Coffee

Coffee is an absolute plague in today's society. You can't walk a foot in any sort of modern, even slightly developed location without being bombarded with coffee this and coffee that. If you live in a house, you probably are within a few metres of some sort of coffee-making facility, if you live in a suburb there is probably somewhere you can get a coffee made for you at anytime of the day by someone who's life it is to make coffee, and if you live on Earth, you've probably had a coffee at some stage in your life.

People love coffee! They sit and gossip over it, they open and close deals with it, they deliver good and bad news with it and they fall in love over it. All of them completely misguided and idiotic in their choice of beverage. Coffee has this bizarre mystique about it, that intelligent people sit and ponder their next novel over coffee, or that drinking coffee makes them cool, or that coffee will hopefully put off their impending old age. Coffee is certainly a cultural phenomenon, and people sure do get uptight when their coffee hasn't been brewed for exactly 29 seconds, the espresso shot hasn't been tapped three times on the counter to ensure optimum crema, and the milk hasn't  been heated to exactly 65 degrees to ensure immediate consumption.

Such petty woes. They have alot of other, more important things to worry about.

Coffee contains caffeine. And you know what caffeine does? Aside from making you marginally more alert, it does alot of other things, too. Does it really surprise you? It is, after all, classified as a PSYCHOACTIVE STIMULANT DRUG, a CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM STIMULANT, and is a crystaline XANATHINE ALKALOID. Do they sound good for you?

Some of the things that will happen to you if you go within 100 feet of Coffee.

And those are the main side-effects. Coffee is something which your body very easily becomes tolerant of. It takes just 7 days of 400mg of coffee three times a day to become completely tolerant of any caffeine-based sleep disruption. And if you try to wean off the coffee, you get withdrawals. You know what else gives you withdrawals if you try and get off it? Heroin. Does headache, irritability, an inability to concentrate, drowsiness, insomnia and pain in the stomach, upper body, and joints for 1 to 5 days sound good? Nup. It doesn't.


There is a condition known as 'caffeinism' - where a user takes a high amount of caffeine for a long period of time - and develops symptoms such as nervousness, irritability, anxiety, tremulousness, hyperreflexia, insomnia, headaches, respiratory alkalosis and heart palpitations. Over time, if you are an unfortunate being who decided to make too many appointments over coffee, you are at a higher risk of peptic ulcers, erosive esophagitis and gastroesophagal reflux disease.  Woo.

Coffee is such an evil in society, you can even overdose on it.  Mild overdoses result in fidgeting, rambling and rapid heart beat. In more severe culminations, you can expect, from your double-mocha-freaking-triple-tall-mega-cockochino any combination of disorientation, mania, depression, delusions, hallucinations, loss of inhibition, psychosis, rhabdomyolysis and death. Awesome.

Your baby after a coffee.

 Not only is coffee bad for you, but it is bad for the world. The number one coffee producing country is Brazil. What's in Brazil? The Amazon Rainforest. Who's cutting down the rainforest? Brazillians. The second largest producer of coffee is Columbia. You know what's in columbia? Druglords. What do drug lords do? Give drugs to children. Therefore, if you drink coffee, you are cutting down the rainforest and giving drugs to children.

And coffee farmers are some of the lowest paid people in the world. They get about 14c per pound of coffee sold. And one coffee plant produces about a kilo of coffee a year. So they get around 35c per plant. That's not very much. And there you are complaining about how expensive the coffee down at Cafe Coffee Day is, wearing your cool-wool suit, paying with your fancy twenty dollar bill which you pluck out of your Armarni wallet with your manicured hands, manicured by an impoverished Vietnamese immigrant from a suburb you go out of your way to avoid. You make me sick.

Did you know that the average American coffee drinker has 3.1 cups a day? 52% of Americans over 18 drink a cup of coffee every morning. More than 80% are regular coffee drinkers. That means that 80% of Americans will get erosive esophagitis, that 80% of Americans support the destruction of the rainforest and that 80% of Americans support drugs for children. If coffee were removed from the equation, that percentage would drop only to the portion of active Republican voters.

The freshly brewed blood of the children of  the Amazon.

And the time spent waiting in line for a coffee? That adds up to 45 hours a year. Thats 45 hours that could have been spent saving the planet, helping the homeless or painting the next Mona Lisa. Clearly, coffee destroys art, kills the homeless and obliterates the planet.

But yet we persist in our love of coffee. We laugh in the face of the dying rainforest; we practically throw our money at drug lords and we love the fact that we earn so much more than the poor sod who picked the coffee for us. We love that we can drink something which causes so much pain, it's as if we can smell the pain, taste the blood of the dying children who picked the coffee and allow our senses to feast on their innocent souls.

It is clear, however, that coffee has a conscience. It knows the evil it spreads in the world, and tries to make its consumers pay with their own blood. But still we ignore it. Our misguided love of coffee will end up killing the majority of our population. Onya, western society. Surely we can spare this little green bean some of our hate.

UPDATE: Recent news has stated that the price of coffee is set to rise in the next few months. Even more reason to kick the bean, you slothful sleep-deprived slack-jawed office-bound buffoons.