ing and expen­sive (read: more for less) cof­fee? That will never work. 5 years later there was 30 or so Star­bucks branches around the Parisian area and much more in the rest of France.

But I digress, even though I don’t really care, you were warned when you came it.

Today I was lis­ten­ing to [The Skep­tics’ Guide to The Universe](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/ “Home — The Skep­tics’ Guide to the Uni­verse”) — Episode 213 where Steven Novella (the host) was explain­ing that peo­ple usu­ally develop a tol­er­ance to Cof­fee really fast (around two weeks I believe he said). What that means is not that Cof­fee becomes use­less after that time, it’s even bet­ter. Because of the way caf­feine acts on neu­ro­trans­mit­ters (they fight those who help us relax basi­cally), peo­ple have a with­drawal effect and instead of being excited by cof­fee they in fact spend most of their time being more sleepy than non-caffeinated folks — cof­fee sim­ply makes them nor­mal again.

You have to love the irony. The grown up drink. Lore­lai Gilmore’s (and most of America’s) workjuice, actu­ally does the oppo­site of what it’s sup­posed to do. So suck on that grown ups.

PS: Addi­tion­ally, the very bright Steven Novella admit­ted never lik­ing Cof­fee at all either, cit­ing its taste as a prob­lem. His brother Bob then said some­thing like:

“Oh come on! Black coffee’s nasty but throw some sugar and cream in it, damn it, it’s great!”.
To which the delight­ful Evan Bern­stein replied:
“Yeah, throw sugar and cream in any­thing [and] it’s great.”.

Exactly.

Posted on Jeudi, septembre 10th, 2009 at 9:33 . Filed under Unsorted. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.